The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Hey, do me a favor, if you enjoy the program, share it with other people, will you? Will you send an email to your friend, say, “hey, listen to this show as a podcast or a standalone segment.” Get them to tune in on the radio, whatever works for you. Also, especially social media, Ed Martin Live on Facebook, @EdMartin on Gab and Parlor and also Truth Social and on Twitter @EagleEdMartin. All those places.
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So got a great program. In a few moments, we’ll talk with Salena Zito. Salena Zito is kind of an authority on the Trump voter phenomenon. She’s a Pennsylvanian who has written nationally – New York Post, Washington Examiner, and also for the Pittsburgh Gazette. Is it the Pittsburgh paper there? She’s also got salenazito.com and she wrote a book called The Great Revolt, I think that’s the title of it, about the voters who got Trump in office. She’s also just a hard nose reporter and she says what she sees. And she’s been very critical of Kathy Barnette. She’s also critical of Doug Mastriano’s chances going forward. So we’ll talk with her. We’ll see what she says. I don’t always agree with her, but I always respect her. She’s an interesting commentator and a journalist.
Also, we’ll talk with Terry Schilling. Terry Schilling is with the American Principles Project. We’ll talk with him about his Big Family Pledge that they have had some great success with candidates signing. It’s not only, as he will tell you, I assume he comes from a huge family, ten or twelve kids. But it’s meant not only to make you look and go “what? you tellin’ people have lots of kids?” Well, it’s kind of that, there’s some of that, but it’s also these are the things that will allow people to have a successful family, the kind of policies — America First, focusing on American jobs, and other things.
But what you need to know today, I want to spend this next eight or 10 minutes talking about a very important issue. Helen Marie Taylor passed away just a few months ago. She was an extraordinary woman who lived into her nineties and had a career and a life that spanned Waco, Texas, where she grew up, London, where she was on the stage as an actress, New York City, where she was a philanthropist, Richmond, Virginia, where she spent much of her life, and Orange, Virginia, where her family’s from. And she and her husband, the late Jackie Taylor, were instrumental in starting the James Madison Museum there. And ultimately Montpelier.
And if you haven’t been to Montpelier, it’s like going to Mount Vernon and Monticello. It’s extraordinary to see these homes that the founding fathers lived in and the artifacts and all. And it’s just extraordinary. It gives you a real context, to… It’s like visiting a lot of historical sites, but it’s a wonderful experience. Montpelier.
Well, Helen Marie Taylor spent a lot of her time and a lot of her money supporting efforts to highlight the founders and the founding values and the importance of what happened in our country. She started a Museum in Waco, Texas, the Museum of Waco History, but also it includes an exhibit. Almost a third of the Museum is the American Constitution, the exhibit that she put together after the Bicentennial of the Constitution in the 80s, and it has incredible artifacts. I mean, she’s an amazing collector and amazing lady.
She also was fearless in her advocacy. In the last years of her life, in her 90s, she helped fund and was the named plaintiff in a lawsuit to protect the statues that were on Monument Avenue in Richmond, where she lived and had a home. She and her husband, late husband. Especially the Robert E. Lee statue. She was the lead plaintiff saying, wait a second, we all lived here, rely on that. What are you doing? Why are you taking down statues? And she was an amazing lady, an amazing lady who in the – famously in the late 60s, early 70s, they were going to pave over Monument Avenue and make it into a kind of a race track with lots of lanes so that traffic could move forward more quickly. And they had cobblestones. And she stood in front of one of the pieces of machinery, a big truck that was going to move this stuff. And she won.
So wonderful lady. But she cared. She was kind. She was a nice person. She was good to people and she cared a lot about America. And she helped… early funder of Heritage Foundation. She was a conservative, to be clear. She will, and is turning over in her grave today as the news has broken that Montpelier and its board of directors has caved in to a group of illustrious African Americans and other concerned citizens –
The Descendants Committee, which is supposed to be a committee of people who are descendants of the slaves who worked on Madison’s Farm or Madison’s farms or in Madison’s area. Madison was penniless by the end of his life. He wasn’t a very successful planter. I’m not sure he was penniless. That’s probably a bit much. But he wasn’t… Jefferson, Monroe, both were very poor businessmen. Washington was in debt a lot.
But be that as of may, they were men of their time. And now the Montpelier board has decided that Soledad O’Brien and another cast of characters should be on the board of directors of Montpelier in order to change Montpelier from a celebration of James Madison’s life to a celebration of what? I don’t know, 1619, CRT, what’s it going to be.
