DAVID: 2020 was a banner year for those wanting to take history seriously. Some residents of Jessamine County, Kentucky, concerned about losing southern history, were defending our Confederate soldier statue. Others, awakening to racial history that already had long been hidden from public view, questioned the statue. Was its “grand cause” really so grand? And all the while, Union memory—in the form of Camp Nelson National Monument—was rising from the ground. But 2020 was also . . . an election year. And the brutal contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump threatened to overwhelm Jessamine County’s search for its past. As summer turned to fall, I wondered whether rapidly polarizing politics at the national level might derail local politics . . . and our debate about history. Could we actually pull off the conversation about race and Civil War memory promised by Judge David West? . . . A curious political attack made it seem unlikely. DAVID: Welcome to “Rebel on Main.” I’m David Swartz. This is Episode 6: A Confederate from Canada. PART ONE: BOB’S SURVEY DAVID: I started hearing . . . a name. RADFORD: Robert. Robert something. DAVID: This is Pastor Moses Radford. RADFORD: Bonner. Is it Bonner? DAVID: By this point, folks around the county knew that I was researching our Confederate statue. And they fed me information about it. In late September, I began hearing about this Robert guy. No one could quite remember his name. But they sure knew what he was doing. He was conducting a telephone survey about the Confederate statue. And it seemed like he was dialing half the people in the county. RADFORD: Ok, I get a phone call, of course it’s a local number. So I answer it. BARNEY: Hi, it’s Bob Barney calling. I’m with the Republican Party here in Jessamine County. How are you this afternoon? Or how are you this evening? And you be as nice as possible. Because what do you want? You want the person to stay on the phone. And they don’t want to hang up on nice people. Ok? RADFORD: And this guy tell me who he is. He’s a Republican, but I’m doing a survey among Democrats. And I want to ask you questions. I said, Okay. DAVID: So who exactly was this Bob Barney? And why was he as interested in Confederate statues as I was? So I sent him a message. I explained that I was a history professor doing research on the statue. And would he be willing to get together to compare notes? Within minutes, I got a response. “Absolutely,” he wrote, “I’d enjoy that discussion.” Then he gave his address. And suddenly it all made sense. Bob Barney was my neighbor. His house, just across the street and two doors down from mine, was the classic southern plantation-style two-story, the one with four huge white pillars. Just a few months earlier he had tacked blue vertical banners to those pillars that read “Trump,” “2020,” “Trump,” “2020.” Horizontally on the bottom of each banner was a slogan. Two of them read “Keep America Great.” But the other two, written in white block letters, had been colored in blue to hide the words. The next morning as I began my jog, I inspected them more closely. They had originally read, “No More Bullshit.” I chuckled. He was right. That kind of language wouldn’t fly in our town of Wilmore. I knew I was in for an interesting conversation on his back patio. DAVID: One of the people you called gave me your phone number and your email address last week. So as soon as I got home, I emailed you. You responded immediately. And you put down your home address, and I just . . . BARNEY: . . . laughed. Okay, that’s the guy. The wacky Republican. DAVID: Republican—that was the key word. It turned out that Bob Barney didn’t care at all about the Confederate statue—until he did. That’s because he’s a political operative. Unlike those staunch defenders of the statue from the second episode, Bob isn’t a true Confederate believer. He doesn’t believe in the statue. He’s just using it. DAVID: Are you ready to go? I’m ready. BARNEY: Okay, my name is Bob Barney. Born and raised in Canada. Immigrated to the United States in 1997. I live in Wilmore, Kentucky, which is where I’ve lived since 1997. I am the president of a software company, a small software company, and I’m a registered Republican. DAVID: I mean, you’re from Canada. You’re not a Confederate! Your interest in this is for partisan purposes. BARNEY: No. Heck, no. No. No! Yeah, my ancestry is interesting. The first Barney that I descend from came to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1630. DAVID: Salem, home of the famous witch trials . . . home of the Puritans . . . home of abolitionists. BARNEY: Now as the Barneys grew and migrated, the ancestor that went to Canada was born in Rochester, New York. And he met a girl in Canada, and he married her and stayed in Canada. The rest of the family went on to Illinois. So I descend from that guy who got to Canada in 1830. So we missed the Civil War. Had we been in it, we’d have been northerners. DAVID: That suited Bob just fine. BARNEY: Coming to the United States, once I became a citizen, I was quite happy to join the Republican Party, which is the party of Lincoln. And I’m glad he freed the slaves. And I’m glad he kept the Union together. DAVID: In his praise of Lincoln, Bob again did not fit the mold of most Confederate statue defenders. In 1860 Jessamine County gave Lincoln just zero-point-two-five percent of the vote. A quarter