Long before President Donald Trump mused that the statue wreckers would be coming for Thomas Jefferson and George Washington one day, I was warning that this day would come. One of the most common arguments we’re hearing from people on the right these days is that the statue wreckers are “ignorant of history.” I disagree. They understand history perfectly well. Their desire to smash works of art is borne out of the fact that their own ancestors didn’t do anything noteworthy enough to have statues made of them.
Virtually every major social problem in America today can be traced back to former Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act. Since then, the demographics of America have changed starkly. We have aborted approximately 65 million of our own children, while importing roughly the same number of foreigners.
This was the largest mass migration of people in the history of the world, and it has changed America dramatically. In the late 1970s, nearly every person in America could trace their own ancestry back to the original 13 colonies. Today, we have tens of millions of immigrants and their children and grandchildren who have no connection whatsoever to America’s heroic and exceptional past.
Back in the 1990s, then-Vice President Al Gore was being given a tour at a statuary. He was led into a room ringed with busts of notable Americans. Gore asked the tour guide, “Who are these people?”
“Those people” were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and so on. You know, those guys.
This is the same way that most non-assimilated immigrants feel when they walk around in American cities and see works of art dedicated to notable historic figures. “Who are these people? Why aren’t there any monuments to my people?”
Because we don’t assimilate any immigrants (because that would be “racist”), it only breeds resentment among them.
In the most recent night of statue-wrecking as of this writing, mobs in San Francisco ripped down statues of Francis Scott Key, the author of the National Anthem; Ulysses S. Grant, the former president and the Republican general who freed the slaves from the Confederacy; and Miguel Cervantes, the author of “Don Quixote.”
These are all people who led remarkable, significant lives. The mob spray-painted “Kill Whitey” on the base of the statue of Francis Scott Key after they ripped it down. And Miguel Cervantes? He wasn’t even an American.
Cervantes never set foot on the shores of America. But due to the significant Spanish ancestry of people in California, the author has (had) a statue erected to him in California. Cervantes was captured by the Islamic Barbary Pirates in 1575. The man who would later write “Don Quixote” was held in slavery for five years before being ransomed to freedom by the Trinitarians.
He led a meaty, significant life and he accomplished many great things. If your ancestors’ only contribution to history was to sneak across a border and steal a social security number to commit welfare fraud, you’d probably be embarrassed every time you look at a Miguel Cervantes statue, too.
Christopher Columbus statues are being wrecked everywhere across the country as well. Sorry, Italian-ancestry Americans! Your history as immigrants doesn’t matter to these people either.
Columbus is smeared as a genocidal rapist and slave trader by college professors filled with white guilt. Nothing could actually be further from the truth. Stanford University professor Carol Delaney wrote the most authoritative book on Columbus ever, back in 2012. You’ve never heard of her book, “Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem,” because it interferes with the Columbus-was-a-racist narrative.
Using newly discovered historical documents and writings, including Columbus’ own journal, Delaney proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christopher Columbus never killed or enslaved anyone. He was respectful sensitive to the cultural differences of the natives he encountered and fascinated by them. He never hurt anyone. And now his statues are being ripped down despite the record on Columbus finally being corrected by Delaney’s scholarly work.
The statue wreckers know all of this. Their problem is not historical ignorance. Their problem is that our leaders let them invade our country and made no effort at assimilating them to our wonderful country. And now we’re paying the price for that mistake.