But here’s what I’ll tell you when you decide that instead of highlighting – and they have, I’ve been there. Montpelier has a whole section of the place that’s about the slave quarters. And I thought there was an effective exhibit about there were slaves here, done somewhat, what I thought and saw was it was done with subtlety and it was done seriously about this issue – it wasn’t buried under. In fact, it was precisely the opposite. They uncovered the slaves quarters through excavation, and they made an exhibit.
Let me drop a footnote. On the campus of Montpelier is another institution. I think it’s called the National Constitution Center or National Center for the Study of the Constitution. It’s its own sort of entity with rooms for scholars to stay and get paid to have deep thoughts. And I was talking to someone about that institution. It was founded when Montpelier sort of got going in the last 30 years, and it became a favorite for the liberals. And so it’s a liberal bastion. It’s not a conservative bastion. It’s a liberal bastion trying to argue about the Constitution’s liberalness and all that.
Now, I’m not saying that’s good or bad. I think it’s bad. I’m actually just describing that institutions, when they become governed by liberals, become liberal, they don’t stay independent, they don’t stay open minded. They become entities promoting that view. If you went to Madison’s Montpelier, and if you didn’t go to the slave exhibit and just went through the house, you wouldn’t know if he was a conservative or liberal. You wouldn’t have a debate on the Second Amendment. You wouldn’t have a debate on the Bill of Rights. You wouldn’t have a debate on the Constitution. You just wouldn’t hear,
I mean, there’s no debate – you weren’t getting shoved down your throat a conservative worldview when you had an exhibit, had a home open to people. And there is a clear delineation between conservatives who say, hey, let’s celebrate history. Let’s have a celebration of our values, and they have historical monuments, historical things, and liberals who get control of something and use it for their end. If you don’t think that that’s a difference. There are some conservatives that will take something and maybe try to make it into more of a political argument, but not really in Washington, DC. Go to look at the archives and see the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. It’s not a political argument. There’s not a partisan argument. It’s just displayed. It’s just history.
Now, we’ve let Montpelier’s board, which was pressured by all the cultural forces that want to tear down statues and teach our kids to hate their forebearers and each other hate their histories. We’ve let them in charge. Montpelier will become, I guarantee it will become a left wing ideological entity that will be meant to teach people. So when you come to America and take a tour of Virginia and you go see the founders, you’re going to get an earful of the same junk they’re teaching in CRT, in 1619. They’re not shy.
Now, in some ways, fake history, which is the historians writing things about like St. Harry Truman. Harry Truman was a politician, just like Reagan was not always a saint. In other words, he too was a political guy. At the highest level, these men and women are players of a political game to make Harry Truman into St. Harry. Well, he was an inside, Pendergast machine, face punching, fist player. I mean, he’ll talk like that. There’s quotes. I’ve been putting them up.
So here we are. Soledad O’Brien and a gang of, one’s academic from Harvard, are now going to be on the board of Montpelier. And if you can roll the board to add eleven, I think they added eleven members to their board. I don’t know who has a majority, but I guarantee it doesn’t matter. You put eleven, you just need two. Two or three people that know how to play the game on a board and they can move the whole board. You put eleven on that are going to vote as a block, and you’re going to see all kinds of changes to Montpelier.
You could stand in the room in Montpelier, Madison’s room above the entrance. It’s upstairs study and look out over his fields and you could think to yourself, this guy was writing in this room some of the most important words ever written. He was writing letters and documents. Extraordinary. And now we’re going to have a conversation about race and racial theory and critical race theory and exploitation, et cetera, et cetera. And it will be a disaster. It’s a disaster.
And they’re undercutting our history. Because if you can get rid of history, you can get rid of the anchors that people have. It doesn’t mean we can’t get better every day. Every day. But we are who we are in history. Our values are what we have from our history. And to cut them off like this is a real mistake, real mistake. Watch what happens. Montpelier will soon, they’ll rename it. They’ll rename some African name or something. They’ll have a new name for it and we’ll be have to call it some new name. This is terrible.
I’m getting trouble. But in Australia, they used to have Ayers Rock in the middle of the country, this massive promontory, this huge rock that bursts out of the desert. It was renamed Iluru to be the rock, because it’s the Aboriginal name. We’re going to rename stuff, forget our history, and wonder why we’re just adrift disaster. That’s what you need to know.
All right, we’re going to take a break. We’ll be right back. We got a lot more, visit proamericareport.com. I’m Ed Martin. Be right back.
