Will the Left Stop with Robert E. Lee?

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, 13 April 2018

Their iconoclasm has no limits.

The defining characteristic of an American conservative is his naivete. Following the ill-fated Unite the Right demonstration, the push to remove Confederate memorials escalated. Many conservative pundits treated the iconoclasts’ arguments against Confederate memorials in good faith. In the long run, they will learn the real target is not the Confederacy, but all of European-America. Many non-whites don’t to remove just statues of whites, but white people themselves.

“The monuments should go,” declared Rich Lowry of National Review, denouncing Robert E. Lee for having “betrayed the U.S. government” and having fought “on the side devoted to preserving chattel slavery.” Gracy Olmstead at The Federalist said, “these memorials are splitting us further and further apart.” In the Weekly Standard, Berny Belvedere argued that the removal of the memorials was a “good thing” because they were “backward-looking,” unlike the “forward-looking memorials” which “promote our core values and herald American virtues.”

Yet this begs the question of what those “core values” are and who determines them. Last August, President Donald Trump raised the question of whether the Founding Fathers—the wellspring of those “core values”—would be the next target. In response, the New York Times ran an article that said the President was mocked on social mdia for his comments. The Times added that even “historians” were questioning his opinion.

Among these scholars was Annette Gordon-Reed, credited with advancing the dubious theory that Thomas Jefferson slept with his slave Sally Hemings. As quoted by the Times, Prof. Gordon-Reed said there is a “crucial difference” between men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Confederate leaders. The former were “imperfect men who helped create the United States,” she claimed, while the latter “took up arms against it.”

In a similar vein, NPR published a snarky “fact check” declaring Lee fought “against his country” while the Founding Fathers were “participants in a great experiment in self-government, which has expanded over time to embrace more and more people of all races, not to mention women, too.”

Yet few non-white agitators seem to recognize this distinction. Movements to remove statues or busts of Jefferson are now underway at Hofstra University. Even before Unite the Right, Thomas Jefferson’s statue at his alma mater William & Mary was a target for vandalism. Even the University of Virginia, which would not exist without his efforts and which was once known as “Mr. Jefferson’s University,” is now host to a coalition of non-white student groups demanding “required education (either inside or outside the classroom) on white supremacy, colonization, and slavery as they directly relate to Thomas Jefferson.”

Please read the entire article at American Renaissance.