Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has blurted it out: America’s problem isn’t rogue white cops who unfairly persecute blacks, as the George Floyd riots and ensuing municipal destruction suggest. It’s white men themselves—and Ocasio-Cortez and the Democrats are going to do something about it, at least symbolically (for now). House Democrats have passed a bill, with significant RINO support, to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol building’s National Statuary Hall Collection. But Ocasio-Cortez wants not just Confederates gone—white men must go, too. Bye-bye, Historic American Nation.
“We have 100+ statues and portraits in the Capitol. Almost all of them are of white men,” AOC huffed on Twitter, referring to St. Damien of Molokai. “Every single statue there could be of a canonized saint and that *still* doesn’t change the fact that the erasure of women & BIPOC [“Black, Indigenous and People of Color”] from American history is a feature of white supremacy.”
We have 100+ statues and portraits in the Capitol. Almost all of them are of white men.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 2, 2020
Every single statue there could be of a canonized saint and that *still* doesn’t change the fact that the erasure of women & BIPOC from American history is a feature of white supremacy.
And there you have it. What we’ve seen since the George Floyd riots began is hatred for whites. It’s not about black lives, or slavery, or Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy or even Catholic saints such as Damien, who gave their lives for “indigenous” people but are somehow viewed as “a feature of white supremacy.”
Of course, anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last 10 years would have known it—including the 72 Republicans who, in a shameful surrender to George Floyd hysteria, joined all the Democrats in voting to banish Confederate statues.
Did these 72 GOP representatives think their vote will gain them some “strange new respect” in the Leftist media, or a higher share of the minority vote? If they do, they’re WRONG.
The Capitol's National Statuary Hall collection of statues, two from each state, get the seal of approval from their state legislatures. Virginia’s, appropriately, are George Washington and Robert E. Lee. John Winthrop and Samuel Adams represent Massachusetts.
But on July 22, 2020, the House approved H.R. 7573 to drive old Dixie down again:
To direct the Joint Committee on the Library to replace the bust of Roger Brooke Taney in the Old Supreme Court Chamber of the United States Capitol with a bust of Thurgood Marshall to be obtained by the Joint Committee on the Library and to remove certain statues from areas of the United States Capitol which are accessible to the public, to remove all statues of individuals who voluntarily served the Confederate States of America from display in the United States Capitol, and for other purposes.
It if becomes law, the measure would remove 12 statues from the Statuary Hall Collection, all Confederates, with the exception of John C. Calhoun, a States Rights supporter who died in 1850.
He’s on the chopping block, too. Because “racism.”
The bill would also prohibit any future donations of likenesses of “persons who served as officers or voluntarily with the Confederate States of America or of the military forces or government of a state while it was in rebellion against the United States.”
The House vote is a gauge of our ruling political class: The yeas were 305, the nays, 113.
The GOP’s Senate leadership has, thankfully, expressed no interest in a comparable measure [House votes to remove Confederate statues from Capitol, by Heather Caygle, Politico, July 22, 2020]. But every single House Democrat voted to remove the statues.
The vote not only demonstrates the lockstep, Woke Leftism of the Democrats but also the extinction of old-fashioned conservative patriots from the party of Andrew Jackson.
Among the defenders of history and sanity: Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, District 5 (with Numbers USA rating, A+). He defended the Yellowhammer State’s statue of Confederate Gen. “Fighting Joe” Wheeler:
[T]he only Confederate general to later become a United States general. General Wheeler oversaw Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War & served in the Philippines in 1900. General Wheeler’s service was so respected by America that he earned the right to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
[Alabama Will Not Be Dictated To: Congressman Mo Brooks Celebrates & Defends Alabama’s U.S. Capitol Statues, Brooks.House.gov, July 24, 2020]
(Alabama’s other statue: Helen Keller, a Leftist later in life but a daughter of the South nonetheless.)
Brooks brings up an important point. Many outstanding leaders of the Confederacy were also outstanding American leaders—before and/or after the Civil War. Why doesn’t Wheeler’s subsequent service to the U.S. count?
