Matt "The Confederacy Was Based" Walsh

I'm Mr. Beat, and if you've watched me before, you probably know that I'm a history teacher. I specialize in teaching American history, and I think I'm qualified to do it. You know, I even got a license and everything. I even got a piece of paper, a master's degree in history. So yeah, you ought to believe me when I say that Matt Walsh doesn't know what the heck he's talking about when it comes to American history. What is a Matt Walsh? He's a reactionary. Reactionary pundit. I have a hypothesis that many of these reactionary pundits are actors, that they really don't believe most of what they say, and there's a lot of money to be made by being a reactionary content creator because, you know, it's easy. You don't have to actually critically think much. Now, I do believe that Matt Walsh does believe most of what he says, but he's still an actor, and an actor for the production company The Daily Wire. And I don't use that term loosely. The dude is literally an actor playing the part of a reactionary political pundit. First and foremost, this dude is a performer. Recently, Matt Walsh decided to play the role of history teacher and tell you the quote REAL history of the United States in a series called Real History with Matt Walsh. That's the real name of it. If I were to sum it up, it's basically a show for snowflakes who get offended by historical facts and so it has to demonize history teachers and historians, oh, and apparently go out of its way to make white people look better for some reason. Oh, I watched the show alright. It's not good. Kind of horrible actually. I reacted to the first two episodes with the Cynical Historian over on Twitch, and other YouTubers like Atoonshy and Vlogging Through History have also reacted to this series. They generally have been very critical of Matt Walsh and the show, and yes, I've been critical too. But I wasn't going to post a big video about Real History with Matt Walsh on my own channel. After all, I didn't want to bring more attention to yet another crappy history show. That is, until they went after my friends. Both the Cynical Historian and Vlogging Through History have apparently been punished by the Daily Wire for being too critical of the show. Both have had copyright strikes on their reaction videos to the show, despite their reactions completely being legal due to well-known fair use guidelines. I should note that every time these copyright strike threats have come, both the Cynical Historian and Vlogging Through History have won their cases to keep the videos up. Regardless, it's pretty freaky messed up that the two had to go through all that trouble. Especially since after just three copyright strike violations, YouTube completely shuts your channel down. It's a big freaking deal. So I fear that if I do that on my channel, the same thing might happen, but screw it. I think enough people need to know that this guy's full of crap. Especially if you look at the video. Look at that. 451,000 views on YouTube alone. This was posted a month ago. The Real History of the Civil War. What schools don't teach you about the Civil War? Lots of comments. Lots of positive comments. There are people that are just eating this crap up. And so I'm posting an edited down reaction of a recent Real History with Matt Walsh episode I did over on my Twitch, yo for real. I hate to break it to you, but every time you go online, giant corporations are stealing your personal data, and then data brokers are turning around and selling your personal data to anyone. Stuff like your address, your phone number, even your political beliefs and income level. I think it's obvious by this point that I hate this crap, and so one way I fight back against this is Delete Me. Delete Me proactively removes our home address, phone numbers, and family details from the internet. What I like about Delete Me is that it sends you these personalized privacy reports showing what they found, where they found it, and what they deleted. I've been using it for several years now, and it's done a really good job getting rid of my personal information from all kinds of messed up sites out there. Protect your personal information and your family's personal information by going to joindeleteme.com slash MrBeat. Use code MrBeat to get 20% off Delete Me consumer plans. Once again, that's joindeleteme.com slash MrBeat. Use promo code MrBeat. Yes, and the QR code's been up here the whole time, so that makes it so much easier. Thanks again to Delete Me for sponsoring this video. So we're going to dive right in. On the night of January 2nd, 1864, Confederate General Patrick Claiborne was worried. He warned his fellow Southerners that surrender to the North, quote, means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy. That our youth will be trained by... History is written by the winners. All right, so he's tapping into that Lost Cause mythology right off the bat. The South erected statues and monuments to its heroes. Several were erected inside the United States Capitol. Even abroad, people respected the dignity, bravery, and brilliance of Robert E. Lee. Winston Churchill described Lee as one of the