In a wild press conference on Tuesday, President Donald Trump doubled-down on his decision to criticize “both sides” of the violent Charlottesville, Virginia, protests and suggested some of the protesters attempting to save the city’s statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee were not racist, but simply concerned about liberals’ attempt to whitewash history.

“George Washington was a slave owner,” Trump said during the press conference. “So, will George Washington lose his status? Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson, what do you think of Thomas Jefferson, do you like him? … Are we going to take down the statues, because he was a major slave owner?”

Trump’s comments caused significant backlash from Democrats and even some prominent Republicans. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter, “Mr. President, you can’t allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame. They support idea which cost nation & world so much pain.”

Many liberals on cable news networks and social media called for Trump to be impeached because of his “racism.”

While one could certainly question whether there were any good-hearted, history-loving protesters in the Charlottesville mob, as Trump suggested, the president’s argument about the left’s reaction to “racist” statues of Confederate leaders is important and worthy of further discussion.

Over the past several years, liberals have worked tirelessly to rid America’s institutions from any association with those deemed to have a racist past. They’ve removed statues, forced academic institutions to change the names of buildings, and they’ve even broken countless laws as part of their righteous crusade to rid the world of any honor that might be given to people who have in the past sinned — and make no mistake about it, slavery and racism are terrible evils.

However, the left, and Democrats in particular, should think very carefully before continuing down this road, lest they find themselves also thrown into the dustbin of history as “racists.” Here are just some of the many inconvenient facts about the left’s history of racism and bigotry.

During the height of the mid-20th-century civil rights movement, some of the most adamant proponents of segregation were Democrats. In 1956, 99 congressional Democrats (and only two Republicans) signed the “Southern Manifesto,” which called the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) “an unwarranted exercise of power by the Court” that is “creating chaos” and “destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races.”

Democratic Party President Woodrow Wilson, who also served as president at Princeton and was a proud progressive, wrote in his The History of American People, “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation — until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”

And let’s not forget about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a noted racist and advocate of eugenics. Sanger wrote in Woman and the New Race, “Birth control itself … is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”

Hillary Clinton once said of Sanger (after being awarded the Margaret Sanger Award by Planned Parenthood in 2009), “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision … And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.”

Using the same logic the left has embraced in its attempt to rid the world of Confederate statues, it should also demand the closure of the Democratic Party, which itself has been used as a tool by racists and other moral monsters. All honors bestowed upon multiple past leaders of the Democratic Party should also be removed from the public, including those given to Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt — who, it should be remembered, sent thousands of Japanese-Americans to concentration camps simply for being of Japanese heritage.

Planned Parenthood should also be closed, as it was founded and supported by multiple bigots who believed it could be used to control the population of “undesirables,” including many minority groups.

Similarly, every mosque in America should be torn down because Muhammed owned slaves. Lutheran churches should be forced to close their doors forever, because Martin Luther said some terrible things about Jews. In fact, all Christian churches should be shuttered, since Abraham, the leader from which Christians are said to derive their spiritual lineage, owned slaves. All honors given to numerous Native American tribes should also be purged, because many of them practiced slavery. Some even engaged in infanticide!

Of course, this sort of thinking is idiotic and would logically result in the whole of Western Civilization being erased from history, which, it seems, is the ultimate goal for some on the left.

Many spectacular, world-changing people have done horrifically immoral things, but that doesn’t mean they should be erased from history. Instead, we should learn from their mistakes, just as we learn from their achievements. That’s how human society advances, not by cowering in “safe spaces” and pretending that we modern people are superior in every way to the billions who have come before us. What a sad and arrogant view of the world.