OPINION:
The events of the last few weeks provide more than enough proof that the orgy of destruction we’re witnessing in various Democratic cities has nothing to do with George Floyd, let alone black lives mattering.
On Monday, we once again witnessed mostly white liberals doing damage to everyone’s lives by hijacking the important issue of racial reconciliation and then, in the name of people of color, proceeding to try to destroy American history through vandalism, violence and anarchy. We once again got a front-row seat to a mob gathering in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Park where they proceeded to deface (again) St. John’s Episcopal Church and vandalize and attempt to tear down the statue of President Andrew Jackson.
They failed, and the aftermath video has gone viral featuring collections of woke white women screaming at the police, and other groups of mostly white people consoling each other after having been thwarted in their crimes by the U.S. Park Police and D.C. police. The most revealing of these videos is one of a shirtless white man hurling insults at a black man trying to do his job as a police officer, including smears involving the officer’s mother. Because, we are to assume, he really cares about black lives.
In reality, this has nothing to do with black lives and everything to do with liberal Marxist anarchists having hijacked, as they always do, an important social issue with which they will undermine the very communities and people they claim to represent.
One of the founders of Black Lives Matter has admitted that they are “trained Marxists” whose goal is, among other things, to “remove” President Donald Trump. And no, they don’t mean through an election.
The sentiment and principle that black lives matter is being conflated with this Marxist group that uses the phrase, and that’s exactly what they intend. But what they’re doing in the name of racial justice and progress is doing nothing more than driving Americans apart, and that’s also exactly what they intend.
The rampage of violence and destruction of public property and American history is by design. If your goal is to tear down a society, you must first erase its identity, and to do that you wipe out its legacy and history. After all, how do you know how far you’ve come, or even who you are, if you’re not allowed to look back and know your history?
This orgy of Marxists and anarchists in the form of the BLM political group and Antifa, the designated terrorist group, has manifested with attacks on statues and memorials representing Gandhi, Lincoln, the Unknown Soldier of the Revolutionary War, President George Washington, Francis Scott Key, Christopher Columbus, a Catholic saint, abolitionists, western pioneers and even Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the man who won the Civil War setting blacks free from the scourge of slavery. In Philadelphia, a statue of Benjamin Franklin was vandalized.
And now New York City has announced that the Teddy Roosevelt statue in front of the Natural History Museum will come down because it “glorifies colonialism.” But why stop with the statue? The entire Natural History Museum is arguably based on colonialism. And then there’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art, within which there is something offensive or hurtful for everyone.
And what about the name “New York” itself? The city is the namesake of James, the Duke of York, and brother of King Charles II. He was also head of the Royal African Company and a slave trader. To follow this madness to its natural end, as Marxists and anarchists intend, all of New York and America would need to be burned down, pulled down and erased from memory.
Most Americans, thankfully, reject this notion but are also unaware that this is the trajectory, no matter how absurd it sounds.
President Trump was mocked in 2017 when he warned about the ultimate end of this social “cleansing.” He asked at the time, “So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. … I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” Fox News reported.
If the standard is set that we only see our past as perpetual evil to be destroyed, then this will not end until there is nothing left. The Islamic State terror group and the Taliban are the most recent examples of what happens when extremists dictate how history is handled.
At The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson suggested, “What was erected to give honor in an earlier generation can simply remind us today of who we are and how far we’ve come. There’s no need to pass by a statue of [Robert E.] Lee or Jefferson Davis with downcast eyes or a clenched fist. Their cause has been defeated utterly, and their monuments have become — or could become, if we wanted it — testaments to our national greatness. They could be powerful reminders that we overcame not just the Civil War but the failure of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era that followed.”
An important perspective comes from a black family whose own history is threatened with the frenzy to erase the past. When Quaker Oats announced they would rebrand their famous “Aunt Jemima” products, the family of Lillian Richard, who became the brand’s representative in 1925, spoke out:
“‘We want the world to know that our cousin Lillian was one of the Aunt Jemimas and she made an honest living. We would ask that you reconsider just wiping all that away,” [family representative Vera] Harris said …,” Fox News reported. “‘I wish we would take a breath and not just get rid of everything, because good or bad, it is our history. Removing that wipes away a part of me — a part of each of us.”
Indeed.
• Tammy Bruce, president of Independent Women’s Voice, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk-show host.
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