noblest Americans who ever lived and one of the greatest captains known to the annals of war. Appeal to authority there. Its heroes, who existed on both sides, were complex, multi-dimensional people. Good people on both sides, as Donald Trump famously said after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Very fine people on both sides. This is the real history of the Civil War. Imagine serving as an infantryman in a battle where your enemy outnumbers your side two to one. And not only that, your enemy is better trained, they're well rested, and to make matters worse, they've caught your regiment and your entire army in a picture. They have a massive number of soldiers behind you and in front of you, perfectly positioned. He's framing them as the underdog because everybody loves underdogs. We have sympathy for the underdog. We root for the underdog. That's why he's framing the confederacy like this. Then imagine that after a week of the most intense fighting of your life, you realize that your side has somehow emerged victorious. In fact, you've won decisively. Well, that was the experience of a confederate soldier named Dorastus Myers during the Battle of Chancellorsville, which lasted from April 30th to May 6th, 1863. On May 11th, Myers, who served as a sergeant with the 33rd Virginia Infantry Regiment, wrote a letter to his brother and sister. Quote, the Lord hath crowned our arms with another glorious victory. I think it was one of the hottest contests of the wars. The historic victory was the result of the leadership of Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. It's widely regarded as one of the most brilliant tactical victories in American military history, often called Lee's perfect battle. I mean, yeah, Lee did show good leadership in this battle. It's referenced in books like the West Point Atlas of American Wars, and it continues to be studied in military academies today for its demonstration of outmaneuvering larger forces through audacity and tactical ingenuity. In other words, Robert E. Lee was a genius. Some of that superlative talk, though, like the greatest ever, one of the greatest ever, you know, I bet you there's some historians out there who would disagree with that. There are plenty of military historians who say that Robert E. Lee was not nearly as good a general as, say, Ulysses Grant, the lead general on the other side in the second half of the Civil War. So, I mean, this is all subjective. Just saying that as fact is definitely misleading. For over two decades, he served as an exceptional military engineer, overseeing critical infrastructure projects for the federal government. He served in the Mexican-American War, where he performed so well under fire, he was promoted to colonel. A decade later, in 1863, he found himself fighting the very army that he spent three decades serving. He needed a victory at Chancellorsville because he needed European support to break the blockade. His enemies sought to destroy Lee's army and reunite the country. Roughly 70,000 Union soldiers ultimately converged at the Chancellorsville crossroads, 12,000 soldiers from the Union's 11th Corps. This is a lot of time spent on a battle that was in the long term, not that significant. I think it's more important to focus on other battles, like Antietam, for example, which was not a win for Lee. When Lee led his forces into Maryland, it was a bloodbath on both sides. The bloodiest day in American history, actually. The Battle of Gettysburg, obviously the most important battle of not only the Civil War, but all of American history up until maybe D-Day. Vicksburg. Even Appomattox, I mean, where Lee, hello, surrenders to Grant. And Lee lost several battles, okay? You can look it up, especially in the last two years of the war. Even in the early years of the war, he didn't win every single battle. And if they are going to spend 20 minutes of an hour-long documentary on this one battle, that just leaves the question, why? Why are we focusing so much time on this Confederate victory? I think I know why, actually. It's because you're trying to appeal to a certain demographic. I would say the two biggest fallacies of the Daily Wire overall are the cherry picking fallacy and the ad hominem fallacy. Lee's foresight in recognizing the Civil War's potential for protracted devastation, unlike the naive optimism of many on both sides, underscored his wisdom and his realism. His perfect battle at Chancellorsville showcased Lee's military prowess. The South didn't have the North's industrial capacity, railroads, wealth, or population, but had some of the greatest military leadership in human history. In other words, Lee and the South... I think this is still taught in most high school classrooms today, even some college classrooms, is that the Confederacy had better leadership on their side and the military, at least not politically. I don't know enough about it to definitively say that, but that's kind of how, when I used to look at school textbooks, that's what they said, and I kind of went with it. Although, you still have to acknowledge that, you know, Hooker had problems, yes. I mean, he was also a pretty solid