James Edwards and Keith Alexander got together this week to watch the 1997 TNT movie George Wallace. As the film progressed, the decision was made to dedicate this hour of the broadcast to discuss it.
[00:00:01] You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is The Political Cesspool. The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program. And here to guide you through the murky waters of The Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
[00:00:31] Well, folks, as I mentioned, I had done a few minutes last week after Jose Nino's appearance on this, you know, the fundraising incentive gifts that we're offering to folks. And I talked about this movie, George Wallace. It was a 1997 Turner Network television TNT original movie.
[00:00:58] And during this time frame of approximately five years between the late 90s and the early 2000s, so say 97 to 2002, 98 to 2003, right around there. Ted Turner produced three movies that should be of great interest to our audience. He personally, this is Ted Turner, and I know I talked about this last week, so I'll make this quick, but he personally had a hand in both Gods and Generals and The Hunley.
[00:01:25] And Turner himself, by the way, made a cameo appearance in a Confederate camp scene in Gods and Generals where Dixie is played. And he, as I've mentioned this many times over the years, Ted Turner himself led the four and a half mile funeral procession from the Battery in Charleston, South Carolina, Rainbow Road, and downtown Charleston, South Carolina, to the burial plot where the real life Hunley crew was laid to rest on April 17th, 2004.
[00:01:54] He rode on horseback dressed as a Confederate officer. And I was there. So during the same time, so that was 2004. So during the few years prior to that, Turner's studio made these movies, Gods and Generals and The Hunley. And I'm talking about, I mean, you have aidless talent in these movies. In Gods and Generals, you had Robert Duvall playing Robert E. Lee. You had Stephen Lang, the great character actor, playing Stonewall Jackson.
[00:02:23] He played Ike Clanton in probably the greatest modern Western, maybe one of the greatest Westerns ever made, Tombstone. And so that was, if you're looking on the other side, you had Jeff Daniels played Joshua Chamberlain in Gods and Generals. In the Hunley, you had Armand Assante playing Lieutenant Dixon, who was the commander of the Hunley, the third crew of the Hunley that sunk the Housatonic. Donald Sutherland plays Beauregard.
[00:02:52] And in the Hunley, I mean, in Gods and Generals, they do a good job, I think, of showing both sides of the war from the perspectives of both the Confederates and the Union. But the Hunley, I mean, in the Hunley, there's just no doubt about it. The Confederates are there, and they are the heroes, and they are defending Charleston. I mean, that's how they are portrayed. But you had one other movie around this time, George Wallace.
[00:03:19] And this movie stars Gary Sinise, of course, as the iconic former governor of Alabama. And it explores his life from 1958 through, which was his failed campaign, gubernatorial campaign against John Patterson, through the 1972 shooting in Laurel, Maryland and beyond. But it really focuses, of course, on that period in the 1960s.
[00:03:47] And as I said, I mean, there are some fictional elements that there was some creative licensing that went on. I mentioned that last week, and so I'm not going to go over all of that again. But as I was talking about the movie last week, I was thinking, you know, man, you know, it's been a while since I've seen this movie. It's been a while since I've seen this movie. And so I hope I haven't just told people, you know, that this is so good and you need to watch it. And then it's just it's not as good as I remember.
[00:04:17] And there's some false memories in play there because I remember watching this. I saw it when it came out in the late 90s. But I really remember watching it again in January of 2002. So I announced that I was going to be running for the state legislature in Tennessee in March of 2002. And I remember sitting there and my parents had a pool, a playroom with a pool table, a billiards room.
[00:04:45] And I was there going through all of my contacts from the Buchanan campaign and shoring up this nascent support base for my campaign in January of 2002. And I watched this movie for inspiration. And that's when I had the core memory of that. This was a movie. Not only was it good, but it.
[00:05:15] It was inspiring. But that was still a long time. It's been a long time since 2002. And so I was going off those memories. And then I was thinking, well, after I've hawked it like this, I mean, what if it really isn't the way I thought it was? And so I watched it again this week. And I just have to say, I mean, it is close to what I remember. And it has some connections to TPC. I mean, we've talked about Gary Sinise being on the show before, also George Wallace Jr.
[00:05:43] But the acting in this movie is just absolutely superb. I mean, it's really superb. Sinise won an Emmy for his performance. And he's from Illinois. But he really played George Wallace convincingly. And it humanizes Wallace. And Mayor Winningham played his first wife, Lurleen. Both she and he won Best Actor awards for male and female.