of one percent. That number would be higher now, but people around here still complain that Lincoln was a federal bully. And Bob, even though he spoke highly of our sixteenth president, kind of agreed. BARNEY: I am very sympathetic with the state’s rights movement. And the view that the federal government through the last centuries has gained and grabbed more and more power. And I’m very sensitive about it, coming from Canada. DAVID: Bob believes that the Canadian political system benefits eastern Canada and exploits western Canada. That’s also his view of the North and South at the time of the Civil War. BARNEY: And I’m also of the view that the stronger a federal government is, the more chance for socialism to get into the system. I was always against socialism in Canada, and I’m clearly in the minority of Canadians on that. I was very glad to come to the United States where, you know, conservative thinking had an opportunity to still defend itself. DAVID: But when Bob arrived in Jessamine County 25 years ago, he was dismayed to learn that there were twice as many Democrats as Republicans. It didn’t feel like the small-government stronghold he had expected. BARNEY: So I’m sympathetic to the Confederacy to some degree and that they felt that they had been cheated. They joined something and then the rules changed. And now they didn’t want to be part of it anymore. And they wanted to leave. And the rest of the country said, “Hell no, you can’t. You know, you went all in, and you can’t take back your chips now.” But I’m still glad, as history goes, that the North won the war—and that Lincoln freed the slaves. It was all good. And I have a perspective as a Christian—and that is it was a great sin for our country to have been engaged in that behavior. And the Civil War was the blood we shed for that. DAVID: In Bob’s view, this is where the current statue controversy and the Civil War intersect. BOB: I think having litigated it with such a terrible loss of human life, it’s a mistake to relitigate it. Let’s just try and put it in the rearview mirror. That’s kind of my overall view of it. DAVID: Bob’s own story with Jessamine County’s statue goes back to when he first moved to the county. BARNEY: I had to go down to the clerk’s office to change the tags on our cars and had seen the Civil War statue in the front yard. I had gotten really interested in the Civil War after the Ken Burns series, which I thought was fascinating, and we got to watch that in Canada. And I was curious, what is this soldier? And looked on the soldier, and the only thing I could find was the CSA on the belt buckle. And then it was only after I started into this process of phoning that I learned it had been originally cast as a Union soldier for a northern community, and that they didn’t pay for it. And it came up for sale. And somebody here in Jessamine County got an eBay deal before eBay. [chuckle] DAVID: He’s enjoying the historical twist. Remember, Bob doesn’t really believe in the statue. Poking a little fun at it is just fine. BARNEY: The thing that’s funny about all this as a Republican: I had nothing to do with the erection of any Confederate monument anywhere. In fact, I challenge anyone to point me to a Republican who erected a Confederate monument. Not a Republican involved. DAVID: He’s right. In my research on this statue, it was Democratic voters who put it up. Mostly because Democrats decisively controlled southern politics into the 1970s. So it’s true that almost all Confederate statues were erected . . . by Democrats. BARNEY: Now if this statute was so offensive, where’s the apology? Where’s the formal apology from the Democrat party here in Kentucky for the egregious offensive act of erecting that statue? I never saw any mea culpa on that statue. And that irritates me to death, because the thing that troubles me the most about this story that’s coming along is the failure of the Democrat party to own what they did. And it’s what they did, and they want to project this on Republicans. DAVID: Bob told me that he wouldn’t have put it up. And if it were torn down by activists now, he would oppose restoring it. BARNEY: I don’t think anybody has backed up a four-wheel drive pickup up to the statue and put a chain around it to tear it down. And by the way, I have some advice for the local government on that. If they do, I wouldn’t put it back up. Unless there was private money to do it. I wouldn’t spend one thin dime of public money to fix or erect the statue again. DAVID: Bob is a classic libertarian. BARNEY: It’s like the Jefferson Davis statue. DAVID: Davis was the first and only president of the Confederacy. His statue was installed in 1936 in the rotunda of Kentucky’s state capitol building. A gilded plaque beneath it read, “Patriot – Hero – Statesman.” But in June 2020, just months before I interviewed Bob, the statue was removed. BARNEY: I disagreed with its removal. I really disagreed with the $225,000 to remove it. I can’t underscore enough how much I disagreed with that. But would I, under a Republican government, put it back? Not even for a second would I put it back. It’s gone. So my bottom line of it is is I don’t have any personal attachment to the statue. Okay, I’m a Republican. DAVID: In the decades Bob has lived in Jessamine County, he’s seen—and welcomed—a steady shift to the right. But he sees the potential for more. He sees the statue controversy