First, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other rioters destroyed Confederate monuments, and after that, statues of Christopher Columbus and Junipero Serra and even Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
Then they decided Gone With the Wind was unacceptable fare. Aunt Jemima syrup and pancakes and Uncle Ben’s rice are unacceptable food.
Now, they’re after John Wayne.
On Friday, the Democrat Party in Orange County, California, passed an “emergency resolution” to remove his name from the county’s John Wayne Airport (shown), which would also mean removing his statue, because Wayne, during an interview with Playboy 49 years ago, said some things that cannot be tolerated today.
John Wayne, they say, uttered racist remarks.
The Playboy Interview
The inspiration for the latest purge was Contributing Editor Richard Warren Lewis’ interview with Wayne in May of 1971,which “resurfaced” in February of last year and caused a minor moral panic. Wayne, the tweet that kicked it off said, “was a straight up piece of sh*t.” After discussing the star’s film career, Lewis turned the discussion to Wayne’s conservative views.
Lewis asked Wayne about communist Angela Davis’ claim that “those who would revoke her teaching credentials on ideological grounds are actually discriminating against her because she’s black” and whether he thought that was true.
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“With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so,” Wayne replied. “But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”
PLAYBOY: Are you equipped to judge which blacks are irresponsible and which of their leaders inexperienced?
WAYNE: It’s not my judgment. The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether the blacks are sufficiently equipped scholastically. But some blacks have tried to force the issue and enter college when they haven’t passed the tests and don’t have the requisite background….
What good would it do to register anybody in a class of higher algebra or calculus if they haven’t learned to count? There has to be a standard.
Nor did Wayne “feel guilty about the five or 10 generations ago these people were slaves. Now, I’m not condoning slavery. It’s just a fact of life, like the kid who gets infantile paralysis and has to wear braces so he can’t play football with the rest of us.”
Then Lewis asked whether Wayne felt “empathy” for American Indians because they “played an important — if subordinate — role in your Westerns.”
Replied Wayne, “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”
PLAYBOY: Weren’t the Indians — by virtue of prior possession — the rightful owners of the land?
WAYNE: Look, I’m sure there have been inequalities. If those inequalities are presently affecting any of the Indians now alive, they have a right to a court hearing. But what happened 100 years ago in our country can’t be blamed on us today.
When Lewis observed that “Indians today are still being dehumanized on reservations,” Wayne explained that “a government-run reservation would have an ill effect on anyone. But that seems to be what the socialists are working for now — to have everyone cared for from cradle to grave.”
The Resolution
Thus did the Orange County Democrats mount up and ride after a man whom Democrat president Jimmy Carter awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Even Hollywood’s liberals revered and respected him so much they gave statements to or testified before a congressional committee, chaired by the late Democrat Frank Annunzio of Illinois, in favor of his receiving a Congressional Gold Medal in 1979.
“John Wayne personifies the true American character,” Carter wrote to Annunzio. “He serves as a symbol of courage and self-reliance in the finest of our Nation’s traditions. His true grit helped win the West, World War II, and the hearts of thousands of us across the country and the world.”
The county renamed the airport after Wayne in 1979, and his name was still good enough in 2017 for the Newport Beach City Council to rename a park after him.
What the Orange County Democrats think should be done with Carter or Newport Beach is anyone’s guess, buy in any case, the “emergency resolution,” as the Los Angeles Times called it, explains that “racist symbols produce lasting physical and psychological stress and trauma” on blacks and minorities, and the “removal of racist symbols provides a necessary process for communities to remember historic acts of violence and recognize victims of oppression.”
The county, the resolution says, “condemns John Wayne’s racist and bigoted statements, and calls for John Wayne’s name and likeness to be removed from the Orange County airport.”
The Orange County Democrats did not say whether Wayne’s remains in Pacific View Memorial Park should be exhumed and cast into a fire with every last print and digital copy of his films.
Image: Don Ramey Logan/Wikimedia Commons
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