[00:06:09] And then Angelina Jolie won a Golden Globe for her role as his second wife, Cornelia. And then the movie itself took home the award for Best Motion Picture made for television. Now, this was a TNT movie. It was a TV movie. Or otherwise, it would have been up for Oscars. But if you're made for TV movie, you get Emmys and Golden Globes. And this one pretty much ran the gauntlet.
[00:06:36] And again, watching it in its entirety for the first time since 2002 this week, as the film progressed, I just thought it would be interesting to dedicate an hour to the broadcast discussing it tonight. And then we're going to follow it up in the third hour with three men who worked on Wallace's campaigns. And they're going to share recollections and remembrances. And we're going to get to all that. But first, it's a big surprise to me.
[00:07:04] And we'll see if we can get this done here on the fly. I said he wasn't going to be here. But yet, he decided to truck out here anyway and joining us live here in the studio for the first time in a month. I haven't seen Keith Alexander in a month, but he's here right now. And I didn't think he would be. And now here he is. And it's a surprise to me. I mean, so much about this night is really just off the cuff. How are you doing, Keith? I'm doing great. I've been chasing you around for a month. Finally called. I think it was a little bit different. You've been busy yourself.
[00:07:33] I mean, we've both been busy, but in very different ways. We'll try to get your audio levels here. But yes, so this movie here. I think what you'll find, and we have sent out, first of all, it's a very hard to find movie. And the fact that it's hard to find is probably a testament to the fact that there's something there that they don't want you to see.
[00:08:01] And again, just watching it again from the eyes of a 46-year-old in 2026 as opposed to the starry-eyed young activist in 2002. I was pleasantly surprised at how much it humanizes George Wallace.
[00:08:22] And that, I mean, it does show each phase of his evolution from the slightly more liberal candidate in 1958 through the transformation he has going into the 1962 campaign and on through the next decade leading up to his shooting.
[00:08:47] But they didn't have Gary Sinise play him as a cartoon villain. He really gives you the hungry judge, the man who learned how to win elections, how to become governor, and then the broken man in the wheelchair later in his life. And this was all part of this true story. So, Keith, we'll start there. Well, I can say this. I think that it's Sinise best role probably.
[00:09:16] Secondly would be that championship season. And thirdly would be Forrest Gump. What do you think? Oh, you're talking? Well, you know, well, of course, you know, Gary Sinise is most well known for his iconic award-winning role as Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump. I mean, that was the movie that was, you know, really for Tom Hanks' career, probably his defining role. And Sinise has said that many times.
[00:09:45] But Sinise did say that this was his most intriguing role. And for a guy from Illinois to play George Wallace so memorably and authentically, you just don't expect. And what else was I going to say about that? But I was going to say there's one other movie you didn't mention.
[00:10:12] Not quite as well known, but going back to, you know, these Hollywood associations we've had over the course of our run here. Gary Sinise plays the villain in a movie called Ransom. It's a Mel Gibson movie. And Gary Sinise plays a police detective who kidnaps Mel Gibson's son and holds him for ransom while working both sides of the case. And he's just great as a villain. I mean, Gary Sinise is a world-class A-list actor.
[00:10:41] I have got to give my friend Keith Alexander a hug here in this break. I did not expect to see him here in the studio live tonight. When we called to connect with him, he said, hey, I'm almost here at the studio. I said, wait, you're almost here? Well, now he is. So I'm going to talk to him for a minute. We're going to come back and talk a little bit more about this movie. And we're going to talk to some people who were there in the 60s in the third hour.
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[00:13:02] Today, I have stood where once Jefferson Davis stood and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom, as have our generation of forebears before us done time and again down through history.
[00:13:28] Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us, and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
[00:14:00] Well, that is what you would have heard if you were on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in January of 1963. That was the real George Wallace delivering that iconic speech, and more than anyone else that was involved in that struggle, whether it be Ross Barnett in Mississippi or Orville Fawbis in Arkansas or Lester Maddox or any of the other Southern governors, it was Wallace who stepped into the void, who stepped into the vacuum,
[00:14:29] and was really the man of the hour for our people at that time. Really ran the best third-party presidential campaign of anyone, really, since Teddy Roosevelt. Absolutely. I mean, you know, people talk so much about Ross Perot. Ross Perot didn't carry a single state. I mean, he got a nice share of the overall electorate in terms of percentage points, but Wallace carried numerous states in the general election.