as an extraordinary opportunity to flip registered Democrats to the Republican Party. BARNEY: It was a political motivation to start making calls and polling people about the statue. We have a state representative race going on in the 39th district. Matt Lockett is the Republican, and Carolyn DuPont is the Democrat. Carolyn DuPont has quite a interesting history of wanting Confederate statues removed. She is herself a professor of history at EKU. DAVID: EKU is Eastern Kentucky University. It’s a thirty-minute drive and ferry ride across the Kentucky River. Dupont, who lives in Jessamine County, takes this trip to work. You’ve met Dupont a couple of times already as a historical consultant for this podcast. She’s also a friend of mine. We occasionally get together for coffee to talk shop about teaching American history. BARNEY: She has been very aggressive at trying to get rid of Confederate monuments. She organized history professors five years ago to demand that the Jefferson Davis monument be removed from the State Capitol building. And now she’s running here in Jessamine County. And so I was curious from a political point of view: well, how much of that is shared by the rank-and-file Democrat voters here in Jessamine County? And given that we had this petition being circulated and her colorful history of wanting statues removed . . . DAVID: Dupont also had called for the removal of Confederate monuments in Richmond, Va. BARNEY: . . . I decided to jump right in. And I formulated a poll, which I began calling Democrats in Jessamine County to ask them their views on the statues. Did you approve of the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue? Do you approve of the removal of the Civil War statue in Jessamine County? That was the second question. The third question, if they said they didn’t approve of removing it, then my question was, were you aware that the statue in Jessamine County is that of a Confederate soldier? And then we’d have a chat. And it was funny, because most people who knew it was a Confederate soldier would pause at that moment in the phone call and say, “But it’s history.” They went on the defensive, as soon as you ask the question, because they kind of felt, “Oh, I think I know where this poll is going. And I don’t like it.” DAVID: They thought Bob wanted the statue down, though of course he didn’t . . . BARNEY: And so at that moment, you get this knee-jerk response. It’s history. And I heard that over and over and over again. DAVID: These responses energized Bob even more. Here was something he could use to divide his political opponents. BARNEY: But you have this kind of interesting dichotomy between the leadership of the Democrat Party, who seems to be very active and aggressive about getting rid of these monuments. And then you have the people . . . DAVID: . . . who, according to Bob’s personal phone survey, aren’t interested in removing the statue. BARNEY: Right now the numbers are just under 20 percent who want the statue here in Jessamine County removed. And I’ve now polled 968 Democrats. I will break 1,000. I am determined to break 1,000. DAVID: Did you catch that? The numbers are overwhelming. Remember, Bob’s only calling Democrats, and he says even in that more progressive slice of the population, fewer than 20 percent want the statue down. With those people, he cuts the conversation short and ends the call. BARNEY: I don’t want to get into an argument with them. I’m not there to try and convince them. I am there to record what is their view. DAVID: But with those who answer, “No, I don’t want it removed,” he does try to convince them of something. He tells them that Democratic candidate Carolyn Dupont had campaigned to remove the Jefferson Davis statue from the Capitol Building—and that perhaps they would like her Republican opponent better. After all, Matt Lockett is on record as saying that statues are under attack from leftists who want to “erase our nation’s history.” Bob says this is a perfect opening to flip Democratic voters. He intends to flip a lot of them. I really didn’t have a sense of just how many until we left his back patio and went inside his house. DAVID: I’d like you to describe what it’s like to make these phone calls. BARNEY: I sit at my desk. I have an office off the foyer here in the house. It’s a total disaster. I’m one of those guys that everything piles up. DAVID: He’s not exaggerating. There were stacks of paper everywhere. Even so, I quickly spotted Carolyn Dupont’s book on the civil rights movement in Mississippi. It was dog-eared and bookmarked. BARNEY: Okay, so this is the list that I’m using of Democrats. And you’ll see here my last Democrat is on line 13,359. DAVID: These are all registered Democrats in the 39th Kentucky House District. BARNEY: And then up here at the top, of course, it starts at line number two, the actual names. DAVID: So where did you get this data? BARNEY: This comes from the GOP data center. They call it the voter vault. Now this is my second pass through Jessamine County. Okay, I went through the entire county calling threes and fours the first time. Now, threes and fours are the number of times in the last four general elections this individual has voted. DAVID: So you are targeting those. BARNEY: I am going for people who actually vote. People who are registered and don’t vote, I am very disinterested in their opinions about anything. If