The radical left is wantonly tearing down statues, oblivious as to whether or not the historical figures they portray had anything to do with slavery or racism.
Indeed, much is quite to the contrary:
In Boston, rioters tore into the 54th Regiment Memorial which honors an all-Black unit fighting against slavery. In San Francisco they celebrated Juneteenth by ripping down U.S. Grant’s statue. All he did was make Juneteenth possible by defeating the slave-holding South in the Civil War. Later, as our nation's 18th president, he oversaw the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment giving Blacks the right to vote.
In Portland, thugs tore down George Washington’s statue.
Then, for good measure they burned an American flag atop his broken remains.
There are many more examples, including defacing the Lincoln Memorial in our nation’s Capital. The Great Emancipator deserves better than a Krylon screed.
Clearly our universities have done a great job filling the empty heads of these vacuous "social justice warriors" with a radically corrosive, inaccurate, hate-filled diatribe of American history.
It’s no surprise that this wave of criminal destruction and vandalism are occurring in Democrat-run cities. Municipalities where liberal mayors sit back and watch it go down.
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan calls the occupation of part of her city a "Summer of Love." Nothing to see here; those are peaceful murders inside of CHOP.
The left has unleashed something that it cannot now control. At best they’re afraid to intervene. At worst, they’re supportive of the destruction and the defund the police movements behind it. No doubt a healthy dose of both.
And make no mistake; this one-sided mayhem comes from the left.
The thugs running the CHOP shop in Seattle and the anarchists ripping down statues aren’t exactly wearing MAGA hats.
Beyond the near-term insanity, the biggest problem with all of the media/Democratic Party virtue-signaling and their re-imaging the rioters as righteous protesters is that they are killing the opportunity for the valid conversation that America could be having.
Because when it comes to many Confederate monuments, a very good case can be made that indeed they would be better off being removed to museums. It is a fact that many of these statues were erected decades after the end of the war, when Jim Crow was in full swing.
In other words, much like the Ku Klux Klan, they were designed to intimidate black Americans.
Here’s a little sidebar you can file under "inconvenient facts":
The Confederate statues in question, Robert E. Lee, et al, come courtesy of the Democratic Party. After losing their Civil War fight to preserve slavery and stridently opposing the Thirteenth/Fourteenth/Fifteenth Amendments, Democrats implemented Jim Crow and created the Ku Klux Klan. If it’s evidence of residual institutional racism in America that you seek, there it sits.
I never looked askance at Confederate statues. But Black Americans come from a different reality. One that we need to hear. We all should be willing to have a conversation about the motivations and validity behind those statues, certain street names, etc.
By contrast, monuments to the Confederate Civil War dead are of legitimate value, are they not? They exist to honor the dead, not to intimidate the living. Leave them alone.
That kind of rational conversation could go a long way to "bind up the nation’s wounds," to quote from Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural address of March 4, 1865, enabling us to move forward as united Americans.
Instead, there is no conversation.
There’s only a leftist mob that is being allowed to destroy, inflaming the situation and pushing opposing sides further apart. Which is their goal. And appeasement by virtue-signaling liberal politicians is dangerously misguided. That only empowers the mob. It’s not a Summer of Love in Seattle, Mayor Durkan. Thanks to you and your fellow liberal politicians, it’s a Summer of Rage.
Here’s a path forward:
Priority one is the restoration of order. Instead of attacking and defunding the police, empower them. Allow them to do their job, which includes arresting and prosecuting rioters. Call in the National Guard if necessary, but ending this mayhem is urgent and non-negotiable. Because they’re not going to stop until we stop them. And we’d better do so soon, because the visual of a shattered and graffitied Washington Monument lying on the National Mall is getting a little too close for comfort.
Then let’s have a conversation about the who and why of certain statues, school names, etc. And if we really want to make progress, let’s talk police reform, school choice, enterprise zones, the restoration of the nuclear family in the African American community, and the fact that some 95% of Blacks are murdered by other Blacks. While much of this should happen at the state level, that doesn’t preclude a larger national dialogue; because these are America’s problems to fix. And fix them we can. Peacefully.
Patrick Murray (colonel, U.S. Army, retired) was part of a military-diplomatic exchange program between the Pentagon and Department of State, where he served in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs in Washington, D.C. In 2005, Murray became the U.S. representative to the Military Staff Committee at the United Nations in New York under Ambassador John Bolton. After retiring from the Army in 2009, Patrick became the Republican nominee for U.S. Congress in Northern Virginia. He is the author of "Government is the Problem." Read Patrck Murray's — More Here.