[00:14:57] I mean, it was just absolutely unfathomable now. But Gary Sinise, they do put that speech in its entirety. By the way, that speech, I got to get the lineage here right. So, again, I sent this DVD to a young lady last month, and I sent it with a personal note. I said, watch this, because she's very discerning and very blunt, I think is how I would put it.
[00:15:25] I mean, you know, she's going to give me an honest opinion. And I said, you watch this, and you tell me if I'm not watching this right, because I just watched it again, and I think it's just an incredible performance, and I can't believe the movie is this good. And she watched it and agreed. By the way, so I don't think it would be a step-grandfather.
[00:15:55] If I'm getting the history of this family correct, her grandmother's first husband, okay, wrote that speech. Her grandmother's first husband was Asa Carter, who wrote that speech. And so if anybody can give us a fair assessment of a movie about George Wallace, it should be somebody like that. Now, so this movie opens with the shooting in Maryland, and then it drops you back into 1958 Alabama.
[00:16:24] So it comes and goes in and out of different timelines. It was directed, now we know Ted Turner and TNT produced it, it was distributed by Warner Brothers, directed by John Frankenheimer. Now he is, as you might guess by the name, half Jewish. His father was a German Jew, his mother was Irish Catholic. But the structure treats Wallace like a Shakespearean figure,
[00:16:52] rather than a civics class villain. And I think that the film conveys to the audience, in some ways, why Wallace took the positions he did. And I think it was fairer to his entire life, to the man's entire life, than what most viewers, especially now in 2026, might expect from an award-winning movie
[00:17:20] from a major studio that was shot as late as the turn of the century, you know, nearly the turn of the century, the very late 90s. Well, the reason Wallace took the positions he did was, quite frankly, because they were correct. They were right. You know, that is a big problem for Americans today because of all the indoctrination that they've received in the schools, in the media, and otherwise, about how evil segregation was.
[00:17:48] Because segregation was a compromise that allowed two very different races to live together in harmony. And the reason Jewish power and influence tried to tear it down, and did, unfortunately, is because they wanted to weaken the prospects in life for the white working class before the civil rights movement, in particular.
[00:18:18] The white working class, because of the high quality of public education prior to the implementation of the Brown decision, was very good. And you could, if you were smart enough, do really well and ascend the social ladder, okay? When you destroyed public education, that became very difficult.
[00:18:43] You had to either have some way to afford private school education for your kids. And you've got to remember, back in those days, they did not have... Excuse me, what is happening here? Okay. They did not have homeschooling. So, consequently, you know, it was... You know, if you were an unfortunate white person that had to go into one of these newly integrated schools
[00:19:09] after busing hit and really the, you know, integration became a reality, basically, your children were thrown into the black hole of Calcutta. And it's sad. I was driving down the road the other day, and I saw this attractive young black white girl on the back of a motorcycle being driven by some big black guy that was probably a pimp or something like that.
[00:19:36] And I said, unfortunately, that was what happened to so many white people, white young people that were left behind that couldn't move out of these neighborhoods once they started turning black. So, going back to the movie, the schoolhouse door incident is featured as an important scene in this film. And, you know, again, I think that it allows the argument to be made from the perspective of not only Wallace,
[00:20:05] but of white Alabamians at the time, to be articulated as to why these stands were being made. And, again, watch it for yourself. It is hard to find. You may be able to find a used copy on eBay or something like that. You certainly can't find it in bulk, which is what we needed. I had actually done a couple of projects with Warner Brothers.
[00:20:29] I was able to climb back the link tree of contacts and find some overstock of this when we were offering it right now for our top-tier donors between now and the end of the month. But, yeah, I mean, this movie has come up before, and I'm glad we're able to talk about it at length right now after having rewatched it. Now, his first wife, Lurleen Wallace, is the heart of the first half of the film.
[00:20:55] She's played in this by Mare Winningham, who won the Emmy for Best Actress for her role. And she plays a – it stays true to fact on a lot of things. And she plays Mrs. Wallace as a tired and dying but fiercely loyal Southern wife who still runs for governor so the family can keep office.
