For nearly a century, a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee stood in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1997, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which meant that at the time — and this again was in the 90s — it was considered worthy of preservation for both its historical significance and artistic value. A little over 20 years later, in the midst of public hysteria over the overdose death of a criminal drug addict in Minneapolis, that 100-year-old work of art — which was supposed to be preserved — was instead torn down and, we were told, moved to a museum. Last week, the museum, in a symbolic humiliation ritual, melted the statue down and destroyed it. It will now be repurposed as an “inclusive arts display.”
This is how we treat our art and our historic monuments these days. It’s especially how we treat historical figures like Robert E. Lee. But it wasn’t always this way. Going back now to the early to mid 19th century, for more than three decades during that span, Robert E. Lee served as an officer in the U.S. military. He graduated from West Point and went on to play a key role in the Mexican-American war, which no one ever talks about, even though it changed this country forever. At the end of it, Mexico ceded a lot of territory — including California, Utah, Nevada, and a lot of what we now call Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. Lee’s role in this victory earned him a series of major promotions. He was eventually named the superintendent of West Point, the military academy he once attended.
Just a few years after Lee left that post, the state of Virginia, where Lee was born, seceded from the Union. And at that point, Lee had a decision to make. He could accept a post with the Union army, or he could defend his home state, which would mean marching against his community, his family, and even his own sons. Even though Lee was no great fan of either slavery or the idea of secession, he chose the latter option. In the end, he felt a greater loyalty to his state than to the federal government. He resigned from the U.S. military, joined the Confederacy and won some of the most pivotal battles of the war, often when he was up against very long odds.
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After the war, Lee became a college professor, and worked to unify the North and the South until his death. He was remembered, across political lines, as both an ingenious tactician and a man of principle and faith. Churchill called him one of the best generals in history. Dwight D. Eisenhower — the president of the United States and the former commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II — had this to say about Lee:
A few years later, a dentist wrote Eisenhower a letter, demanding to know why he had a picture of Robert E. Lee in his office. This is part of Eisenhower’s response: “He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which, until 1865, was still an arguable question in America. He was a poised and inspiring leader. … From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s calibre would be unconquerable in spirit and soul.”
For the next few decades, most Americans agreed with that assessment. In the 90’s we had movies venerating Robert E. Lee, starring Martin Sheen, and no one lost their minds. The Lee statue, and statues like it, stood in town squares all over the country, and especially in the south. It wasn’t an issue. They weren’t vandalized. There were no angry mobs demanding their removal. Most people, including those who certainly cannot be described as confederate sympathizers, recognized that the Civil War was fought at a different time, in a different era, and there were noble men on either side.
But somewhere along the line, in just the past few years, everything changed. Statues of Robert E. Lee and anyone like him had to come down, we were told. They had to come down right away. There was no time to talk about it. No time to debate. The statues weren’t a problem for 100 years. But in the last 100 seconds they became a problem, and it was our duty to simply watch as they were all toppled and carried away.
Already, if you are a perceptive and insightful person, you might ask yourself: was this a sign of progress? Were we a better country back when a man like Robert E. Lee was widely respected? Or when we decided that we could not have any acknowledgment of him in any public place? Which version of the country had greater racial harmony? The one back in the 90s when Robert E. Lee statues were being preserved as historic monuments? Or the one in the 2020s? What do you think?
To make the contrast clearer, the media did not elevate voices as articulate as Churchill or Eisenhower to make the case against the Robert E. Lee monument. Instead, they thrust BLM activists like Zyahna Bryant in our faces. Here was the argument. This is from two years ago:
First of all, if Zyahna Bryant looks familiar — and she does have a distinctive look, we must admit — that’s because you’ve probably seen her before on this show. Bryant is the morbidly obese BLM activist who is officially sponsored by Dove, which is supposedly a brand that promotes personal health and beauty. Bryant became famous for destroying the life of a University of Virginia student with a false accusation of racism.
But, for a second, let’s put aside what a horrible person Zyahna Bryant is. Listen to the argument she was making two years ago, on behalf of BLM. She’s supposedly not objecting to the existence of the statue of Robert E. Lee, at least not explicitly. Instead, she’s saying that it doesn’t belong in a prominent public place — that it shouldn’t “stand in the center of parks, towering over whole communities.” She insists that there are “whole museums” that people can go to, if they want to see a statue like this one. Maybe people can even Google pictures of the statue if they’re so inclined.
Whatever the case, the argument was that BLM isn’t trying to erase history, or denigrate this nation’s heroes, or mock white people for honoring one of the most brilliant generals in the history of the country. No, they’re not doing any of that. They’re just trying to put everything in its proper historical context. The Lee statue “doesn’t tell the story of the Confederacy falling,” she complains, as if the role of a statue is to explain 19th century history in detail. There were a lot of black people in Virginia, she goes on to say, and Lee was not black. Therefore, this statue needs to come down and go to a museum where it belongs.
None of that made any sense — unless, of course, the goal was never to move the statue of Robert E. Lee, but instead to destroy it entirely. If that was the intent, then everything just went according to plan. As I said at the top, activists and university faculty members, with the help of local legislators, just melted down the statue of Robert E. Lee, in secret, in an undisclosed location. They won’t even say what state the foundry is in. But the leftists who demolished Lee’s statue made sure to release this video. Watch:
Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue has met its end, in a 2,250-degree furnace.
The divisive Confederate monument, the focus of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, was secretly melted down and will become a new piece of public art.
More on the process:… pic.twitter.com/XatZUfvku3
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 26, 2023
They gave an inanimate statue of a Civil War general the Terminator treatment. They melted it down and filmed it. Why did they do that, exactly? It wasn’t to make the area “safer” for anyone. In fact, just a few days ago, a black male was murdered by another black male a short distance from where the statue used to be. So what’s the real purpose of all of this?
