Last week, yet another mob of nearly all-white leftist protesters terrorized their town — in this case, Madison, Wisconsin. They beat up a 60-year-old Democratic state senator and beheaded the statue of a fervent abolitionist who died fighting for the Union in the Civil War.
All we can say is, thank you. This incident helps illustrate what the current iconoclast movement is really all about.
As the professional Left continues to commit, and its institutional apologists to excuse, these convulsions of nationwide violence and vandalism, it must be noted that such historically ignorant misfires keep occurring again and again — too often to be a coincidence.
In Boston, it was emancipator Abraham Lincoln’s statue that has been repeatedly vandalized. In Philadelphia, it was abolitionist Matthias Baldwin. In San Francisco, it was President Ulysses Grant, who put down the Confederacy’s rebellion. In Washington, D.C., George Washington’s statue was pulled down on the campus of George Washington University.
In another part of Washington, yet another mostly white mob of professional protesters showed up in Lincoln Park with the intention of tearing down a memorial to emancipation that Frederick Douglass himself had dedicated in a magnificent speech, which was mostly financed by freed slaves. A black woman who spoke up to object — “Are you trying to divide us or bring us together? Because it seems like you are abusing this situation” — was jeered until she left.
To be perfectly clear, this fit of iconoclasm is not in any way about cautiously discriminating which figures will be honored by local communities. It is not about removing ugly memories created by memorials to the Confederacy. Rather, it is about vandalizing and erasing this nation’s history (and other nations’ histories as well — it takes a special kind of stupid to deface Charles de Gaulle’s likeness, calling him a “slaver”).
Southern secession was a thoroughly ignoble cause — a rebellion against the U.S. government undertaken to protect slavery and expand it westward. Yet even the memorials to that unfortunate chapter of history, if they are to be removed, should be taken down through local, democratic processes that respect the rule of law.
And of course, such community action has nothing to do with the violent leftist mobs out there today indiscriminately pulling down statues of Unionists, women’s suffragists, anti-slavery campaigners, 20th-century anti-Nazi leaders, Jesus and Catholic saints — whoever else happens to be on hand.
What we are seeing now is the product of historical ignorance bred by two generations of Marxist-infiltrated educational institutions. The weaker-minded among those attending college in the last two decades have been indoctrinated — brainwashed with the idea that the American founding itself is evil, based entirely on slavery and racism, and that therefore America itself is irredeemable. Thus, even people who unambiguously worked to make America a better place must have their images defaced in acts of mob violence — and the same must obviously be true of those whose legacy was mixed or worse.
This is how the mob that once came for Gen. Robert E. Lee started coming instead for Washington, then for Lincoln. Oddly enough, President Trump predicted this in 2017. But let us lay down another marker now — it won’t be long until they’re tearing down likenesses of Barack Obama. Just give the nation a few years to build them.
In the mob’s simple, ignorant logic, this is justified in the name of their revolution because they are “anti-racist” or “anti-fascist” or something. The reasoning, if it can be called that, is that people in the old days tended to have attitudes that don’t square with the dogma of today’s political correctness. Therefore, anyone old enough to have had a statue dedicated to him should have it torn down.
And all dissenters, obviously all conservatives who dare voice an opinion but also liberals who defy dogma by trying to make the irredeemable America a better place, deserve a beating for good measure. So do old people in general, perhaps. Oh, if they happen to be black, they probably need a good beating to show them what sort of opinions and behaviors are acceptable for black people. (Oh, yes — that happened in Madison, last week too. Is there anything these woke whites won’t do in the name of anti-racism?)
Do you not like where all this is going? We don’t either. It’s time for the nation’s liberal pundits to stop defending the savage and violent ignorance of the mobs and start demanding an end to it. It is this sort of violent and anti-American ideology, not statutes of Thomas Jefferson or Washington, that’s tearing this nation apart today.
The professional Left has taken full advantage of the coronavirus to co-opt the rightfully popular cause of ending police brutality. With so much of the population forced into idleness by the disease, it is a lot easier to bring together large numbers of rioters to destroy businesses, beat up lawmakers, and pull down statues.
State and local politicians must join Trump, swallowing their pride for a moment if need be, in demanding restoration of law and order. It is time for America to prove its goodness and its commitment to the rule of law by throwing the book at those inciting violence and meting out lengthy prison sentences that make an example of the rebellious, secessionist left-wing imitators of the original Confederacy.