Then Brooke delivered this zinger:
I reject cancel culture, historical revisionism, socialism, and fascism. I support freedom and liberty. I support federalism and a state’s right to decide for itself who it should honor.
Thank you, Rep. Brooks. We need more Republicans like you.
On the other hand, we don’t need more Republicans like the 72 who voted for the measure. It if weren’t for them, the measure would not have passed with the necessary two-thirds of members.
What were they thinking?!
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL war hero who wears two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, should know better. He explained his vote in a “Republican History” vs. “Democrat History” post on Facebook:
Republicans won the civil war. That’s our history.
Democrats have a long list of segregationists & KKK members. That’s their history.
I’m glad to help them confront that racist past & voted to remove these Democrat statues from positions of prominence.
It takes guts and brains to be a Navy SEAL, which raises the question how one can do something so stupid. The people bringing down our statues and erasing our past aren’t doing it in the name of Republicans vs. the Democrats. They hate our history and heritage, and, as AOC made clear, they aren’t going to stop at Confederates.
For example, why did Rep. Frank Lucas, who represents Oklahoma 3, vote for it? Were Lucas’ core constituency of wheat farmers thinking, as they drove their combines across the fruited plains, “those statues must come down!”
Not at all.
A member of Lucas’ staff told a constituent that part of the reason for his vote was that Democrat Rep. James Clyburn’s speech demanding the purge moved Lucas.
I'm not for destroying any statue.
— James E. Clyburn (@RepJamesClyburn) July 22, 2020
I'm here to ask my colleagues to very properly and lawfully return these people to their proper place.
Put them where they can be studied, where people will know exactly who and what they were.
But do not honor them and do not glorify them. pic.twitter.com/APDa9AyRqb
Is Clyburn now Frank Lucas’s mentor? Is Lucas aware that Clyburn called federal agents Nazis just a few days before the speech that so inspired Lucas that he voted against his own people? [House Majority Whip Clyburn compares federal agents in Portland to Nazi Gestapo police, by Brian Flood, Fox News, July 20].
That brings us back to AOC, who blurted out the truth: The white boys gotta go, and Hawaii’s choice for its statue, obviously was not a Confederate, shows why.
Saint Damien was a Belgian Catholic priest who lived in a leper colony for more than a decade, serving the lepers and eventually dying of leprosy himself. Hawaiians consider him a hero, which is why they picked him for the Capitol.
“Even when we select figures to tell the stories of colonized places, it is the colonizers and the settlers whose stories are told—and virtually no one else,” she wrote on Instagram. “Check out Hawaii’s” ['White supremacist culture': AOC decries statue of Catholic saint by Nicholas Rowan, Washington Examiner, July 31, 2020]
St. Damien lived and died with Molokai’s lepers when Hawaii was an independent kingdom, so one wonders how he was a “colonizer,” but that little fact aside, the woman who wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement continued: “It's not radical or crazy to understand the influence white supremacist culture has historically had in our overall culture and how [it] impacts the present day.”
And while she was at it, she slammed Arizona’s statue of the late Barry Goldwater because he opposed welfare on principle and voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the grounds that it was unconstitutional [Barry Goldwater explains his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — Firing Line (1966), YouTube, September 26, 2009].
It probably hasn’t occurred to the AOC, but white men have built this country since they founded it, and are responsible for most of its achievements, whether in war or in peace, whether in math, science, or business. Of course, most of the statues in the Capitol will represent white men.
Nor has it occurred to AOC that she directly benefits from the men she hates. A white man designed the building in which she disgorges her Cultural Marxist nostrums. White men wrote the Constitution to which she swore loyalty, along with the parliamentary procedures she pretends to understand.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but she works for anti-white revolution in the air conditioning thanks to a white man.
And yet to AOC and too many others, the white man (except, oddly, her white boyfriend) is the enemy.
That’s the situation we face, my friends. We ignore it at our peril.
American citizen Allan Wall (email him) moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008 after many years residing in Mexico. Allan's wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.
