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The Monument-Destroying Mobs Don’t Hate The Confederacy, They Hate America
The Federalist ^ | June 15, 2020 | John Daniel Davidson

Posted on 06/15/2020 7:24:43 AM PDT by Kaslin

They Hate America The mobs defacing and pulling down monuments across America have no limiting principle because their target is America itself.


Angry mobs are tearing down and defacing monuments across America. They make no distinction between Confederate and Union, abolitionist and pro-slavery, 15th-century figures and 20th. They don’t care when a monument was erected, who built it, or why. They have not come to debate or persuade their fellow citizens to relocate these statues to museums or private property. They believe the debate is over and that they have won.

The Confederacy Isn’t the Target

Their target is not the Confederacy. It is the United States. They mean to destroy symbols of American history writ large, because to them all of American history is racist and genocidal. Their goal is not to cleanse a nation they love of monuments to Confederate traitors who tried to secede, but to cleanse their consciences of ever having loved such an evil and irredeemably racist country in the first place.

That is why you see mobs defacing statues of abolitionists like Matthias Baldwin and Union war heroes like Adm. David Farragut and Gen. George Thomas. That is why the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution in Philadelphia was vandalized this past weekend with the words “committed genocide.” That is why statues of Christopher Columbus were torn down or beheaded in three cities last week. That is why officials in Dallas recently removed a Texas Ranger statue from Love Field Airport. That is why a mob of college students toppled two statues of American pioneers on the University of Oregon campus. That is why Black Lives Matter protesters in San Antonio, Texas, are threatening to march on the Alamo.

To suppose this has anything to do with the Confederacy or the Civil War is to misunderstand completely the nature of what is happening right now in America. The people who are pulling down monuments, defacing statues, and demanding U.S. military bases be renamed do not have a limiting principle. They don’t distinguish between those who fought for freedom against the British Empire and those who fought for union against the slave states of the South. To them, the Union itself was a crime against humanity long before the South seceded. What kind of moral monster would ever fight to preserve it?

This is the 1619 Project come to life. If the American Revolution was fought to protect and preserve slavery then the entire history of American colonization and westward expansion is a litany of crimes that no one should celebrate. The Founding Fathers are no less guilty than Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis — not just because they owned slaves but because they founded the United States, a nation conceived not in liberty but in white supremacy.

In this reading of history, the crimes of Gen. George Washington are worse than the crimes of Gen. Lee. In religious terms — and make no mistake, this is a religious movement of the radical left — the founders are guilty of original sin, which we have all inherited and which only public penance and indulgences can erase.

There Is No Limiting Principle

You will nevertheless hear, and likely have already heard, arguments for a limiting principle, a way to justify pulling down Confederate monuments while allowing monuments to Christopher Columbus or Thomas Jefferson to stand.

The comedian Andrew Schulz tries to make this argument in a recent YouTube video. Confederates were traitors and slavers, he says. Their monuments were built to glorify a treasonous and failed effort to secede from the Union. The Founding Fathers might have had slaves and Columbus might have been a slaver, but we didn’t build monuments to honor them for these things. Their monuments were built to celebrate the good things they did, not the bad things. Confederates, like Nazis, only did bad things, so their monuments must come down.

But to accept this argument, you must first concede that Columbus and the founders did something good, that the achievements for which their monuments stand are worthy in the first place. You must accept, in other words, that the United States itself is deserving of praise and reverence, that there is something to celebrate and honor in our national heritage, that despite its faults and failures America has achieved a degree of liberty and prosperity unparalleled in human history.

This is precisely what the mob rejects. Schulz pokes fun at the people going after Columbus and the founders, calling them “crazy.” But they are not crazy according to their logic. They do not love America because America is wicked. There is almost nothing worth celebrating in our nation’s history, and almost nothing in our heritage worth honoring.

There’s a reason, for example, the anarchists and Antifa rioters in Seattle’s “autonomous zone” set up barricades and hung a sign saying, “Now Leaving The United States.”

These people don’t want to improve America. Like the monuments they despise, they want to tear it down.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: 1619project; blmmovement; confedmonuments; confedstatues; historicalmonuments; outragemobs; wokemobs
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1 posted on 06/15/2020 7:24:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

Spot-on


2 posted on 06/15/2020 7:26:13 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog (Patrick Henry would have been an anti-vaxxer)
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To: Kaslin

When they finish what Nikki Haley started with the Confederate stuff, they will go after the founders.

They want to destroy America and all she stands for.


