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The monuments to past heroes of the American experiment have been dragged off their pedestals

The monuments to past heroes of the American experiment, in a mob-tempest of retrospective indignation, have been dragged by night off their pedestals. Worst of all, this fit of the new inquisitionism has hit the actual graveyards themselves, with the new Sanhedrin tearing off the plaques honouring long-dead Southern soldiers. Who was it spoke of those “who hunger and thirst after righteousness?” Something about “they shall have their fill.”

All of this turns on the fanatically overblown response to Donald Trump, for which he does bear large responsibility, but by no means—let me underline—anything like all.

And the final illustration I offer today comes from a paragon of news reliability and judgment, the CNN’s great Wolf Blizter. On Thursday, as the ISIS slaughter in Barcelona was unfolding, with 13 dead and more than a hundred injured, Blitzer turned to the really important question: Was this attack a “copycat” attack following the model of last week’s clash between neo-Nazis and antifa protestors, and car killing, in Charlottesville?

Never mind that every schoolboy knows that ISIS has made major European cities their preferred killing ground in recent years, with Berlin, London, Nice, Paris and now Barcelona just the most recent examples. Blitzer is so saturated with anti-Trump politics he has forgotten how to think, and sees a Trump plot in an ISIS storyline.

Poor Lincoln. After the greatest upheaval in American history, and half a million dead in a civil war, he found the depth of feeling and understanding to write these words: “With malice towards none, with charity towards all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.”

Present day U.S. politics is an insult to these words and their spirit. As for “charity towards all” and striving “to see the right,” how could such sentiments even exist when grave-digging is now a form of political action, and a great nation teeters towards a purge of its own past.

America is in a very delirium of unhinged total politics. It is the sheerest folly to believe this is allbecause of Donald Trump.

National Post