It used to be that when someone made a statement, then made another statement that implied something completely different, we had a name for that. We called it a contradiction. And it wasn’t considered a good thing. Not too long ago, contradictions could end political careers in this country. When Tim Murphy said publicly that he was pro-life, but then privately told a woman to kill her baby, he had to resign from Congress. Al Franken met the same fate, after he bought into the #MeToo hysteria, then fell into its crosshairs himself.
But a lot’s changed in the few years since Tim Murphy and Al Franken were forced out of Congress. All of a sudden, contradictions are everywhere, particularly in the political world. The only way to ensure world peace is to fund a war, foreign policy experts tell us. We’re a sanctuary city or state, but we don’t want any more illegal migrants, say Gavin Newsom and Eric Adams. Men can turn into women, gender studies professors shriek. Euthanasia is healthcare, the Canadian government insists. All of these statements are contradictions, but you’re hearing them all the time now.
In revolutionary periods, this is nothing new. Mao even wrote an essay entitled “On Contradiction” a century ago. Mao understood well that contradiction drives social change. Maybe the most important contradiction that revolutionaries must embrace, Mao argued, is the relationship between construction and destruction. On their face, these two concepts are polar opposites. Tearing something down means ruining it. Building something means creating it. If you want to build something new, you lay a foundation and get to work. You don’t wreck what you have. That’s how the bourgeoisie saw it.
But Mao didn’t see it that way. A half-century ago, Mao famously explained, “There is no construction without destruction.” In other words, there’s a logical relationship between the two concepts. Creating a new society — one totally unlike whatever came before — requires wrecking the old society. Creating new symbols requires wrecking the old symbols.
Mao’s teachings led to, of course, tens of millions of deaths, the destruction of historic artifacts, and mass starvation. The last thing you would ever want our political leaders in this country to do is follow his ideology and try to emulate it. But that’s exactly what’s happening. This weekend in Albany, the capital of New York state, we saw maybe the clearest example in recent history of both construction and destruction happening simultaneously. Under the cover of darkness, at 5:30 in the morning, the city removed a statue of Revolutionary War hero and U.S. senator Philip Schuyler. And at the very moment that workers took Schuyler’s statue away, the so-called “progress Pride flag” was waving in the background, for the first time in Albany’s history. Here’s what it looked like.
One of the defining images of our era
City Hall removes Revolutionary War hero General Philip Schuyler
Pride flags wave in the background pic.twitter.com/0hkhl4bHL8
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 11, 2023
Notice the multiple Pride flags flying proudly as the statue is hoisted away, including the brand-new nonbinary/BIPOC/trans flag.
Now, if that seems like a carefully engineered juxtaposition, it is. It’s choreographed to deliver a very clear message. Mao’s disciples in the New York state government know that if they want their new flag to have any kind of legitimacy, then Philip Schulyer’s statue can’t remain. You can’t have construction without destruction. If you want a revolution, you can’t introduce a new idol without erasing the one that came before. So that’s exactly what the local government did, as explicitly as they possibly could have done it.
If you’re not trying to engineer a revolution — if you’re just an average person living in New York, with reasonable political views — then none of this really makes sense. What was wrong with that statue, exactly? As far as we can tell, no one ever bothered to ask a significant number of New Yorkers that question. No one ever ran a poll on this, at least not one that we could find. There was certainly no statewide referendum on whether people actually wanted Philip Schuyler’s statue removed.
A few bureaucrats in New York just decided to do it a few years ago, and this weekend, they cut through the red tape and did it.
A local news station did conduct a man-on-the-street-style interview with a couple of residents to get their perspective. None of them could explain why this statue was being removed, even the people who said they supported removing it couldn’t explain why:
Yes, a century-old historic artifact memorializing a Revolutionary War hero was not only taken down, it was taken down at the behest of a group of teenagers. The primary reason, as we heard in the clip, is that the absence of the statue will make city hall more “welcoming.” But welcome for who? If the standard is that any “unwelcoming” statue needs to go, then why exactly can’t we destroy the monument of George Floyd that sits outside city hall in Newark?
“But George Floyd didn’t own slaves,” you might say. That’s true. All George Floyd ever did was break into a woman’s home with five other people and hold a gun to her chest. And then, after getting out of prison, all George Floyd did was take enough opioids and meth to kill a horse, before trying to rob a store and fighting with several police officers.
Despite all that, you’re not allowed to even criticize the George Floyd statue. You’ll lose your job if you do. Under the new rules, George Floyd’s statue is “welcoming.” The Revolutionary War general is “unwelcoming.” Understood? Probably not, but then you aren’t supposed to understand. Part of the point behind these arbitrary decisions is that they make no logical or moral sense. You are meant to go along with it whether you understand or not. We might ask “why?” but The Powers That Be will treat us like we’re children and they’re our impatient parents: “Because I said so,” they respond.