general. McClellan was, uh, yeah, not so good. Obviously, Grant was amazing. Uh, he helped them win the war. Sherman, who, yeah, as ruthless as he was, also considered to be a pretty good leader. I just think, though, that this is opinion, you know, this is all subjective. They were no losers. They were not. Yeah, this is just lost cause stuff. Uh, first 16 minutes. Most of what we've heard, Robert E. Lee was awesome. That's what we've heard so far. 16 minutes out of an hour-long documentary. When the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, an immediate question arose. What should the conflict be called? Now, the answer wasn't obvious. On April 15th, President Lincoln issued Proclamation 80, which referred to the attack on Sumter and various state secessions as, quote, combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings. In a July 4th message to Congress, Lincoln referred to the Two U.S. Senators, Rufus King of New York and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, approached Senator John Taylor of Virginia and informed him they wanted to break up the union already. They recognized a huge divide between the northern and southern states, and it wasn't just cultural differences between the agrarian South and the urbanized North. They noticed major political and economic differences too. In 1803, a group of Massachusetts-based Federalists known as the Essex Junto threatened to secede because they feared that Louisiana Purchase would dilute their political power. Aaron Burr, who was Thomas Jefferson's vice president, was their leader. In 1807, they threatened to... Hold on, hold on, hold on. Wait a second here. The Essex Junto did approach Burr, but this made it sound like Burr was a Federalist, but he was not a Federalist. He didn't even live in New England. He was a New Yorker. Come on, didn't you watch Hamilton? He was never the leader of Essex Junto. It was just a few New England Federalists, and it actually never really grew to be that big of a deal, so... Some states considered independently making peace with the British. Massachusetts and Connecticut refused to place their militias under federal command. They claimed the federal government didn't have the power to do it. In the 1840s, northern politicians published a solemn appeal to the peoples of free states, arguing that the annexation of Texas will be, quote, so injurious to the interests and abhorrence... Why didn't he mention South Carolina threatening to secede and retaliation of the tariff of abominations in the 1820s? He just skipped right over South Carolina. He's only talking about northern states threatening to secede, not southern states. As the fervor over secession began to boil over, Lee wrote his father-in-law, quote, if the Union is dissolved, which God in his mercy forbid, I shall return to you. According to historian Alan Guelzo, as the states of the Deep South left the Union, Lee complained that the behavior of the cotton states was wholly beyond any justification, and he was worried that their selfish and dictatorial bearing would make life for Virginia miserable should she determine to coalesce with them. More Robert E. Lee glazing. This is starting to get boring, okay? We get it. You love Robert E. Lee. Lee refused to leave Fort Mason and pledged to defend his post at all hazards. This is because the legality of secession mattered to him, and because his native Virginia hadn't seceded yet. By the way, this is all AI slop. Yes, lots of AI in this already, in case you hadn't figured it out. Daily Wire uses AI for all their videos, and it is frustrating. Lee's attitude tells us a lot about why not one single Confederate leader was ever convicted of treason, because it was commonly understood at the time that it was not treason. The legal case for secession goes back to before the Constitution. I mean, okay, that was obviously debated. Many, many Republicans wanted to not pardon these Southern military leaders and political leaders, and did call them traitors, especially the radical Republicans. In fact, they said that they should still be in prison for what they did. That's an oversimplification there. 13 U.S. colonies decided to secede from the British crown. After winning their war for independence, those colonies then formed the Articles of Confederation, which required that any changes to the Union be adopted by the Congress in all the states. But that never happened, and most states just seceded. So you're really just bringing up the Articles of Confederation? Why are you bringing this up? Come on, dude. Subsequently, Washington commanded armies in the field designated by those opposed to them as rebels, and whose descendants now glorify them as the Rebels of 76. Much as Lee later commanded and at last surrendered, much larger armies also designated rebels by those they confronted. Except in their outcome, the cases were therefore precisely alike. And logic is logic. Logic is logic. Yeah, so he's trying to make it so that Lee, it wasn't about slavery, man. Lee just was loyal to Virginia, you know? His allegiance was toward Virginia. After Davis's case was dropped in April of 1869, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate, unrelated