3 posted on 06/15/2020 7:27:27 AM PDT by Lurkinanloomin (Natural Born Citizens Are Born Here of Citizen Parents|Know Islam, No Peace-No Islam, Know Peace)
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To: Kaslin

https://babylonbee.com/news/protesters-pull-down-joe-biden-after-mistaking-him-for-old-racist-statue


4 posted on 06/15/2020 7:33:15 AM PDT by BipolarBob (Money can't buy happiness, BUT it can buy guns and ammo which is pretty much the same thing.)
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To: Lurkinanloomin

You said it.


5 posted on 06/15/2020 7:33:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: BipolarBob

I luv it, Perfect, that’s a good one


6 posted on 06/15/2020 7:36:10 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

To be replaced with monuments of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Mao, Guevara, Castro...


7 posted on 06/15/2020 7:37:43 AM PDT by Starcitizen (Communist China needs to be treated like the pariah country it is. Send it back to 1971)
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To: Kaslin

Those statues were put up because after the south lost they encouraged unity and being one country.


8 posted on 06/15/2020 7:42:12 AM PDT by mosesdapoet (mosesdapoet aka L.J.Keslin posting here for the record hoping somebody might read and pass around)
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To: Kaslin

Never really has been about the Confederacy. They hate what they perceive to be traditional America. More specifically they hate the West and whites.


9 posted on 06/15/2020 7:43:09 AM PDT by Altura Ct.
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To: Kaslin

They can’t even spell confederacy.


10 posted on 06/15/2020 7:43:09 AM PDT by SpaceBar
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To: Kaslin

Duh!


11 posted on 06/15/2020 7:45:02 AM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: Lurkinanloomin
They want to destroy America and all she stands for.

Sad to say but, many blacks don't want equality; they want revenge.

12 posted on 06/15/2020 7:45:21 AM PDT by libertylover (Socialism will always look good to those who think they can get something for nothing.)
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To: mosesdapoet

If you suggested replacing them with Union Generals, they would call that racist, too.


13 posted on 06/15/2020 7:45:29 AM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: Kaslin

Mind you, the Confederate statues came down first because they were such easy targets. Weren’t many of those statues put up back in the 1950’s and 1960’s as reaction to the Civil Rights movement of the time?


14 posted on 06/15/2020 7:48:10 AM PDT by RayChuang88 (FairTax: America's Economic Cure)
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To: Lurkinanloomin

“When they finish what Nikki Haley started with the Confederate stuff, they will go after the founders.”

I hate Nikki for her cowardice in letting South Carolina ban the confederate battle flag.


15 posted on 06/15/2020 7:48:34 AM PDT by CodeToad (Arm Up! They Are!)
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To: Kaslin

The Confederacy was run by Democrats. The maintenance of slavery as an institution in the 1800’s has disturbing parallels in the contemporary Urban Democrat Plantations which are FAR more profitable to the Democrat machine than slavery itself ever was.

The presence of all those statues is an inconvenient reminder of those facts-and in fact the Democrat Party sees those statues as an impediment to the expansion and development of newer and larger Urban Democrat Plantations.


16 posted on 06/15/2020 7:49:10 AM PDT by mo ("If you understand, no explanation is needed; if you don't understand, no explanation is possible")
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To: RayChuang88

Ours in Richmond were erected in the late 1800’s.


17 posted on 06/15/2020 7:50:37 AM PDT by Lurkinanloomin (Natural Born Citizens Are Born Here of Citizen Parents|Know Islam, No Peace-No Islam, Know Peace)
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To: Kaslin

It’s time to split this country up; to think the present 50-state entity is ever going to stand as one on any issue is laughable. We are never, ever going to coexist with these people.


18 posted on 06/15/2020 7:50:41 AM PDT by ScottinVA (Prayers up for Rush Limbaugh...)
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To: Kaslin

They hate America. They hate Capitalism. They hate Individualism. They hate White People.


19 posted on 06/15/2020 7:52:43 AM PDT by windsorknot
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To: libertylover

This has far less to do with black citizen than with communists who have been trained and conditioned right under our noses in our universities and public schools.

The author is right....they hate this nation and all it stands for. Anything that disagrees with communism equals fascism....and they are the anti-fascists.

They feel totally justified in anything they do to achieve their goals and if you disagree, then you are a fascist as well.

Most of these people are white, young adults, not blacks.

The George Floyd protests did not get violent until ANTIFA & BLM (made up mostly of white communists) got out on the streets.


20 posted on 06/15/2020 7:54:41 AM PDT by Erik Latranyi (The Democratic Party is communism)
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