[00:21:21] And, you know, Keith, do you think that that's true to the Old South in terms of secession and loyalty and family as, you know, compared and contrasted to the usual Hollywood marriage-as-oppression type script? Absolutely. I think Lurleen was a very devoted wife. I think she was 100 percent behind George Wallace. But she was also a committed segregationist in her own right.
[00:21:46] I mean, she was known for some other things as well, but that was not an issue where she had any sort of truck with him. She was also a segregationist. There was one scene that I watched again a couple of days ago, and it really got – I mean, she – of course, she died while she was in office, and she had gotten cancer in 1961. So I think it was 1961 right before he was first inaugurated.
[00:22:12] And there's just this one scene where they just humanized these characters so much. George and Lurleen Wallace and later his second wife Cornelia, played by Angelina Jolie, just humanized – you know, she's dying and she screams, George, you know, I want to live. And, you know, after, you know, she dies, of course, in real life. So in the movie, that's portrayed.
[00:22:32] But – and then there's this scene, you know, just very humanizing scene where a member of the staff of the governor's mansion is dusting her gubernatorial portrait. And Gary Sinise playing George Wallace says, you dust this – you dust this portrait every day. The state of Alabama loved this little lady.
[00:22:54] Well, what you can say is that Lurleen not only was very loyal to George Wallace, she was also very loyal to the thought of segregation. Racial segregation was what any thinking person in the South basically thought was the correct way to handle the two races living side by side.
[00:23:18] And quite frankly, black people don't realize it now, but they really had it very good during segregation. For example, in Memphis, we had all black neighborhoods like Orange Mound, but the black neighborhood had everybody from the top tier of the black community to the bottom. And the top tier was not going to allow their community to descend into criminal chaos.
[00:23:42] So they taught the white leadership into hiring and appointing black policemen for their neighborhoods. And those black policemen were famous for being very strict and hard on criminals. Also, almost all of the businesses in black neighborhoods at that time were owned by local black businessmen,
[00:24:03] and not by Palestinians or Dodd Indians or, you know, other foreigners, people from, you know, all sorts of places. And, you know, one of the things that happened as a result of the desegregation movement is that most black people that were ambitious got into government
[00:24:27] and started looking to get money from the government rather than being actual private sector entrepreneurs the way they'd been before. We'll be right back. We're going to continue to talk about this movie, doing this film review, and interspersing it with real-life commentary about the situation at the time and beyond. Stay tuned. Pursuing Liberty. Using the Constitution as our guide.
[00:24:54] You're listening to Liberty News Radio. News this hour from Town Hall. I'm Mary Rose. President Trump is posting on social media today. Correspondent Richard Boyd has the details. President Trump posted an image early Saturday morning on his Truth Social platform of the Strait of Hormuz, labeled Trump Strait, in the first public indication of his thinking after Iran proposed the New Deal
[00:25:23] and suggested it might help the president ahead of the midterm elections. The White House on Friday said only that U.S. officials were having positive and constructive conversations with mediators on the Iran war. Earlier in the week, Iran held hours of indirect talks with the U.S. Richard Boyd reporting. The 2026 midterm campaign heating up in North Carolina is drawing national attention.
[00:25:48] On Monday, Vice President J.D. Vance was in Greensboro to campaign for Republican Senate nominee Michael Watley, who faces former Democrat Governor Roy Cooper in the race for the Senate seat that will be vacated by outgoing Senator Tom Tillis. The race could impact the Republicans' slim Senate majority. Vice President J.D. Vance says when Democrats were in charge, the American people suffered.
[00:26:15] But for years, for four years under Joe Biden and congressional Democrats, America was run by a party that prioritized the needs of everybody else, everybody but you. They prioritized massive corporations. They prioritized the far-left NGOs. They prioritized illegal immigrants. And of course, as I've learned over the past few months, they prioritized a whole lot of fraudsters. And we know exactly what happened as a result.
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[00:30:07] Okay, so we are talking about the 1997 TNT original movie George Wallace. And we were able to purchase a sizable quantity of these movies. And we're giving them to you, our donors, our top-tier donors, before September the 30th. So a lot of you have already received them. We have mailed out a lot of these over the course of the month already for the people who contributed early.