case, Texas v. White, that secession is indeed unconstitutional. There we go! He finally brings it up. Texas v. White, which is a pretty big case. I made a video about it. It said that Texas specifically, their ordinance of secession was unconstitutional. To sue the Supreme Court under original jurisdiction as a state, Texas had to prove that it was still legally part of the Union. The Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution created this indestructible Union. Think of it as it's either all or nothing. And I get it, there was confusion before this case, but the fact that he's finally just now bringing this case up, which is pretty important, Texas v. White, it's not just like a minor case, you know? At least he's mentioning this case. I wasn't sure if he was going to mention this case at all. But it was a throwaway line in a case about bonds. There wasn't any significant discussion of secession during oral arguments. It was not a throwaway case about bonds. This was the main point of the case. This was a foundational Supreme Court decision. Secession is unconstitutional. One of the great myths of the Civil War is that the South was somehow uniquely evil. Indeed, at the time, abolitionism... Here we go again, like, well, everybody had slaves at some point throughout human history. Is he going to go this route? The cartoon version of history holds that Abraham Lincoln invaded the South because it had slaves. But just how peculiar was the South's peculiar institution? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's a straw man fallacy. That's another common fallacy of Daily Wire shows. No one is saying that Abraham Lincoln invaded the South in the early stages of the Civil War to free the slaves. The North had slaves too. According to the book, It Wasn't About Slavery by Samuel Mitchum Jr., in 1703, more than 42% of New York City households owned slaves, a ratio only surpassed by Charleston, South Carolina. By 1783, one quarter of Connecticut families owned slaves, and one out of every 14 people in Rhode Island was a slave. Many prominent Northerners, including John... Yeah, but in the early years of the Republic, all these Northern states abolished slavery. So what's your freaking point, dude? Slavery in the North was awful. Massachusetts and Connecticut set curfews for Black people, according to the book, Black Bondage. Yeah, yeah, we got to make it so that we understand that when they did have illegal slavery in the North, it was worse than the slavery down the South. Because down South, they got to hang out on plantations, and they got Sundays off. They could actually go to church on Sundays and dance. One overlooked fact is that early attempts to curb the slave trade had Southern support. In his 1806 State of the Union, President Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian and a slave owner, called on Congress to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights, which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa. The next year, the United States Congress voted to abolish the slave trade. The bill passed the House with 96% of representatives, yes, putting massive support from Southern members of Congress. It was completely for selfish reasons. These Southerners supported the transatlantic slave trade ban because it was cutting off cheap foreign slave imports. It made it so that their slaves that they did have became extremely more valuable. Most Southerners who supported the transatlantic slave ban, the reason why they supported it was because they would make a lot more money from the slaves they already had. Supply and demand. So yeah, the way he's framing it is like, oh, Southerners, like, no, they just, they wanted to also end slavery, just like Thomas Jefferson wanted to end slavery. All Southerners wanted to end slavery and send them back to Africa to colonize. One of the key figures in passing the black codes was a state representative named Johnny Logan. Logan was an enthusiastic enforcer of the Fugitive Slave Act and an open racist. Abraham Lincoln later made him a union general. After the war, Logan reinvented himself as a radical Republican senator, but it's hard to imagine that Johnny Logan held contemporary woke views on black people. He talked about somebody from the 1860s having woke political views. Wow. You know, we kind of joke around about these things, but when he actually does it, it's a little bit jarring still. Right up through the shelling of Fort Sumter, the North was profiting massively from the slave trade. Four union states had legal slavery. But if the war was not about slavery, then what was it about? Well, the answer depends on who you ask. Though, interestingly, Presidents Lincoln and Davis... The war was about slavery. Let me say it for those in the back. The war was about slavery. Please stop repeating the stupid crap about tariffs or states' rights or anything else to deflect and just prop up that Lost Cause mythology that, oh no, it's just the reality of the times. In other words, according to both presidents, the war was fundamentally about the question of keeping or ending the union. At the beginning. The key argument