7/18/2020 - Kay Coles James Townhall.com
I’m going to get straight to the
point. It’s time for bold action. It’s time for Americans everywhere who love
their country to heed the words of President Ronald Reagan: “If we lose freedom
here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth.”
All around us, the forces of
socialism, Marxism, and anarchy are waging a war against democracy and the
moral legitimacy of the great American experiment. Radicals have hijacked
peaceful protests and are using the current racial unrest as a tool to attack
the very foundation of our nation.
Violent mobs have defaced and torn
down statues across the country in the name of “social justice,” yet they’ve
gone beyond toppling the statues of slave owners and Confederates to toppling
statues like that of former slave Frederick Douglass, one of the nation’s
greatest abolitionists who dedicated his life to ending slavery and promoting
justice for African Americans.
Memorials to Founding Fathers George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and even the statues of Union heroes like
Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant — more than 150 statues and memorials
nationwide — have been destroyed, defaced, or taken down during the last month
and a half of protests.
It has become clear that it matters
little to the Marxists and anarchists what a statue or monument represents. All
that matters to them is that it represents America’s past, and therefore, it
must come down.
It’s also clear that they’re not
interested in resolving race issues. Destroying monuments, burning churches,
and looting businesses do nothing to bring attention to racism or to advance
police reforms. They’re simply using racial discontent to forward their Marxist
agenda.
Meanwhile, spineless politicians who
agree with the rioters’ agenda, if not their tactics, have told police to stand
down. After rioters in Baltimore recently tore down a statue of Christopher
Columbus and tossed it into the harbor, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Baltimore
native, blithely excused the behavior, telling reporters, “People will do what
they do.”
Many of these mal-educated rioters
and politicians believe everything about America’s past is based in racism.
They are fed this lie in schools and by institutions like theNew York
Times, which claims with great historical illiteracy in its “1619
Project” that this country wasn’t founded based on humanity’s highest ideals in
1776, but rather in 1619, when the first slaves were brought to the New World.
TheTimeseven absurdly asserts that the Revolutionary War wasn’t fought
to gain our independence but to keep slavery alive in the colonies. That’s why
The Heritage Foundation has joined with other conservative leaders in the “1776
Project” to rebut this revisionist history and bring the truth to light.
In his speech at Mt. Rushmore
honoring Independence Day, President Trump spoke to the heart of the matter:
“[O]ur children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe
that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but were villains… [A]ll
perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every
fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and
the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”
We have built statues and memorials
to recognize individuals and events representing some of the noblest — and even
some of the worst — moments in our history. The people memorialized didn’t lead
perfect lives, and many did controversial or even evil things, but monuments
help tell our history and help us remember our highest ideals — as well as the
mistakes we’ve made and wish not to repeat again.
If localities decide that some of
their public statues need to come down because they no longer represent the
values of their community, then the proper course is through the democratic
process and civil dialogue, not mobocracy.
But if politicians ignore or even
tacitly encourage these mobs, they will declare more and more things offensive
until they have targeted every Founding Father, every religious institution
(some are even calling for the removal of images of Jesus because His representations
are “too white”), and virtually any symbol of “oppressive” Western
civilization.
We must put an end to this now. The
rioters and statue topplers must be arrested and prosecuted. We must educate
the public about the truth of the founding of the most exceptional nation on
earth. And we must wrest our educational system from the hands of leftists who
use our schools as indoctrination centers — before we lose yet another
generation to them.
This must be our wake-up call,
because as Ronald Reagan also admonished, freedom must be fought for,
protected, and handed on to our children to do the same, or one day, we’ll be
telling our children's children what it was once like in the United States
where men were free.
Kay C. James is president of The
Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).
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