you don’t have the gumption to get up and vote at least once in the last four general elections, I don’t really care if I talk to you or not. DAVID: But it’s hard work to talk to those who even are politically engaged. BARNEY: I have a headset and microphone. I dial every call, and I would say it probably takes fifteen phone dials to get one person to talk. And sometimes that is a person who hangs up on you. And sometimes that’s a person who refuses to do it. So on an average night, I would say I’m doing very good if I can get five surveys per hour. DAVID: Oh my goodness. That sounds incredibly tedious. BARNEY: It is tedious. But you know, the bottom line of it is that I’m good at it. DAVID: He’s very good at it. One reason is that he doesn’t take negative responses personally. BARNEY: Most Jessamine County Democrats are very nice people. DAVID: But not all of them. BARNEY: You get the hang ups or you get some people making rude comments or whatever. You know, the thing you learn as a person who does a lot of telephone calling is none of this is personal. You know, they don’t know me from Adam. DAVID: Bob typically starts at 4:30 in the afternoon and ends at 6:30. Those are prime times when people are getting back from work. BARNEY: Some nights if I’m on a hot roll, and I’m hitting people, I will often extend it out ‘til eight o’clock. I won’t call after eight o’clock. It’s been my experience that calling later than eight o’clock will make some people very unhappy. DAVID: But even on those long evenings, time passes quickly. BARNEY: I mean, dialing phone numbers is almost addictive in that you hit a call, you get the five rings, and you’re looking at the next number on the list. And you just go. It’s almost a kind of an assembly line work. But the key is that when you actually hit a live human being, you have to pause within yourself. And you begin with your script. But what you have to remember is while the script you have said many, many times, okay, the person you’re speaking to has never heard it. You’re not an auctioneer. You have to pause and go carefully. DAVID: If Bob played it just right—and got a little lucky—he had a captive audience. BARNEY: I say we’re doing a survey about Civil War statues and memorials. I was hoping to get your opinion on a couple of quick questions. And usually I’ll stick “quick” in there. Okay. And at that point, they go, “Okay well, you’re not asking for money. So that’s a relief.” Okay. And then we’re into the questions. And by the way, by the second question, they are in it. They are happy to, you know . . . talk. DAVID: Bob says it gets tedious. But I don’t believe him. He loves it. PART TWO: BOB’S TARGETS DAVID: So what about Bob’s targets? Well, most don’t love the survey as much as he does. RADFORD: Like, I got the phone call from the man that was doing a survey. DAVID: Here’s Pastor Moses Radford again, describing what it’s like on the other end of Bob Barney’s telephone survey. RADFORD: “First question: Were you in favor of Jefferson Davis statue being removed from the rotunda?” I say yes. “Second question: Are you in favor of the Civil War statue being removed from Jessamine County Courthouse yard.” I say yes. “Okay, thank you.” DAVID: The call ended, as the script protocol required. BARNEY: And then I called for about another twenty minutes, and my phone rings up. And it’s Moses on my caller ID. RADFORD: Let me call this guy back, because I got to thinking about what he asked. BARNEY: And so I answer the phone and, “What are you doing?” RADFORD: So anyway, we started going around and around about the history and about the statue and how I say it need to be removed. One thing led to another, and I told him he can have a good day. I’m through talking. BARNEY: And I knew who he was because I had read the original article about the petition. And by the way, I respect his views as an African American, that, you know, the perspective about slavery and the perspective about the Civil War is clearly going to be different and far more significant. If there are going to be wounds, they will be there, you know, as opposed to what some white member of the southern states feels about it. And so I just gave him as much time as he wanted. DAVID: They argued about several things. Whether Bob was manipulating the survey. Whether Bob’s point about Democrats putting up the statue was valid. And whether Democrats, consequently, were more racist than Republicans. RADFORD: I said, by the way you talking, you sound like a racist. He said, “But I’m not.” I said, Well you sound like one. I said, Yes, it was the Democratic Party that supported slavery. It was the Daughters of the Confederacy that started putting the statues up, which were Democrats. The Jim Crow laws came from Democrats. DAVID: Most southern Democrats were big segregationists before the 1960s, and they ran the South. RADFORD: I said, but now it’s the Republican Party that don’t want to take them down. So there has been a change, I said. Since there have been a change. Who changed for the better? DAVID: The change Pastor Moses is referring to happened in the late 1960s. That’s when Richard Nixon successfully used the so-called “southern strategy” to peel conservative southerners away from the Democratic Party to the Republicans. Using a campaign of “law and order,” Nixon leveraged white fear and racism in the South. RADFORD: I said, to me, and I could be