[00:30:33] We've got a lot more going out on Monday and still hopefully some more throughout the remaining few days of the month before our third quarter fundraising drive ends on September the 30th. If you want it, you can get it. And we've got them. So just let me know. There was another scene in this movie. There's a scene where there's a portrait in the governor's mansion of Robert E. Lee.
[00:31:02] And it was the exact same portrait. And it looks to be the exact same size, like an 8 by 10. I mean, an 8 by 10 foot. I mean, it covers an entire wall of Robert E. Lee, his official military portrait of Robert E. Lee. And it shows Gary Sinise as George Wallace on, I believe it was the night he won his first election, walking over to the portrait and saluting it.
[00:31:30] And it just leaves it open to interpretation, truly. I mean, it's not done in like some sort of a corny way. I mean, it really, I watched it, and it inspired a sense of pride and passion. And this is a very odd movie that it would be produced this late. But, you know, again, you had seven years after this movie came out, Ted Turner himself leading the procession of the Hunley funeral. I mean, there were things that were going on in the early,
[00:31:57] even as late as the late 90s and the early 2000s that are anathema now. You would never see them now. But back then you did. Let's play a quick clip. Liz, can you cue up that second clip? This is a clip from the movie. Okay, we're going to play it now.
[00:32:11] Where is it? Looking sort of hopeless. Well, didn't have none, George. You had to go and open it and announce the Klan now. Of course.
[00:32:39] Did get you in support of the ACLU NAACP. And all our Israelites here in the state. Well, the problem is, let yourself get out of touch with everybody else in Alabama, George. The Klan might be just a bunch out there hooting on a fringe, but I tried to tell you. Times got intense. Shouldn't have kept trying to be that nice and hard a young fellow he was back there in the legislature.
[00:33:09] Just didn't distance yourself enough from Big Jim. There's a sulfur out there in the air now. Can't be compromised, Judd. Not these days. We're way back now, Liz. You've got to get back and grace with the people. You've got to be on the power of this. I really am so sorry. I just heard.
[00:33:42] That was, at the end of that scene, his wife, Lurleen, who we were just talking about, played by Mayor Winningham in the movie, coming in and telling George Wallace how sorry she was that he lost the 1958 gubernatorial election to John Patterson. That was that scene. And, again, Keith, matter-of-factly, you hear his advisors saying, you didn't distance yourself enough from Big Jim, I'm talking about Big Jim Folsom, and that you endeared yourself to the NAACP
[00:34:12] and every Israelite in Alabama, but you let yourself, you let a chasm grow between you and everybody else in Alabama. And then comes the famous quote that was attributed to Wallace in the movie. He says it. I just got out something-anothered, but I'll never get out something-anothered again. And this was the pivotal point, really in American history, where he came to this realization
[00:34:42] and then he stepped into the George Wallace that he is remembered as being, the 1962 to 1972 version of George Wallace. It's, again, all matter-of-factly, not good, not bad, just real. And, you know, what they were saying in that clip was true of the 1958 campaign, and that loss led directly to the Wallace that we remember so fondly. Well, George Wallace wasn't confrontational by nature, okay?
[00:35:11] He was put into a position where to stand up for what was right and righteous, he had to be confrontational. Like most people, he would prefer to get along with people, but on the other hand, the way that the civil rights movement was thrust upon the nation by Jewish power and influence and their control of the media and their control of politics and whatnot in America, which they still have, by the way,
[00:35:41] it was necessary for him to be, you know, a confrontational type of person, and he learned that. This is what happens. Basically, nice guys finish last. You know, we've all heard that famous Leo de Rocher quote. Well, that's what happens in this type of situation, particularly when you're up against a power as formidable as Jewish power and influence. See, what happens is gaslighting.
[00:36:10] That is a psychological manipulation technique in which you make somebody feel guilt about something that, one, either they didn't do, or two, if they did it, they should feel no guilt about it. And once that really hits people, once they are effective in doing the, you know, the gaslighting, what results in the person that's been gaslighted is called Stockholm Syndrome. Basically, you start trying to ingratiate yourself to your tormentors.
[00:36:40] Well, George Wallace learned early in that 58 campaign that there was no future in that and that basically, not only was he standing up for people, the white working class in the South, that needed a champion. Secondly, he and they were right. And what has, why do I say that? Look at what has happened to America since the Civil Rights Movement. Has America improved? Has the plight of the white working class improved at all?
