Following former President Donald Trump’s pledge to restore the names of military bases that were named after Confederate figures, members of both parties in Congress vowed to oppose any such efforts.
As Politico reports, President Trump made another campaign promise on the culture war front on Friday, during a town hall event in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
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At least 160 Confederate symbols including statues were removed from public spaces following the death of George Floyd in 2020, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Of the symbols removed 94 were Confederate monuments, including a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that was removed from the U.S. Capitol building after 111 years, according to Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) data. The left-leaning SPLC keeps track of around 2,100 public parks, buildings and statues devoted to the Confederacy through a database called “Whose Heritage?”
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Virginia Military Institute began tearing down a statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson Monday morning after school leadership approved the removal in October.
Virginia Military Institute’s (VMI) Board of Visitors unanimously approved Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson statue’s removal in October after the school was accused of systemic racism and of fostering a hostile environment for black cadets. An Oct. 17 Washington Post report laid out several accusations of racism and insensitivity at VMI.
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Amid plague, national lockdown, riot and arson, iconoclasm, recession, and the most contested voting in history, the country leaves 2020 with some scars that won’t heal.
Mail-in Voting: Election Day as we once knew it no longer really exists. It has been warped, trimmed, and made nearly irrelevant in the panic of the times. The prior, but now accelerating, changes and the “never let a good crisis go to waste” efforts during the COVID-19 lockdown rammed through vast changes in previous voting norms. If the Democrats win the two U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia, new federal voting mandates designed to supersede state laws will institutionalize the chaos.
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A bill to remove statues of Confederate leaders and figures who advocated for white supremacy from the Capitol passed the House on a bipartisan vote Wednesday, the New York Times reported.
The House voted 305 to 113 to remove the statues as part of a broad effort to take symbols of racism out of public spaces, the Times reported. The legislation was introduced by House Majority Leader and Democratic Maryland Rep. Steny H. Hoyer.
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Virginia has removed from its iconic state capitol the busts and a statue honoring Confederate generals and officials. That includes a bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee positioned in the same spot where he stood to assume command of the state’s armed forces in the Civil War nearly 160 years ago.
They are the latest Confederate symbols to be removed or retired in the weeks since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked a nationwide protest movement.
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More than 50% of Americans oppose removing public statues dedicated to Confederate generals, according to a Washington Post/ABC poll published Monday.
The poll showed 80% of Republicans and 56% of independents oppose removing such monuments, while 74% of Democrats support ridding the country of statues commemorating the Confederacy. Nearly 60% of white people oppose their removal, as do about half of Hispanic people, the poll found.
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The fevered frenzy against public monuments has caused varied reactions. Among scholars, the main symptom is seemingly contagious dispassion. When a New York Times columnist spoke with art historian Erin Thompson, for example, their interview closed with Thompson recommending the use of chains for those interested in inverting large objects. She appears to have an affinity for neither art nor history. Thompson may have caught the bug from archaeologist Sarah Parcak, who recently — and apparently satirically — briefed mobs struggling to dislodge obelisks. “It is sometimes complained,” drawls historian William Cavert, “that such acts erase history.” According to him, that is a popular grievance against the destruction of statues that historians and scholars almost universally dismiss.
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Protests and looting were supplanted last week by an orgy of more symbolic destruction. Statues of various figures from our civilization’s past—Christopher Columbus, a Texas Ranger, numerous confederate Civil War memorials, and even Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo—have been toppled, defaced, or scheduled for removal by compliant officials.
In the same spirit, a Senate GOP committee recently voted to rename military bases named after confederate generals. Those names—Fort Bragg and Fort Hood, among them—have acquired their own connotations as centers of excellence, but must be renamed because their long-forgotten namesakes fought on the losing side of the Civil War.
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