looking at it wrong, but to me, the Republicans changed for the worse. The Republican Party as a whole have become a prejudiced party. Not just against Blacks, but against low class. What ya’ll call trashy white folk. You all are prejudiced against them. “No, we’re not.” I said, Yes, you are. I mean, we went round and round for a long time. DAVID: Bob Barney’s confrontation with the candidate was much longer. When Carolyn Dupont declared that the local Confederate statue was not a campaign issue, Bob’s clinical project took on more of an edge. I could feel it as we talked in his home office. DAVID: She’s not taking a position on it, from my understanding. BARNEY: The hell she isn’t. That’s a lie. That is a categorical lie. And I just call B.S. on that. So the bottom line of it is, of course, she would like it removed. And my view is that she should be honest with the people she’s trying to represent. DAVID: That’s what Bob’s final survey question was all about. BARNEY: And then the last question goes to Carolyn Dupont. I hate seeing this number 666—of the 666 people I asked about whether they knew about Carolyn Dupont, only 9 percent knew she was involved with any statue removal. So that’s my numbers there. DUPONT: Bob Barney knows a lot more about me than I know about him. DAVID: This is Carolyn Dupont. DUPONT: So all I can really say about Bob Barney is that I know that he’s a local citizen. I know that he’s originally from Canada and that he lives in Wilmore, that he’s very active in the Republican Party in Jessamine County. That he’s very diligent in tracing things out. DAVID: She first heard about Bob’s survey from a woman she met on the campaign trail. DUPONT: Well, it was one night when I was out knocking on doors. She said, “Well, you will not have my vote!” And I was just, whoa, okay, you know about me already. And she started to tell me, “You want to take the statues down?” And just started to tell me all about myself. DAVID: And then she—and others she talked with—proceeded to tell Dupont about Civil War history. DUPONT: They immediately went to the Civil War was not about slavery. And I tried to say, Well, I’m a historian, and I kind of know that it is. And they said, “Well, you just better read the history books again.” And so, you know, I decided, well, there’s a vote I’m not going to have, and I left. But then, you know, I started hearing more, people bringing up the statue. DAVID: Dupont began to realize the scale of Bob’s survey—and how it might affect the campaign. DUPONT: It’s not a misrepresentation to say that I have supported removing Confederate statues. That is actually absolutely true. But I was not, and had no intention of and would not, make the Jessamine County statue an issue in my campaign. There are a couple of reasons why that’s the case. One is, I don’t think everything I personally believe needs to be made a campaign issue. Number two, I was running because of education. And that was where I wanted to keep the focus on, and I didn’t want to get distracted by an issue like the statues. Number three, ultimately that decision has to be made at the local level. That is on county property. For him to suggest that that was an issue that I was going to try to move on if elected is not true. DAVID: Dupont fought back. She explained these positions to the Jessamine Journal. After Bob called Dupont the quote “queen of Kentucky statue removers,” she called Bob an “errand boy” of her opponent Matt Lockett. She said Bob was engaging in a smear tactic, not doing a legitimate survey. DAVID: So Bob told me that all of the people that he polled, only 9 percent of Democrats wanted the statue removed. Do you buy that number? DUPONT: So not entirely, partly because a lot of Jessamine Countians who are registered as Democrats have been voting Republican for years. So that’s one thing. The other thing I would say is that there’s some leading in those questions that he asked. DAVID: But she knows that Bob’s survey also captured some truth. DUPONT: I did talk to some Democrats that didn’t want to see it removed. And I get it. You have an attachment to something that you have known all your life, and that you’ve grown up with. And to many white people who’ve never thought about it, that’s a feature of the county that they’re fond of, just like the courthouse itself. There’s that feeling when you know, maybe you’ve been away and you come home and you start to see the things that are familiar, and maybe even you know, the smell of it and all of those things. And you know, it’s like, man, that’s my home. So there’s that association. And I don’t, I don’t fault them for that. DAVID: But she wonders if their feelings would change if they knew history better. DUPONT: We’ve done a very poor job educating people about what the Confederacy was about. And honestly, it’s kind of a vicious cycle because that statue miseducates people. