Clay’s Alma Mater GW Drops Colonial Mascot

CLAY: Some of you may have heard about this story, but it’s been percolating for a while. George Washington University is named after — go figure — George Washington. And the moniker that is connected to George Washington is the Colonials. The mascot is George Washington dressed in his colonial army outfit, his uniform when he was leading the Revolution.

They decided at GW to remove the Colonials mascot/moniker because idiots at the university decided that it was too closely connected to the idea of colonialism, even though it’s the basic exact opposite of that because the colonial army was standing up against Great Britain, which had created colonies and we were all fighting for our independence.

Even though the basic history of this is not in any way similar, they decided, if people are upset about it at GW, they would remove the Colonial moniker, and here’s what — and I know that has happened to your school, too, Buck, Amherst, ’cause we talked about this before with the Lord Jeff, right, and his questionable history.

BUCK: Alleged bioweapon usage, but they didn’t really understand microbiology —

CLAY: Smallpox blankets.

BUCK: — at that point in time; so I don’t think that’s really fair to say. But he used to be a very festive fellow with a long, flowing white wig, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And breaches and, you know, he kind of looked a little bit… Well, he looked like the bad guy in all the American colonial movies wearing the red coat. And they got rid of him and they replaced him with the Mammoths. I always say mastodon, but apparently the paleontologists out there probably not actually a paleontologist… Whatever. You know what I’m saying. No, no, it’s the mammoths, not the mastodons so we’ve had to change our mascot too. So we’ve had this going on all over the country. This has happened in so many places and it’s because what’s really — I used to say just wait until people find out some of the practices of the Vikings.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: A lot of slavery — a lot of rape, loot, and pillage — going on with the Vikings, as a cultural practice, that was what they did, the Viking raid. Interesting, the word “slave” comes from Slav, actually. It’s related to the word Slav, which no one seems to know this, which is Eastern European because of the Muslim Ottoman slave trade in Eastern Europeans. That’s actually where we get that English word “slave” from.

People say, “Oh, what about that slave trade? I don’t even know.” Subject for another time, but it was massive and lasted for centuries and no one in this… No. You walk around Harvard and say, “Talk to me about the Ottoman slave trade in white Christians from Eastern Europe,” and they’ll say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

CLAY: Well, because slavery in America only has to do with the time that there were slaves in America, and it’s as if it never existed anywhere else. And I’ll give you another example. Julius Caesar pretty well known for enslaving people, right? We’ve got Caesars, which is the huge gambling company with all the statues to Caesar inside of the Vegas hotel, which, by the way, is a fantastic Vegas hotel. I thought you’d appreciate this.

So a bunch of my friends who also are from GW — a lot of liberals, right, who go to GW — think this is beyond absurd, and I just want to read you what GW released here, Buck, ’cause I think you’ll like it. And, by the way, this is the exact opposite of education, which is about curing ignorance in some sense. This is theoretically why universities exist. “The special committee identified a significant difference in connotation for the term ‘Colonials.’

“For supporters, the term refers to those who lived in the American colonies, especially those who fought for independence and democracy. For opponents, Colonials means colonizers who stole land and resources from indigenous groups, killed or exiled any evidence peoples. These are perspectives that cannot be easily harmonized, the committee concluded. Use and popularity of the moniker would therefore not be can continued.”

And one of my buddies who is I would say pretty left-wing at this point just sent to me the text. “Respectfully, these perspectives cannot be harmonized because one is literally incorrect,” and what we’ve reached, Buck — and this is to me emblematic of the larger issues at university campuses — is, people are so afraid of telling college kids, “You’re wrong, you’re an imbecile, we’re not going to take into account your perspective because it is historically in error.”

Just because you think it doesn’t mean that there is a factual basis to support it. That used to be, Buck, the thing. When you and I were in college there were still professors who were willing to stand up in front of the classroom and say, “Okay, you can have that opinion, but it is factually not rooted in reality. You are wrong, and therefore you should educate yourself, which is the purpose of universities.” Now they bend over and genuflect and bend the knee at all these college kids who believe inaccuracies, factual untruths, and actually change things for them!

BUCK: Truth is not a defense against emotion, even emotions rooted in ignorance on the modern college campus. And that’s been true for a while. There used to be… They were kind of rogue professors, ’cause I had a conservative professor as my thesis adviser, Hadley Arkes at Amherst College, pretty well known in Northeastern conservative academic circles. But he was one of the very, very — I mean, really in some ways the only one.

But you could still do it. These days… Even what I was just saying if you talking about the derivation of the word “slave,” if I started to talk to — if I walked into Harvard in the history class and said, hey, who here knows that the first foreign war ever fought by the United States was actually fought — the first foreign war was fought — largely to end slavery, and it was actually slavery in that context of the North African Barbary States enslaving Christians in Europe and in America.