It’s all so contrived. Philip Schuyler is an iconic figure of the revolutionary era. He’s one of the reasons this country exists today. Multiple towns and forts are named after him in New York. And curiously, no one had a problem with him until very recently. Ten years ago, in an article, the Albany Times Union described Schuyler this way:
“Philip Schuyler was a leading American statesman and a key general in the American Revolution who served at the pivotal Battle of Saratoga. He was named a representative to the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia and an adviser to Gen. George Washington, who stayed at Schuyler’s mansion in Albany.”
The Times Union went on to describe Schuyler as:
“instrumental in the victory of the American colonists at the Battle of Saratoga in the fall of 1777, a turning point of the Revolutionary War. Residents of Albany, fearful that their city might be occupied by British soldiers, instead celebrated an unexpected victory at Saratoga. It was the first major win for the colonists and the residents of Albany rang church bells, fired cannons, roasted an ox and gathered around a large bonfire. Schuyler returned to the city of his birth as a hero.”
You can read that whole article. It’s still on the Times Union’s website, from 2013. There’s not a single mention of slavery or slaves in the entire piece. Guess how the Times Union describes Schuyler now? Here’s a recent article from the paper, from this year.
“While noted as a politician and Revolutionary War hero, Schuyler enslaved over a dozen people at his Saratoga and Albany homes.”
The Times Union of 2023 goes on to cite — and this is not a joke — a report by five high schoolers who say that Schuyler is a bad man, and his statue has to be removed. That’s the report you heard referenced in that news clip, as well.
Here’s how the Times Union describes the findings of these high school students:
“The report, titled, ‘What To Do with Phil? — A 2022 Report from the Young Abolitionist Leadership Institute,’ was created by five Albany High School students who met between October 2021 and June with two adult facilitators. While the report notes Schuyler’s accomplishments as a Revolutionary War general and politician, his legacy is still marked by owning human beings, it says.”
This is also the report that the Albany government relied on to justify removing the statue.
Facile does not begin to describe this. In the 18th century, no one had the same attitudes towards slavery that we do now — even the people who opposed it. Which relatively few people did back then. It’s not surprising that a bunch of dumb, arrogant kids would lack the proper historical perspective and think themselves qualified to pass moral judgments on historical figures who lived 250 years ago. But that’s where adults are supposed to step in. The problem is that there aren’t very many adults left in this country.
What’s really going on here is that Schuyler — like Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, and all the other historical figures who’ve had their monuments destroyed — is a hero of a different nation. One that the city of Albany considers to be a foreign enemy. And they know they have to erase him if they want their revolution to succeed.
The Biden administration understands this as well. Look at this grotesque display currently hanging at the White House:
Today, the People's House – your house – sends a clear message to the country and to the world.
America is a nation of pride. pic.twitter.com/ZZS9oTpDww
— President Biden (@POTUS) June 11, 2023
That’s a Pride flag hanging on the White House, in between two American flags. There are similar displays all over the country, at 30 Rock and so on, but putting this flag at the White House, just like the flag at Albany City Hall, has particular implications. Most conservatives are saying that it’s horrific and evil for the White House to not only fly the Pride flag but to give it a place of primacy in between the two American flags. It is, of course, both of those things, but what they don’t understand is that the White House is also properly representing its own nation, which is not our nation. We are two nations in one. There is the old United States that conservatives still cling to and cherish, and there’s a new country with its own flag, its own traditions, its own heroes and foundational myths.
That’s the nation that the Biden regime, the media, academia, Hollywood all speak to and represent. Why do you think the city of New York took down Teddy Roosevelt’s statue? Liberals used to love him. He was one of the greatest presidents this country ever had. He broke up the big monopolies. He was well-read. He saved the middle class. He established national parks. He was an explorer and a pioneer. They took down Teddy Roosevelt’s statue in New York for a specific reason — which was to replace it. Instead of Teddy Roosevelt, New York recently put up a horned statue of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
That’s now happening, at scale. The nation we had before is being replaced. It’s not just the demographics that are changing. The activists who are leading this revolution, like all totalitarians, understand that to take full control, they need to erase our shared history. They’re executing their plan right in front of us, as obviously as they possibly can. While conservatives are debating the proper positioning of the American flag in relation to the Pride flag at the White House, the government is going out in the middle of the night and destroying the symbols they don’t like. They’re not asking your opinion on it. They’re just doing it.
With that in mind, it’s not hard to wonder: What else will they take away before you even realize it? A lot more than statues. Soon the government may be able to kidnap your children if you don’t subscribe to the cult of gender ideology. That’s an actual bill in California right now. They’ll label you a child abuser and likely put you in prison for wrong-think, so the state can raise your child. That’s the ultimate goal of this push for “inclusion,” which of course is fundamentally about excluding anyone with traditional views (and in particular religious views). The totalitarians running the government, like all totalitarians throughout history, are obsessed with using their power to make future generations subservient to their rule. That’s the reason they’re sponsoring “Pride parades” that expose children to deviant sexual fetishes. That’s the reason they’re destroying and replacing everything they can.
It took the single deadliest famine in world history to stop Mao. What will it take to stop the revolution that’s taking place right now in this country? The longer this goes on — the longer sane people stay quiet and watch as all this happens — the more likely it is that, unfortunately, we’re going to find out.