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but in teaching Kentucky students about the Civil War . . . DAVID: She’s talking about some of her college students at Eastern Kentucky University. DUPONT: . . . invariably every semester I get this question: When did Kentucky secede? And so you tell your students, well, you know, Kentucky actually never left the Union. And we sent many times more soldiers to the Union than to the Confederacy. They’re just, like, shocked. And believe it or not, I’ve even had students who actually thought the South won the war. And I’m, like, okay, you didn’t think that one through, because if the South had won the war, you’d be needing your passport to go to Tennessee. DAVID: Bob Barney’s survey exploited these gaps in historical knowledge. DAVID: How did you feel in the fall of when you realized what was happening behind the scenes? DUPONT: Well, I felt I felt helpless because you cannot control how people take your image and manipulate it. And that’s a very uncomfortable place to be. He was trying to make me look like a radical and connect me to the Black Lives Matter movement, which unfortunately was being interpreted in very negative ways in Jessamine County. DAVID: In addition, Bob’s survey made her think about the state of contemporary politics. DUPONT: And I also realized that what was happening to me happens to every public figure. And that is that you become an image, and you become a creation that really has very little to do with who you are, and that you probably won’t get the chance for people to know who you really are. And I think that’s really, really unfortunate, because I think we really need authenticity in office right now. And everything wars against it. DAVID: Dupont faced a dilemma—how to maintain her authenticity and still win the election. Her campaign manager kept wanting her to say things that weren’t quite accurate. She resisted, and her manager became frustrated with her. DUPONT: What I didn’t want to do is become part of the problem. I have to live with myself after this election. So I wasn’t gonna go misrepresenting my opponent in those ways because I’m convinced that if you start to make these compromises, you’ll make the next one and the next one and the next one. And then you’ve just sold your soul. And what we're asking people to do is to sell their soul to then do something good. And that just gets to be the biggest loopy rationalization that I just I think is really dangerous. PART THREE: A COUNTY DIVIDED DAVID: Jessamine County was deeply divided. Matt Lockett vs. Carolyn Dupont. Bob Barney vs. Carolyn Dupont. Moses Radford vs. Bob Barney. In more general terms, people divided into factions that mirrored the national landscape: Democrats vs. Republicans and Black Lives Matter vs. Blue Lives Matter. During the political season that fall, I saw more and more of the latter: Blue Lives Matter flags and stickers on poles, cars and trucks, storefront windows, and billboards. DAVID: So it’s late October, just about a week and a half before the election. And I’m here at a Back the Blue rally. Probably 150 to 200 folks waving the Back the Blue American flags, carrying a lot of Trump signs, marching from North Main St. from close to Maple Grove Cemetery all the way to the courthouse. DAVID: They arrived with police escort right by the Confederate statue—in the same space occupied by Black Lives Matter protesters four months earlier. But this time, the gathered crowd praised those who wore the uniform. LOCKETT: Can you hear me? Awesome. I tell you what, can you give a round of applause for all of our police officers? You guys put your life on the line day in and day out. They deserve and they need our support and our respect—all the time. Right? [cheering] DAVID: This is Carolyn Dupont’s opponent—and the beneficiary of Bob Barney’s telephone activism. LOCKETT: My name is Matt Lockett. And I’m certainly proud to be running for your state representative. Because we stand with our police, with our firefighters, and with our first responders. I’d like to introduce our next speaker: County Judge-Executive David West. WEST: Hello? All right. Thank you for coming today. I usually don’t need a microphone. As I was looking around and thinking today, when we have a moment of concern, we call on the blue. When we have a moment of trouble, we call on the blue. When we have a crisis, we call on the blue. And they are there for us. I think it’s so fitting that we back the blue—and that we show we’re going to back the blue! [cheering] DAVID: When the call and response ended, Judge West announced that the county courthouse would be lit up in blue that evening. WEST: You can see that your magistrates, your judge, your court, your county, and your city back the blue. Thank you! [cheering] DAVID: Then a minister offered a lengthy prayer in support of law enforcement families who wonder each day if their loved ones will come home safely that evening. KIBLER: Dear heavenly father, we want to thank you for the community we live in. We want to thank you that we can walk down the street and we can be safe. And Lord, that doesn’t happen by chance. That’s not the norm throughout history. That’s the exception. The reason that’s the exception is because here we have a thin blue line that stands between us and those who would do us harm. So many times, Lord, especially this year, those people have been maligned, they have been insulted, they have been spit on and criticized and provoked. DAVID: I don’t generally interrupt prayers, but it seems important to note here that no one was spitting on police in Jessamine County. KIBLER: I pray that some of the teenagers and children that are in elementary school and middle school and senior high would grow up to be cops. We pray for the next generation to rise and serve this community. Thank you, Lord, for this day. Thank you for this group of people. Thank you for our community. And most of all, thank you for those who wear the uniform. We love you. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen. [Amens and applause] DAVID: After praying, the pastor urged the crowd, now shivering in a cold October drizzle, to treat police officers to meals in local restaurants. His plea felt all the more poignant a week later when a violent situation developed on the courthouse steps. FOX 56 NEWS: Two people were arrested tonight at an early voting location in Jessamine County. Shelby Smithson has the story. “You’re packing people in her like sardines for no reason.” Tension at the polls that had nothing to do with the candidates. DAVID: As voters stood in long lines to cast early ballots, an argument developed over social distancing. [arguing] A young woman swung her fists at police officers who had arrived to resolve the confrontation. When her companion shoved his hand into his pocket to retrieve a cell phone—which officers initially thought might be a gun—an officer pulled his own gun. Thankfully, no shots were fired, and the tension defused. For most observers, it was an exemplary case of control and restraint. Law and order had been preserved by the blue. But to others, the Blue Lives Matter rhetoric sounded disingenuous, even threatening. Conservative politics combined with a reverence for Confederate history and a nostalgia for old-fashioned values, they said, was a dangerous ideological cocktail. How much racial resentment was involved, they wondered. Was Blue Lives Matter a backlash to the winds of change gusting across Jessamine County—and the country at large? The chronology mattered. The Blue Lives Matter movement didn’t really emerge locally until after the Black Lives Matter protests in June. You might remember that big trucks circled the courthouse during those protests. Some of those trucks bore the “thin blue line” flag, commonly associated with the Blue Lives Matter movement. This wasn’t just support for the police. The timing made Blue Lives Matter seem anti-Black Lives Matter. They were protesting the protest. And in June 2020, Blue Lives Matter was also about the upcoming election. As all the Trump flags suggested, the White House was at stake. So too was Jessamine County’s seat in the state legislature. Just a few days before the big rally and just a few weeks before the election, I returned to Bob Barney’s back patio. On one hand, my Republican neighbor felt good about his efforts. BARNEY: I’m at 1,015. And I’m done. I busted through 1,000. I’ve ended it. I think Trump is going to win. I think it’s going to surprise people how many Democrats vote for Trump in this election. DAVID: On the other hand, Bob worried about voter fraud and the future of the country. BARNEY: I think it’s going to be a messy, messy election. But in the midst of all this anarchy and chaos, I think there are a lot of Americans, including a lot of Democrats, who are very, very worried that we’re losing the country. DAVID: And then he gave an ominous forecast. BARNEY: But I think, yeah, it’s gonna be a real interesting month or two after the election. DAVID: That “interesting month” turned out to include the January Sixth insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Bob Barney was wrong about only one of his predictions: Trump did not win nationally. But he was right about the results in Jessamine County, where Matt Lockett beat Carolyn Dupont 61-39 percent and Trump beat Biden 65-32 percent. Between July and November, as Bob slowly plowed his way through his phone list, the lead in Republican voter registrations over Democratic registrations grew from 5,000 to 5,800. BARNEY: So there has been a big move. There has been a big move. DAVID: No one has done a rigorous analysis of the numbers. But I think Bob had an impact. Confederate controversies helped cement the Republican takeover of Jessamine County. That really bothers Pastor Moses. RADFORD: Almost everything that’s being done now, it’s politically driven. And it’s terrible. And they try to make everything Democrat or Republican depending on who’s talking. Some people are so party driven that if a Democrat says it’s raining outside, the Republican would say, “No, water just falling.” You know, it just crazy. I’d be happy to get rid of both parties. And just be Americans. DAVID: Carolyn Dupont shares his concern. DUPONT: Our civil discourse is in a very brittle state. It’s very tribal. We don’t care about candidate quality. We just care about political identity. So Bob Barney’s poll just plays into that. That anyone who wants to remove Confederate statues wants to destroy our history. And if you don’t want to destroy history, don’t vote for her. It’s that simple. DAVID: That leaves very little room for real and honest conversations. It doesn’t allow people to change their minds on Confederate statues—or any other issue, from education to immigration. DUPONT: I’m old enough to know that I am not right about everything. And I need people who think differently to help me adjust my thinking. DAVID: But Dupont didn’t represent the polarizing ends of the county. The ends were calcifying further. On the right end, people feared that Black Lives Matter protesters would turn violent—that they might vandalize the Confederate statue. It seemed plausible. Just as protests emerged in Jessamine County, Black Lives Matter protesters approached a 70-foot-tall Confederate statue