against the idea of the Civil War was... At the beginning of the war it was. At the very beginning. That changed. Remember, that changed. In the words of the great Civil War historian Shelby Foote, quote, no soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves. McPherson found a union soldier from Philadelphia who wrote that this contest is not the North against the South, it is government against anarchy, law against disorder. Relatively few union volunteers mentioned the slavery issue when they enlisted. The same is true for Southern soldiers. McPherson estimates that just 20% of Confederate soldiers even considered slavery a cause worth fighting for in the first place. You can find these online, actually. There are thousands of letters. There are thousands of diary entries union soldiers wrote during the war that said there was a fairly large and growing proportion of union soldiers that were against slavery and that we should fight this war to end slavery. At the beginning of the war, not so much. But I'm talking like after the Emancipation Proclamation, absolutely. It's explicit. You can read these letters and diary entries. I've seen them. Look them up if you don't believe me. Don't take my word for it. Read the actual primary sources, the letters and diaries. They are out there. Don't listen to this guy who's just cherry-picking information from a lost cause book. Now, wait a second here. We are not saying the war had nothing to do with slavery because that would also be ridiculous. It's just as much a cartoon caricature as what your idiot teachers taught you in school. No, slavery was a factor that led to war and it was a major factor. South Carolina's Declaration of Causes for Secession references slavery. Okay, good. He's redeeming himself a little bit right here. But it is the main factor. After seceding, South Carolina immediately made an appeal to other slaveholding states to secede and in its appeal referenced slavery no less than 32 times. Oh, thank you for doing this. See, we're making progress with the reactionaries, okay? This could be much, much worse. So, let's give Walsh credit here. The federal armory and arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia have been taken by a group of armed men. A train passing through it sent telegrams on to Washington warning of 150 armed abolitionists who have come to free the slaves and intend to do it all hazards and arm poor whites who are similarly aggrieved with the slave system. They were led by a radical abolitionist and insurrectionist named John Brown. He's going to call him a terrorist. He wanted to provoke a massive slave uprising across the South. The attack at Harper's Ferry shows that the Northern people mean more than words. Virginia's legislature awarded Lee a sword for his gallant conduct at Harper's Ferry. The North was euphoric. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that John Brown was an idealist. He put his ideas into action. Henry David Thoreau compared Brown's execution to the crucifixion of Christ. Northerners raised money to pay for Brown's legal defense. Many of Brown's conspirators were protected by Republican government. Just like Southerners raised money for Preston Brooks after he beat Charles Sumner nearly to death with a cane. In fact, they gave him canes as gifts in the mail. You can cherry pick all this information all you want. A full reckoning with the real history, such as Shelby Foote's epic 1.2 million word trilogy spanning 3,000 pages, demands depths that no textbook or hour-long internet video can capture. The mainstream narrative is a cartoon. The war was never a straightforward crusade against Southern evil. Secession was not categorically treason. Abraham Lincoln was not a messianic figure. The story most Americans have heard is a fairy tale. But one thing is true. Wars have consequences. And victors shape the story. That is the enduring lesson of the Civil War. Now, the enduring lesson of the Civil War was that slavery is bad. And Shelby Foote infamously propped up Lost Cause mythology in his books. So there's that. He kept quoting Shelby Foote. We're going to end it there. Half of this was just blazing Robert E. Lee. So, not as bad, I guess, as I thought it might be, but still pretty bad. Pretty boring. I mean, they used all that AI. You thought they would have better production. But yeah, overall, this is a documentary that's a combination of making claims and then cherry picking evidence to back up those claims and then framing the whole thing using ad hominem and straw man attacks on historians and history teachers to make the viewer feel special because they're getting supposedly secret knowledge. But none of this is secret. And yeah, actually most of this documentary is factual, but framing does matter. Anyway, we made it through. If you're wondering where I react to this stuff live, well, I typically do it over on Twitch exclusively every Friday morning at 9 a.m. Central unless I'm out of town or have a dentist appointment or I need to shape my cat's butt. Otherwise, I'm generally pretty consistent with my schedule over there. So I hope to see you over there and thanks for staying curious.