Around 7:10pm a woman climbed the statue using a ladder and attached a rope around the statue. Moments later, The crowd pulled on the rope and the statue fell. In 1924, the Confederate statue was dedicated to Durham. (YouTube Screenshot/NBC4 WCMH-TV Columbus)

In the wake of the Charlottesville, Virginia, tragedy, which began in part as a rally to protect a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, the left has seized the crisis to smear President Donald Trump.

The president is being unfairly accused of sympathizing with white supremacists. His supporters are being lumped in with neo-Nazis, and left-wing thugs recently shut down a “free-speech” rally in Boston.

Using the violence in Charlottesville as an excuse, leftists are also desecrating and tearing down Confederate monuments. Gutless Democratic and Republican politicians have been intimidated into removing dozens of Confederate monuments and statues across the country.

The Baltimore City Council and mayor had four Confederate monuments removed overnight under the cover of darkness. Cowards!

Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down and destroyed a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the Durham County Courthouse in Durham, North Carolina, which had stood since 1924.

Publicity hound and opportunist Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., announced that he plans on introducing a bill to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol building.

Not to be outdone, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called for the removal of the statues, markers and other monuments that celebrate Civil War-era figures from public grounds, describing them as “reprehensible.”

Nancy Pelosi walks past the statue of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders at the Capitol daily, yet she has never called for their removal. Why now? Because she wants to use it as wedge issue to anger blacks and cause them to turn out to vote for Democrats in 2018.

President Trump rightfully condemned these actions. He tweeted:

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. … You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!”

Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You..... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

...can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

Sure enough, in a PBS interview with Charlie Rose, race hustler Al Sharpton called for the federal government to cease maintaining the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Sharpton said, because Jefferson owned slaves, his monument shouldn’t be cared for with taxpayer funds. The only problem is that Sharpton doesn’t pay his taxes; he owes millions to the IRS. Shut up and pay your taxes, Al!

The left is overreaching. According to an NPR/PBS/Marist Poll, 62 percent of Americans said statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy should remain; 27 percent said they should be removed and 11 percent were unsure.

I’m heartbroken to see these historical monuments being destroyed and taken down. I grew up on a plantation in Alabama. My grandfather ran the plantation, and my family worked and lived there. I always say that I’m not African-American – I’m 100 percent American! These monuments are a reminder of how far we have come as a nation. They are a reminder that we have reconciled with the past. Erasing history is a slippery slope, and we cannot allow the left to continue doing this.

If you remove every Confederate monument in the land, it won’t help black Americans one iota because blacks are not suffering due to “racism”; they are suffering because of the lack of moral character and the breakdown of the black family.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley made an awful mistake when she agreed to remove the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds in 2015. The flag wasn’t harming anyone. Blacks in the South have grown up with these images, and they’re part of our history. We don’t think twice about them. But white politicians are fearful of being labeled “racist,” so they cave in to crazy leftist demands.

Democrats are taking down Confederate monuments because they want to erase and run away from their party’s history.

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was a Democrat. As Joseph Farah points out in his column (“Why Democrats want you to forget about the Confederacy“), white Democrats ran the South during the Civil War, through the Jim Crow days of segregation and right up until the early 1960s. Not a single Democrat in that era ever suggested destroying statues of Confederate heroes, taking down Confederate flags or toppling monuments memorializing the Confederacy!

This battle will not be won with anger. In my recent column, “Charlottesville, I tried to warn you,” I appealed to white Americans to drop their anger so they can speak up and fight back against the left in the right way. But young whites who have not had good parents – especially good fathers – are starting to fight back with anger, and now the media and the government are focused on them. It’s a trap.

President Trump was right – the hate is on both sides. Decent Americans should fight back against the attack on our history and on our freedoms, but don’t fight back with anger or it will come back on you. The government creates and encourages many of these problems, but when you get mad and take the wrong action, they pass laws to take away your freedoms.

So speak up and fight back without hate, and you will win!

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson is the most courageous, outspoken critic of the so-called “social justice” movements in America today. Raised without his father on a plantation near Tuskegee, Alabama during the Jim Crow era, Peterson has lived a part of America’s history few have experienced. After a spiritual transformation, Peterson founded BOND, a nationally recognized nonprofit organization dedicated to “Rebuilding the Family by Rebuilding the Man.”