[00:37:09] No, it's gone down the toilet. And basically, George Wallace was one of the few people that had the courage and the ability to fight back. And like I said, he had the most effective third-party campaign for president since Teddy Roosevelt. Well, you're talking about, I think, probably the 68 campaign, 72, you know, a lot of people think, including his son who said it on this program, he would have been the president had he not been shot.
[00:37:39] Now, I want to go back to the Big Jim Folsom. In this movie, he is played by veteran character actor Joe Don Baker. And Joe Don Baker has always been a favorite of mine. Any movie he's in, he chews up. Remember Walking Tall? He chews up the scenes. Yeah, he plays, he's in one of the James Bond movies, Golden Eye, also. I mean, he's in a lot of movies. He's in Cape Fear, the Robert De Niro installment. Joe Don Baker, a ton of credits to his name. But he plays Wallace's hard-drinking mentor,
[00:38:08] Big Jim Folsom, the governor of Alabama from 54 to 58. But again, this film doesn't pretend that Folsom was a saint or that Wallace invented himself out of thin air Now, they did invent the character Archie, who was the black trustee who serves in the governor's mansion. He was a composite character to represent the black conscience, I guess. And the family hated that, by the way.
[00:38:36] There was also a scene that was removed from the final cut of where George Wallace was contemplating suicide later in life. And the family threatened a lawsuit and was able to get that removed. But still, this composite character, Archie, did not exist in real life as he is portrayed in the film. But he was played by Clarence Williams III. That was the black actor who played him. And I gotta say, I mean, in watching it,
[00:39:05] it's not an affront to me. He plays the character with dignity rather than being a mascot. And I think it does go to show really, truly how whites and blacks actually got along in the segregation era south. That there was this understanding between one another. I mean, the relationship in the movie that Wallace, played by Sinise, has with this fictional character, Archie, who is a trustee in the governor's mansion,
[00:39:35] it really does tie into real life white-black relations of the time. And Keith, as you know, this whole thing where that whites and blacks were at each other's throats, it was the malcontents, it was the radical communist operatives that were being paid by Jewish power and influence to do it. But the whites and blacks writ large at that time and decades and even centuries before that, there was not
[00:40:04] that sort of animosity that you would expect. Because I can relate to that. I saw it. I saw it with my grandparents. My grandparents had, you know, black maids and things like that who would come to the house. A lot of people did back in the south in the middle part of the 20th century. Frankly, it was a lot better because that way they're not on welfare. They actually work for a living. But I think that this relationship between Wallace
[00:40:32] and this fictitious character where there is a respect and understanding but still a hierarchy is true to what things were back then. Well, quite frankly, it's true to the way the things are right now. In fact, with white people as well. You know, black people back then lived together in certain neighborhoods. Guess what? Most black people now live in majority black neighborhoods. Birds of a feather flock together. They basically didn't want to be thrust into the company
[00:41:02] of white people. What they wanted was a bigger piece of the pie and that's what they got. And unfortunately, we got a lot of people that were in positions of power and authority that really didn't have what it takes to handle those positions of authority and power properly. Look at places like Atlanta. Look at Memphis. Look at a lot of other cities in the south and in the north like Gary, Indiana. Are any of them showcases? Are any of them
[00:41:30] models of good government? No, they're not. And this was all thrust upon us and we are not allowed to discuss it. If you discuss this stuff then you're a bad person. But on the other hand, reality is popping up its head every day in all these places like Gary, Indiana, East St. Louis, Oakland, California. And quite frankly, if you were honest, you'd have to say that the Civil Rights Movement led to a general
[00:42:05] mediocrity in a lot of government positions that we have not overcome to this point. We never will unless we return to meritocracy rather than affirmative action. So we've talked a little bit about Mayor Winningham playing his first wife, Lurleen Wallace, who went on to become Governor Lurleen Wallace. And there's still a university, I think in her name down there. But Angelina Jolie, of all people,
[00:42:34] John Voight's daughter, plays Cornelia Wallace's second wife. And there is a scene that when I rewatched this movie this week, absolutely passionate and stirring. Angelina Jolie playing Cornelia Wallace. Now, this movie understands that Wallace was a national populace by 68 and 72 and not just
[00:43:04] an Alabama sideshow. and there's this scene where he is shot. I mean, he shows the shooting in 72 and Angelina Jolie in a great moment of acting grabs Gary Sinise by the collar after he's been shot five times. She grabs him by the collar and screams at him with tears and passion, live. She screams, live. And this is just
[00:43:33] a movie that in so many ways, I mean, there are a couple of things you could take issue with. I mean, if you look at it from a negative perspective and you want to find faults and there are some things we'll get to in just a moment, especially at the very end where they over-exaggerate the redemption arc. But man, I mean, you wouldn't expect a movie like this to have been made when it was made. And Ted Turner, quite frankly, is to be congratulated for that. You know, and Ted Turner who led the Humley Funeral Procession
[00:44:03] in Charleston, South Carolina where I was with him on that day in April of 2004. I was in Charleston of all places earlier this year on my wife, Danny and I, our 20th anniversary was on May the 5th and we went to Charleston. Ted Turner died on May the 6th. We were in Charleston still. I was in Charleston on the day Ted Turner died. He died earlier this year on May the 6th.