We were fighting obviously because of America. That’s where we get to the shores of Tripoli. That would upset a lot of people. “What do you mean?” You wouldn’t even be able to talk about the history of what really happened because it’s so important to the left to create this perception that the only place that really had slavery was America and the only slavery that existed was the enslavement of Africans as part of the transatlantic slave trade.

So even talking about the other historical realities of slavery throughout history — you mentioned Julius Caesar. There were obviously slaves in ancient Egypt, we go back thousands of years. Slavery was a condition of humanity, unfortunately. It’s immoral and even. It’s been a condition of humanity for as long as really as there have been organized societies.

My favorite Julius Caesar story though since you mentioned Caesar was when he was captured by pirates and he this ransomed him when he was a young man, and he got angry at them for not demanding a high enough ransom and ordered them around as though they were his servants. They could have obviously killed him at any point in time, and while he was still their captive, he told them — this is written about the histories — this is all fun, guys.

But you know that I’m going to come back and crucify all of you after you’ve ransomed me? They ransomed him, got a huge payment, and then he hired effectively a private navy and army, went back, went after the pirates, crucified all of them. He wasn’t messing around. I mean, you say can that about it.

CLAY: Julius Caesar. Until the ides of March, things were going pretty well for him. Julius Caesar story that I like — and obviously this is from Ancient Rome in general — is they would always have somebody, when the emperors rode through and everyone was saluting them and praising them, whispering in their ear, basically, “This too shall pass” with the idea that your godlike status as the leader of this country is not going to exist forever.

But yes, you’re right, Buck, on the historical front. See, I was a history major at GW; so people say, “What can you do in response to decisions like this?” I’ll tell you. They are always asking me for money. Like every university, they are always asking me for money. And I emailed yesterday, and I said, “I will never give you a dollar for the rest of my life,” and so, look. I enjoyed going to GW, but at some point, you have to make a decision. And I don’t mean just me, I mean everybody out there listening, to make financial decisions when choices like these are made to let them know that there are consequences to these choices. So their chances of ever getting any of my money, gone forever.

BUCK: Whether talking about how did the left completely dominate universities — or how did the left come to completely dominate not only Hollywood, but also now Big Tech, on the social media platforms, the Walt Disney corporation!

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I mean, look at the politics of corporate America in the era of BLM and recognize that radical left politics game not only fashionable but mandatory in the boardrooms of most of America’s signet companies, really. How did we get to that point? For decades the left has used whatever leverage they have and whatever bullying they can get away with within these institutions and where their dollars go — so they either boycott or support with their dollars places that do their political bidding — and it really is just in the last, you know, five to 10 years I’d say that conservatives have woken up and are saying, “No, actually. Disney fires Gina Carano who’s a great actress and a conservative, cancel your Disney+ subscription.”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: If you don’t take these basic steps, you’re actually not going to ever effect any change. And you’re not even going to be meeting on the economic and political battlefield the left where they’re actually winning be day in and day out. You’re not gonna change the game at all.

CLAY: Yeah, here’s what also I would say, Buck. All these people on the board of trustees at George Washington who are statistic of the issues that we’re dealing with in this country, you didn’t solve anything because removing Colonials is just going to enable and encourage the wing that is canceling American culture to eventually decide you have to take George Washington’s name off the university because the same argument you can make about Colonials can be made about George Washington himself.

BUCK: See, this is fascinating, because this is where you start to see these — and the left really likes… “Oh, all the top universities are so left-wing. That’s because we’re brilliant.” No, because you’re Bolsheviks. And you eliminate all other ideologies from your sphere… It’s like if you put the wrong kind of fish in the aquarium, it eats all the other fish, that doesn’t mean that all the other fish shouldn’t be there. That means they got eaten by the fish. The realities that they’re gonna face are you look at some of these schools Yale is obviously the one that comes to mind because it is named for a slave trader —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — folks, a slave trader! A slave owner is bad, slave trader also really bad. But Yale is really a multibillion-dollar hedge fund where they also teach classes. And so if they change the name… I mean, do you think Princeton University wants to go back to being the College of New Jersey?

CLAY: No.

BUCK: No.

CLAY: I mean, they branded themselves, but this is where it leads. And this is where Trump was right. Remember when he came out and everybody misquotes him about his response to Charlottesville, but he was right. He said starts with Confederate soldiers, and this is why I’ve always objected to pulling down monuments and memorials to anything historically in America.

You contextualize it better, but it is going to be the case that now that Colonials are gone, the new target is going to be George Washington himself at the university. No one ever says in the progressive movement, “Okay, we’re good now. You know what? You changed this for us, we’re great, this is solved forever. “ This is my issue with mascots in general. There’s never enough.

BUCK: You even see this in the medical community now. The World Health Organization… We didn’t talk about this yesterday. Actually, we’ll come back. They’re changing the name of yet another virus, folks, “because racism,” they’re saying.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s what they’re saying.

CLAY: Go figure.