Here’s one big clue.
All those images of the statue being melted down were accompanied by a lot of gloating. The Washington Post, for example, spoke to the executive director of Charlottesville’s Black History museum: “’Well, they can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again,’” said Andrea Douglas, the museum’s executive director, as she watched pieces of oxidized metal descend into the furnace. “’There will be no tape for that.’”
The Post went on to interview another UVA activist behind this destruction: “[Jalane] Schmidt, who directs the Memory Project at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, said she felt like she was preparing for an execution of sorts — ‘like if there’s a rabid dog in the neighborhood that’s been hurting people, and it needs to be euthanized,’ she said.
Schmidt also said, “We want to transform it into a piece of art that the community can be proud of, and gather around and not feel excluded or intimidated.”
Because, of course, when you euthanize a rabid dog, you put it in a furnace, and everyone gathers around and celebrates that they won’t be intimidated anymore. Makes perfect sense. Turning the Lee statue into an “inclusive” art display isn’t a humiliation ritual at all, we’re supposed to believe. We’re also supposed to believe that the statue was “hurting people.” How was it hurting people? What was it doing to them? Was it coming alive like Night at the Museum and assaulting innocent civilians in the middle of the night? What kind of damage was it causing? And why didn’t anyone ever notice this damage, or mention it, for the first eight or nine decades of the statues existence?
Why are people in the 2020s more hurt by Civil War memorials than people who lived closer to the Civil War were? How did the wounds of the Civil war become fresher over time? It doesn’t make sense until you realize that the campaign to tear down confederate statues was always, from the very beginning, a proxy in the overall war on American history. They just can’t be honest about it. They never have been.
All the deception is necessary because these activists have much bigger plans. They never planned to stop with melting down the Robert E. Lee statue. Indeed, the Lee statue is far from the only statue that’s been destroyed, or essentially destroyed, in recent years. According to an investigation from the Madrid newspaper “El Pais,” the city of Richmond maintains a secret, open-air graveyard for statues that were toppled in 2020. These statues are disassembled and thrown into storage. A lot of contractors apparently passed on these disassembly gigs, for obvious reasons. But eventually, Democrats in the state landed on a guy named Devon Henry to destroy many of them.
Quoting from the investigation: “Henry estimates that he has dismantled 24 structures between Richmond and Charlottesville. The latter is home to the University of Virginia and is one of the cities that acknowledged historical pain and chose to melt down and reuse the materials.”
They’ve destroyed pretty much every statue remotely associated with the Confederacy. That includes a monument to “Stonewall” Jackson, who like Lee, was a hero of the Mexican-American War and who is widely regarded as one of the best military commanders in history. Devon Henry also dismantled a monument to the Confederate General A.P. Hill, who also distinguished himself in the war with Mexico. As El Pais reports, the statue of Hill now has its head, “dishonorably stuck in a tire, waiting to be wrapped up in white plastic.”
All this is to say — they’re not putting any of these statues in museums. The “museum” gambit was always a lie. Something that only the most gullible among us could have fallen for. And sadly, there are a lot of gullible people among us. That said, there’s maybe one exception. The Jefferson Davis statue, post-BLM riots, was displayed in the Valentine museum in Richmond. This is how it’s presented — toppled, desecrated, and covered in graffiti.
Julia Rendleman for The Washington Post via Getty Images
There are many more examples, but you get the point. There was never any intention to memorialize history here. Leftists are doing something to leaders of the Confederacy that they won’t even do to Nazis. They’re erasing them completely. You can still walk into the World War II Museum and see Nazi artifacts if you want, including Nazi posters and flags and weaponry and even board games. But they don’t want you seeing any relics of the Confederacy, under any circumstances whether it’s in a museum or not.
In fact, even if you agree with removing the Lee statue in Charlottesville — which I don’t — you must at least acknowledge that it is a historic artifact. It’s literally registered as such. All of the controversy over it just makes it more historically significant. There is no valid reason to destroy the thing. The destruction is a gratuitous act, meant to send an ideological and political message.
And this goes well beyond the Confederacy.
That’s why the mob quickly moved from the Confederacy to tearing down any statue of pretty much any white person who was born prior to the 20th century. Even Teddy Roosevelt fell victim. What this tells us is that Leftists are preoccupied, above all, with erasing the history and traditions of this country. It’s about power. It’s about dominating and humiliating those they identify as the enemy. And, in large part, they’re succeeding.
We should remember that we’re in this situation now because Republicans across the country, including in Washington — people calling themselves conservatives, that is, the people who are supposed to be conserving things, like history — let it happen. They were too afraid of being called “racist” to say anything about it. They were too weak to stand up to this cultural vandalism when it took root. And they’re still too weak to stand up to it.
If Republicans had any moral fortitude whatsoever, they would respond to the destruction of the Lee statue by painting over every George Floyd mural and tearing down and destroying every single one of his grotesque monuments. If Robert E. Lee doesn’t deserve to be honored, then violent drug addicts who rob women and rip off convenience stores certainly shouldn’t pass muster either. Throw his busts and golden coffins in the furnace.
But that won’t happen, of course, because we’ve come a very long way since Eisenhower. Unfortunately, we’re heading in the wrong direction. Frankly, at this rate, it probably won’t be long until Eisenhower’s memorial is melted down, too. They’ll turn it into an “inclusive art display” —- another display of inclusivity that excludes everyone who disagrees with them. That is the Left’s goal. It’s always been their goal. And if we keep electing politicians who are too afraid to say so, then they will achieve it.