[00:44:33] And again, I mean, he's known most famously for Mary and Jane Fonda, I guess, but also being the founder of CNN, which, you know, say what you will about CNN, but as I said last week, it was TNN originally, Turner News Network. Well, I mean, he had TNT, the Turner Network Television, he had TBS, Turner Broadcasting System, which was a conglomerate of TV shows and movies and sports. TNT and TBS were one thing, but CNN was the first 24-7 cable news service. It revolutionized media, absolutely revolutionized.
[00:45:02] But he was a southerner and he made movies like this. And so, you have, you know, after the shooting, the shooting scene in Maryland, you know, Sinise lets you see the pain. This film doesn't turn that paralysis into a cheap sermon. I mean, all of this was Wallace. I mean, he was a mixed bag himself and so, the movie portrays that. I was in a text message conversation a few weeks ago with a couple of friends
[00:45:32] of mine and, you know, the topic of Wallace came up and it's like, oh, what happened with Wallace after he got shot? You know, why did he, you know, start to sort of... Like all. Well, yeah, basically. And it was actually Rich Amblin who said it. Rich Amblin said, taking a bullet to the spot pretty much evaporates your ability to fight. And, you know, there's some of that. But going back to this movie, you know, and again, Frankenheimer, the director, did take some creative liberties, but it is mentioned before the movie begins, if you watch the movie,
[00:46:02] before it begins and right before the end credit rolls, it says that the movie did take some creative licensing. But for the most part, it stays true to the historical record. Now, some creative liberties in addition to the composite character Archie, there was the scene at the end where Wallace goes back to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which is just feet away
[00:46:31] from the Alabama State Capitol, which I was at most recently last, just a few weeks ago with my son and Eddie the Bombardier Miller. And there's so much history right there in that one square block of Alabama. You have the State Capitol, you have the first White House of the Confederacy, you have the Southern Poverty Law Center, and you have Martin Luther King's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in a one block on each square of the block. You have those four places. It's just,
[00:47:00] it's unreal. But, you know, so Wallace did go back to that church. Now, in the movie, it's portrayed as that he's going there to repent and apologize and seek absolution from the kind-hearted blacks who are so eager to give it. In real life, he did go back there, but he explained that, hey, look, you know, I was for states' rights. I am for states' rights.
