The Left’s War on Statues is Crumbling Beneath Their Feet

Joseph A. WulfsohnAug 18th, 2017, 11:50 am
 

The events that took place in Charlottesville, VA last weekend has fueled numerous debates, from President Trump‘s response, his employment of individuals within the White House staff, to the current state race relations in America. But the one debate has really has really gone off the rails is the debate over statues.

The Confederate statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee was at the center of the violence in Charlottesville. The removal of the statue was why thousands of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and KKK members rallied together to protest the removal and why the Antifa came to counter them. To the former, it represents Southern pride and heritage. For the latter, it represents racism and slavery.

It’s worth noting that this debate began in the form of flags. In the wake of the 2015 Charleston massacre where Dylann Roof killed nine black churchgoers during a bible study, it was discovered he idolized the Confederate flag. That reignited a long-standing national debate that led to the flag’s removal from the South Carolina’s Statehouse and to TV Land pulling reruns of The Dukes of Hazard off the air.

I personally don’t care whether Confederate statues stay or go. On one hand, it’s part of American history and we should embrace all the good and bad from our country’s past instead of running from it. On the other hand, if the vast majority of African-Americans are truly hurt and disgusted by the presence of such statues, their feelings should be respected.

That being said, the anti-statue crowd is getting carried away.

On Monday, President Trump was mocked for suggesting at his now-infamous press conference that the outrage towards Gen. Lee’s statue will target Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson next because they were slaveowners.

Well it appears Trump was partially vindicated because on Thursday, CNN’s Angela Rye called for Washington and Jefferson’s statues to be taken down. What’s next? Will she demand Washington to be taken off the quarter?

It gets worse.

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. was vandalized with expletive-filled graffiti and a statue of Abraham Lincoln was literally burned in Chicago. They are now going after the president who ended slavery!

It gets even worse.

Vice tweeted the following:

Yes, you read correctly. Vice suggested blowing up Mount Rushmore.

Of course out of total embarrassment, Vice deleted the tweet and replaced it with the following:

But don’t worry, the author of the piece Wilbert L. Cooper still urged to blow up Mount Rushmore.

He writes the following:

“With the president of the United States basically justifying neo-Nazism, it seems unthinkable that we will ever see a day when there is a serious push to blow up Rushmore and other monuments like it. But if that moment ever arrives, I suspect I’d be onboard. Demystifying the historical figures of the past, pulling them off the great mountain top back down to Earth where they shat, farted, spit, pissed, f**ked, raped, murdered, died, and rotted seems like important business for this country. As long as we allow those men to be cults of personality who exist beyond reproach, we’re never going to be able to see them for all of their good and all of their evil.”

Despite the fact that I disagree with virtually everything Cooper said in his piece, I’ll give him credit for coming to the conclusion basically saying that no one deserves a statue, even President Obama who he loves but acknowledges that he has also “committed acts [he] absolutely abhor.”

We can’t forget the fact he suggested blowing up Mount Rushmore, however, which clearly embarrassed his employer since they had delete the tweet and include an editor’s note that says “We do not condone violence in any shape or form, and the use of “blow up” in the original headline as a rhetorical device was misguided and insensitive.”

Overreaction has become the left’s kryptonite. Whenever they overreact to something, it always backfires. They certainly overreacted to Trump during the campaign and now look who sits in the White House. They’ve allowed their knee-jerk reactions determine their actions instead of using logic and reason.

Even The Daily Beast‘s editor-in-chief John Avlon was trying to warn Rye during that CNN segment that her overreaction was playing into “the slippery slope argument” Trump presented about Washington and Jefferson, but she insisted she wasn’t even though she absolutely did.

The fringes on both sides of the aisle are so demented that they have this gift of turning anyone and anything that is good and turn it evil or bad. Earlier this month, a Breitbart writer called the Statue of Liberty an “attack” when it was featured on a Vogue Magazine cover (this was not long after WH advisor Stephen Miller had his spat with CNN’s Jim Acosta over the statue’s poem even though the cover photo was taken over two months beforehand.). And last year, lefties at the University of Oregon debated whether or not to remove a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he said this:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream…”

King’s on-campus critics accused him of not being “inclusive enough” to the LGBT community. Only the left can turn a civil rights icon into a homophobe.

Cooper hints at the bigger picture in that nobody’s perfect. Everyone has their flaws, even their heroes. So when people are calling for Washington or Jefferson’s monuments to be removed, they’re trying to rewrite history by making the fact that they owned slaves the only fact to care about instead of cherishing the good they’ve done like, you know, founding the United States of America.

Look, I get it. There is plenty for liberals to be legitimately upset about with this presidency, but when they get carried away with such nonsense, they make themselves look more out of touch with average Americans than Trump. They need to control their emotions and not let them get in the way of making a reasonable argument. Because if they keep doing what they’re doing, they’re simply handing Trump a second term. And the people who say “There’s no way Trump will win a second term” are likely the same people who said “There’s no way Trump will win the election” a year ago.

You know how the saying goes; those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And as of today, the left is flunking history class.

 

 

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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