The Washington Examiner has decided it knows more about American memory than Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan combined—four presidents who honored Robert E. Lee as a soldier of rare character—while George C. Marshall, John J. Pershing, and Douglas MacArthur likewise admired Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Can all of those men be wrong, or is it simply that the Examiner has outsourced its historical judgment to the Southern Poverty Law Center and still thinks it is 2017? Every activist talking point from the last decade is recycled here as if no one noticed that the same campaign already leaped from Confederates to the Founders the moment the first statue fell. The paper calls the Southern cause “wicked,” which is a cheap slander against the principle of self-government that every Confederate Congress and official document framed as a struggle for independence. A handful of secession ordinances mentioning slavery—documents a minority of the states actually used as their legal brief—are treated as the secret decoder ring that overrides the stated motives of the majority. That is not history; it is the childish method of grabbing a few links that circulate online and declaring the case closed. Telling conservatives to “just put them in museums” is now an act of willful stupidity. In recent days museums have again insulted Washington and the Founders, Confederate bronzes have already been melted, a paint-splattered Jefferson Davis statue has been laid on the floor like refuse, and an entire Los Angeles exhibition has been built to mock American heroes as props in a morality play. Shouting “museums” after that record is not a compromise--it simply means the Examiner has not opened its eyes to basic facts. The Bo French controversy itself is the fruit of this long retreat. French aimed his outrage at the wrong target; it belonged at the Examiner and National Review. Rich Lowry was already demanding that Confederate monuments be “mothballed” in 2017, and among the first figures he lumped in was Chief Justice Roger Taney—a Union man who never served the Confederacy at all. PragerU, the Examiner, and National Review apparently believe the SPLC and its activist historians will deliver conservative victories if only the right statutes disappear. With friends like these, there will soon be no American history left to preserve. -Staff of Jefferson Davis

Let me put it simply: people descended from those who actually founded the country tend to have allegiance to it and no other. The term “Heritage Americans” is clumsy and this is hardly the moment to roll it out, but the underlying point isn’t mysterious. Blood-and-soil nostalgia is a cheap smear; the real distinction is whether your people helped build the thing or showed up later to lecture the builders. When I spoke positively of immigration in the 1850’s it was with the knowledge that the immigrants embraced their new home. Robert E. Lee, whose own father was a Society of the Cincinnati original, wanted no part of that hereditary officers’ club spreading through the Confederacy; he understood divided institutional loyalties when the house was on fire. Even so, later it was these heritage groups that worked to preserve history such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the women who saved Mount Vernon from ruin. Those groups didn’t posture; they raised money, hauled lumber, and kept the physical memory of the founding from rotting. They cared for the country because it was theirs. Yesterday the AEI’s Christian Gonzalez was in the Washington Examiner arguing we should yank the remaining statues off their pedestals and warehouse them in museums like embarrassing relics. Some self-described heritage Americans have joined that crowd, but they remain a noisy minority. The concept itself isn’t hard to explain. The people who built the country get to keep its memory standing.