[00:47:28] That was the impetus of the argument and the conflict that I had, but, you know, it's done now, and so we might as all well get on the same page, and blacks did vote for him in his subsequent wins later on in life, but besides all of that, though, besides all of that, you do see the schoolhouse door, you see Katzenbach, you see Selma, you see Bremer on screen
[00:47:58] without sending the edges off, and it is a, it was a TV movie, basically a miniseries. It was a two-part movie, two hours each, four hours of runtime almost, but, and you can take issue with the way the movie ends, but for the most part, especially for the first half, maybe the first three quarters, I think if you're watching it with the lens that I was viewing it through, you're going to find some inspiration,
[00:48:27] and again, leaving the politics aside for a second, this is one of those rare movies, Keith, I mean, you know, as you said, God bless Ted Turner, that treats a southern politician as a real man instead of some sort of a lesson, and he did it with Gods and Generals, he did it with the Hunley, especially the Hunley, but also with this movie, George Wallace, you're never going to see movies like this again, or at least not until we win. Well, you know, Ted Turner had to walk a very fine line on this,
[00:48:57] you know, first of all, he operated in Hollywood, and Hollywood is as far left as any community that you're going to find in America. On the other hand, he's a southerner, and he didn't want to basically pile on the negativity that basically, that's what led George Wallace to try to seek absolution towards his end, and anyone that suffered as much as he did would probably have done that, but what we need to understand
[00:49:27] is that George Wallace was right. The white working class, after what they called the Fordist interlude between 1945 and 1972, when busing really hit, the white working class really had good prospects for upward social mobility. Once busing hit and ruined public education, they didn't, and that's not just in the South, but that's all over the nation. The left, and Jewish power and influence in particular,
[00:49:56] wants us to be electricians, HVAC guys, you know, people hanging telephone wires and things like this, but they do not want us anywhere near the levers of power for government and economics, and they, that's exactly what has happened. All these young guys, millennials, that are complaining about their job prospects and life prospects basically have the civil rights movement to blame, because when you messed up public education,
[00:50:26] you messed up their opportunity to rise in society. if you want to watch this movie from a negative perspective, you know, maybe you could make the argument that if you strip Sinise's accent away in the period cars, that it's a movie, the movie's really not about 1963 Alabama, it's a 1997 sermon telling white Southerners that any defense of their own schools and towns and political power was always illegitimate,
[00:50:55] and the only acceptable Wallace was the broken one in the wheelchair. If you want to view it through that lens, you could maybe find a way to do that, but that's not how I saw it. I don't think it's the way Keith saw it. It's not the way that the granddaughter of a lady who was first married to the speech writer of the segregation now, tomorrow, and forever speech saw it,
[00:51:25] and it's not how George Wallace's son saw it. He said that my dad got to see it, you know, incredibly, George Wallace died the night that Gary Sinise accepted the Emmy Award for his portrayal of the governor. I mean, what are the odds of that? And I asked George Wallace's son, George Wallace Jr., about it, and he said his dad did get to see the movie before he died, the one we're talking about this hour, that he thought it was fair.
[00:51:55] And if you want a copy of this movie for our top-tier donors for the month of September, still time to get that in. We'll send it to you. Complimentary. It'll be our gift to you. But one other thing that George Wallace's son said was that I asked him on the program, and we've played this a couple of times in best-of shows and remembrance episodes, do you believe your father was going to be elected president had it not been for the assassination attempt in 1972? And George Wallace Jr. said, we knew something
[00:52:25] was going to happen. Big momentum was on our side. You could feel it. You knew that there was no way he was going to be stopped going to Miami, which is where the convention was that year. He had the delegates. He was the only conservative running for president that year, George Wallace's son told me on this show. And then he goes on to say that he found letters in the family archives that were not intended for the public domain, but that his father had contacted Arthur Bremer,
[00:52:56] the man who shot him and left him paralyzed in pain until the day he died. And George Wallace told Arthur Bremer that he loved him. And he said, and I quote, Arthur, I've forgiven you. If you ask our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ into your heart, you and I will be together in heaven. This is stuff you just don't see in the media. You don't see movies like this and you don't ever hear stories like that except for right here where we try to get to the truth of it all. Well, it gets down to this. George Wallace in this movie
[00:53:25] was portrayed as a flawed person, but basically honest and somewhat heroic. In my opinion, he was an out-and-out hero. He was a person that took an unpopular position, but a correct position and fought for the interests of the white working class. The white working class, folks, is the basic victim class of all of these left-wing things that we've seen like no-fault divorce and civil rights movement, feminism,
[00:53:55] all of that. And as a result, we needed to champion and Wallace was one of the few people that would stand up and be counted to defend the interests of those people. How old were you in 1963 when he was inaugurated? 12 years old. All right, so you were 12. We've got people coming up at the third hour, a hair older than you, who were working on these campaigns. We're going to hear their remembrances and recollections. This is real history here, and we like to do history sometimes here on TPC. We're going to do it
[00:54:25] in the next hour. Three different men who were there and were working for Wallace. If you want a copy of this movie, you can support us, and it'll be our complimentary gift to you. We would appreciate your support for the end of the month. A lot of you have gotten this movie. Let me know what you think. I've heard from a couple of you. I'd love to hear from more of you. Watch the movie. Let me know. Are we seeing it the way you're seeing it or what? We'll be right back.