Tag: robert e lee

J.D. Vance’s Bold Step to Reclaim Robert E. Lee’s Legacy

J.D. Vance invited the ire of countless woke historical revisionists when he pushed back against the suggestion that, when Pete Hegseth removed retired General Mark Milley’s portrait from the Pentagon, this was somehow a sign that the Trump administration will be iconoclastic and authoritarian..

Vance’s response perfectly captures what most Americans probably felt in reading Glasser’s nonsense.

Vance’s including Robert E. Lee in this short list of American heroes whose reputations have been wrongfully tarnished could not have been an accident. It is a brave statement for Vance to make and a brilliant cultural flank against those who have been uninterruptedly murdering historical truth throughout the post-Obama era.

Violent mobs and woke social initiatives have led to the defacement or removal of these great Americans’ monuments for many years now.  They were to be newly cast as racists and villains, and you were also to be smeared if you didn’t buy into the lies.

You were a racist, for example, if you questioned the claims made in The 1619 Project. This farce-masquerading-as-journalism argued that the United States engaged in its war of independence because American colonials wanted to keep slaves.

Then, in 2020, Democrats began tearing down the statues of generals such as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, men tarred by the taint of the Confederacy, but also began defacing statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Their reasoning was that the American colonials and the Confederate rebels were both just slaveholders who were fighting to keep their slaves, making them all reasonable targets for the revisionists.

Of course, even honest leftists have admitted that the 1619 Project is among the purest garbage ever put to print. The historical record clearly shows that there’s no credible evidence suggesting that the colonials wanted independence to keep slaves. But if that sort of nuance is important, it should also be important that the historical record clearly shows that the Southern states didn’t simply engage in its failed war for independence because they wanted to keep slaves, either.

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This man says he’s related to Robert E. Lee. There’s no evidence.

“Plaintiff Reverend Robert Wright Lee IV (“Lee”) is a white resident of Iredell County. Lee is the fourth great-nephew of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.”

— Statement in a lawsuit seeking removal of a Confederate statue, filed in Iredell County, N.C., May 5

“As a descendant of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s family, I have borne the weight and responsibility of that lineage.”

— Lee, in an opinion article published in The Washington Post, June 7, 2020

“We’ve been talking about his great-great-grandfather.”

— Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D), introducing Lee during a speech in Richmond, June 4

The Rev. Robert W. Lee IV, known as Rob, has, since 2016, parlayed his ancestry on behalf of what many may regard as a noble cause — removing Confederate statues and memorials. The pastor stood with Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam when the governor announced last June, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, that a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond would be removed.

“There are members in my family who are shaking in their boots. I’m sure my ancestor Robert E. Lee is rolling in his grave, and I say, let him roll,” Lee told a crowd.

When Northam introduced Lee, he said: “We’ve been talking about his great-great-grandfather.”

This is a common mistake. Lee says he is the great-great-great-great nephew of the famous general.

There is a Robert E. Lee V, great-great-grandson of the general, who works at the Potomac School in McLean. He speaks rarely about the debate over historical monuments. Meanwhile, Rob Lee has made numerous public appearances, including on “The View” and the MTV Video Music Awards. At a House committee hearing in 2020, he was introduced by then-Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) as a “descendant of the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee.” In that hearing, he called himself a “nephew” of the general.

But there is no evidence that Rob Lee, who was born in North Carolina, is related to Robert E. Lee, according to The Fact Checker’s review of historical and genealogical records. We were aided in our search through these records by a retired Los Angeles trial lawyer and Civil War chronicler named Joseph Ryan, as well as an official at Stratford Hall, the ancestral home of the Virginia Lee family.

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