Earlier this month, James Alex Fields, a 20-year-old man living in Ohio, drove his car into a crowd of people at a protest-turned-riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulting in one death and several injuries. In the wake of the violence, the City Council recently voted to temporarily cover their Confederate statues in a black cloth. They claimed that doing so would be a way for the city to mourn.

According to reports, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously earlier this week to cover the city’s statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in black fabric. This was done to mourn the death of Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old Virginia woman who was killed after Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into a group of Charlottesville counter-protesters during a “Unite the Right” event to protest over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.

The City Council’s vote came after angry protesters stormed into one of their meetings and demanded answers for the city’s handling of the “Unite the Right” rally. In order to restore order, police officers had to make three arrests. Specifically, they arrested Donna Gasapo Gray, 43, for “disorderly conduct,” and Mark Heisey, 30, and Sara Michel Tansey, 29, for “obstruction of justice.”

Following the arrests, the council agreed to continue their meeting, but instead of continuing along with their agenda, they turned it into a town-hall-style meeting that ended at around 1 AM. When asked why the city has not yet taken down the Confederate statues, Councilor Wes Bellamy replied, “we’ve been told that if we take them down tonight, we’re going to be personally sued. We will personally be held liable and charged with a class-six felony.”

Councilor Kristin Szakos, added, “you can’t just show up to City Council meetings. You have to go to the state legislature. Virginia has laws that restrict what we can do.”

Unfortunately, Charlottesville isn’t the only city currently campaigning to eradicate all things “offensive.” Earlier this year, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists in Hollywood, Florida charged into City Hall, disrupted a commission meeting, and demanded that City officials rename several streets named after Confederates, resulting in five arrests.

Several lawmakers in Dallas, Texas, are also pushing to rename Confederate streets and tear down Confederate monuments. One of those lawmakers is Dwaine Caraway (D), a former Dallas mayor and current City Council member. Just recently, he vowed to have the city’s Civil War monument, which featured statues of Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America, and Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Albert Sidney Johnston, removed by the end of the year.

In addition to Caraway, Democratic lawmakers in Congress, Reps. Dwight Evans (D-PA) and Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), have also come out in support of tearing down Confederate monuments. Earlier this week, they introduced the “No Federal Funding for Confederate Symbols Act.”

According to the legislation, “no federal funds may be used for the creation, maintenance, or display, as applicable, of any Confederate symbol on federal public land, including any highway, park, subway, federal building, military installation, street, or other federal property.” This means that, if passed, all Confederate monuments on federal land would have to be removed.

Some liberals are even going after statues of our Founding Fathers because they were slave owners. For example, during an interview earlier this week with Charlie Rose, Reverend Al Sharpton called on Congress to defund the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. “The public should not be paying to uphold somebody who [owned or supported slavery]. You have private museums. You have other things that you may want to do,” he reasoned.

In addition to Sharpton, Bishop James Dukes, the pastor of Liberation Christian Center, called on Rahm Emanuel, the Mayor of Chicago, Illinois, earlier this week to tear down a statue of George Washington in Washington Park. “In an African-American community, it’s a slap in the face and it’s a disgrace for them to honor someone who was a slave owner,” he explained, noting, “I think we should be able to identify and decide who we declare heroes in our communities because we have to tell the stories to our children of who these persons are.”

The authoritarian left must not be allowed to tear things down simply because they’re “offensive.” Conservatives need to work together to stop this from happening. This means doing things like protesting in the street and calling on lawmakers to pass laws protecting controversial monuments.