National Review: The Robert E. Lee Statue In Richmond Must Go

It goes without saying that these people are worthless.

As we have said for years now, they have conserved absolutely nothing including monuments of their precious heroes like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Their program can be summed up as tax cuts for oligarchs, deregulating Wall Street, sucking up to Jeff Bezos, OUR GREATEST ALLY, defending Big Tech monopolies, imperialism and squandering trillions of dollars on the Pentagon.

National Review:

“Catesby Leigh, writing on NRO, asks whether “Richmond’s Robert E. Lee statue is next,” i.e., next to be removed from the city’s Monument Avenue. (Statues of Stonewall Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and Jefferson Davis are already gone.) Leigh’s essay merits consideration. But I do hope the Lee statue is next.

I side with those who think there is a clear and important distinction between the Founders and the defenders of the Union, on one hand, and the Confederates on the other: The Confederacy was philosophically devoted to racial slavery, while the United States was philosophically irreconcilable with it. Or to speak less abstractly, the founders of the Confederacy inherited an evil practice, wished to perpetuate it indefinitely, and rebelled against the United States to achieve that purpose; the founders of the United States (or those we typically honor) inherited an evil practice, looked forward to its end, and expressly committed the nation to principles (as in the Declaration of Independence) that brought its end about. Removal of monuments to Confederates should not be seen as an “indulgence” of “the BLM­-Antifa statuary rampage,” since it was already right to remove them before the rampage started. I won’t belabor these points, which are by now familiar. I will instead recommend Philip Klein’s and Cameron Hilditch’s more extensive thoughts. …”

This is a hilarious argument.

Aside from Southern independence, what exactly was new about the Confederacy that made it so uniquely evil? There was nothing new about slavery, white supremacy or racial theories in the Confederacy. The same people owned the same slaves in the United States. There wasn’t much that was new in the Confederate constitution either. The Confederate flag was the American flag with fewer stars on it. The same people also always believed in classical republicanism and state sovereignty in the antebellum era.

Nothing changed when the South became the Confederacy EXCEPT our relationship to the Northern states. If the Confederates were evil because of slavery, white supremacy and racism, then the United States was equally evil. The American flag which flew over all the slave ships that went to Africa was equally evil. The Constitution was equally evil and a “Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell” like William Lloyd Garrison argued at the time. The Founders were evil because the Confederate system of government was copied straight from them. The Confederacy was also based on their evil principles of self government. The Founders created a White Republic without consulting any women, LGBTQIA or BIPOC people.

How were the Southern colonies good in the American Revolution when they revolted against Great Britain and fought against its Indian allies and to preserve slavery and white supremacy, but evil when the Confederates left the Union when Lincoln was elected president? How is the Declaration of Independence good when it condemns King George III for inciting slave rebellions and Indian wars on the frontier? Isn’t that racist? How can you condemn Robert E. Lee and praise George Washington?