in Brandenburg, Kentucky, just a two-hour drive to the west. Worried about vandalism, hundreds of white men blocked their path. LOUISVILLE TV: Just an hour ago, a tense confrontation between members of that crowd and protesters yelling “Black Lives Matter.” . . . [yelling] . . . And it has been getting tense at moments. We noticed police stepping in between residents and about fifteen protesters who are chanting. People with guns are not only lined up by the monument, but we’re also told they’re up into town protecting some businesses. DAVID: These counter-protesters wore military fatigues, carried rifles, and told anti-statue protesters to “get out of our county.” Defenders of Confederate heritage clearly felt under siege. This response provoked fear on the other side too. People on the left worried about the implicit endorsements of violence represented in the counter-protest. You could see shadows of this in Jessamine County’s Back the Blue rally. There were “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and a flag depicting Donald Trump riding on a tank. As I stood in the crowd, I saw so many holstered guns. On both sides, seething language was not the most representative, but it was also not unusual. Unkind and dismissive attitudes were typical. I saw unkindness even in myself. I’ll admit, I got mad at Bob Barney for using the Confederate statue as a weapon against my friend Carolyn Dupont. And as I wrote the first draft of this episode, I found myself picking out Bob’s most inflammatory lines, not the lines that would demonstrate his thoughtfulness. Turns out that I too am tempted to use history for political and personal ends. At the beginning of the episode, I asked whether a thoughtful local conversation about race and Civil War memory could happen in these toxic times. As 2020 ended, the answer seemed to be no. I sat down with Dupont after the election. She too was pessimistic about prospects for a more civil dialogue. DUPONT: I think the forces in Jessamine County that are punitive, that will punish you right now for having an opinion that goes against their ideology, are really, really strong. Moses Radford has gotten some pretty ugly commentary. DAVID: She suspected that the county’s elected officials were under tremendous pressure too. And that this was paralyzing them. DUPONT: And this is no commentary on their character, because one of the things I learned in running for office is that you’ve got to develop a thick skin, and there are a lot of negative forces on you. And I hate that it’s that way. If they try to remove it, I think every one of them will be voted out of office. I think there’s a good chance that that would happen. DAVID: It hasn’t always been this way. As local politics turned bitter in the fall of 2020, I found an inspiring story deep in Jessamine County’s past, from before the Confederate statue even existed. Some weeks before the 1888 election, amidst the political factions dividing the post-Reconstruction South, fifteen politicians made a friendly wager. If Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate for president, won, the Republicans would foot the bill for a banquet of reconciliation. If the Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison won, the Democrats would pay. That’s how it turned out. Harrison won. And on the very next Saturday evening, they all converged on Hotel Nicholas, right across the street from the courthouse. As promised, the losing Democrats served up a sumptuous feast. It included venison, grouse, quail, oysters, celery, ice creams, and cakes. The Jessamine Journal reported that the champagne was “somewhat exhilarating.” The party didn’t end until early Sunday morning, not too many hours before church started. Nearly a century and a half later, it’s hard to imagine such a display of civility happening again. But then Bob Barney kind of won me over. Not with his arguments or his tactics. I still profoundly disagree with what he did. And I think he knows I disapprove. Even so, he began giving me lots of helpful advice on repairing my minivan. And like the politicians from so long ago, he took me out for some food. Specifically, a hot brown. For listeners not from Kentucky, that’s a huge plate of heart attack—sliced turkey, ham, bacon, and thick toast—all covered in a creamy Mornay sauce. Our family reciprocated with homemade bread and a Christmas card. Bob and I used to just live by each other. Now we’re neighbors. I hope this kind of thing spreads. Bob does too. During one of our last interviews, he told me he wants to connect with one of his rivals. BARNEY: I intend to call Moses Radford after the dust settles and offer to buy him lunch. DAVID: I hope he does. I hope Pastor Moses accepts. And I hope it leads to more lunches across Jessamine County. There’s just one episode left in this podcast series. Stay tuned to find out what happens to Jessamine County’s Confederate statue. OUTRO: In the meantime, thanks for listening to “Rebel on Main.” Special thanks to story editor Stephen Smith, audio producer Barry Blair, and Asbury University and the Louisville Institute for their generous support. Be sure to subscribe—and leave a rating and a review so others can find us. For more on Carolyn Dupont’s historical research, statistics from Bob Barney’s phone survey, and photos of the Back the Blue rally, head to rebelonmain.com. I’m David Swartz. See you next time.