Tag: statue removal

After Removing Statue Of American Hero, UVA Plans To Replace It With Massive Land Acknowledgement

After removing the statue of a famed Revolutionary War hero in 2021, the University of Virginia (UVA) plans to replace it with a park that will serve as a de facto land acknowledgement to an Indian tribe, The Federalist has learned.

The Federalist obtained the school’s plans for the site that once held the statue of Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, which indicate that the new park will celebrate “the Virginia landscape and Indigenous stewardship practices.”

“The politicization of the university has reached a level of absurdity as it has gleefully destroyed statues of Virginians,” Ann H. McLean, a lifelong Virginia resident who received her doctorate in art and architectural history from the University of Virginia, told The Federalist. “Rather than celebrating the courage and problem-solving of exploration represented by the George Rogers Clark sculpture, cultural Marxist city leaders and academics are choosing to celebrate those who had no written language, no concept of private property, no trial by jury, or many other improvements brought here by western civic life and Biblical practice.”

Charlottesville, Virginia, became ground zero for the left-wing drive to destroy American culture and history when the city decided to remove the statues of Confederate Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from their respective places in the historic downtown.

Clark was not a Confederate general, not that it should matter, but these leftists wanted to remove his statue anyway. Like President Donald Trump said in 2020, noting that the leftist movement wants to tear down our Founding Fathers as well, “They’re tearing down statues, desecrating monuments, and purging dissenters. It’s not the behavior of a peaceful political movement; it’s the behavior of totalitarians and tyrants and people that don’t love our country.”

It is a crime against Americans, and the people behind the removals — school leadership, city leadership, and everyone else — belong in prison for those crimes.

For most Americans, statue removal and the related Unite the Right rally are basically the only thing the city is known for at this point. That the city is also home to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or the university he founded is an afterthought.

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Hegseth announces return of Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, removed by ‘woke lemmings’

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that “The Reconciliation Monument,” a Confederate memorial, will be returning to Arlington National Cemetery. 

“I’m proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as “The Reconciliation Monument” — will be rightfully returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth wrote on X. 

The monument was removed in 2023 amid moves by the Pentagon to remove statues and rename military installations honoring Confederate figures and moved into a Defense Department storage facility in Virginia.

“It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it,” Hegseth said. 

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Chicago mayor permanently removes all Columbus statues from city parks

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has said he supports the decision for the city to permanently eliminate statues of Christopher Columbus from two different city parks. He said that the decision shows the city’s “collective humanity.” 

Both the Arrigo Park and Grant Park Columbus statues were removed from their places after the Black Lives Matter protests and riots during the summer of 2020, according to Fox 32. The statues have been in limbo after the original choice to remove them by former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but Johnson backed a plan to make the removals permanent on Tuesday. 

“Art and culture in particular is something that I don’t believe we should erase,” Johnson said. “And we do have to make sure that our presentation is depicting not just truth, but the best part of our existence, which is our collective humanity.”

The permanent removals come after the resolution of a lawsuit launched by the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans (JCCIA) over the statue. The settlement agreement sees to it that the statue from Arrigo Park goes to a museum that the JCCIA owns. The deal will leave the base in the park empty.

Mayor Johnson’s Park District CEO Rosa Ramirez-Rosa said of the plan, “The Chicago Park District is committed to diversifying our statuary to ensure we are honoring Chicago’s rich history and diversity.”

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J.D. Vance’s Bold Step to Reclaim Robert E. Lee’s Legacy

J.D. Vance invited the ire of countless woke historical revisionists when he pushed back against the suggestion that, when Pete Hegseth removed retired General Mark Milley’s portrait from the Pentagon, this was somehow a sign that the Trump administration will be iconoclastic and authoritarian..

Vance’s response perfectly captures what most Americans probably felt in reading Glasser’s nonsense.

Vance’s including Robert E. Lee in this short list of American heroes whose reputations have been wrongfully tarnished could not have been an accident. It is a brave statement for Vance to make and a brilliant cultural flank against those who have been uninterruptedly murdering historical truth throughout the post-Obama era.

Violent mobs and woke social initiatives have led to the defacement or removal of these great Americans’ monuments for many years now.  They were to be newly cast as racists and villains, and you were also to be smeared if you didn’t buy into the lies.

You were a racist, for example, if you questioned the claims made in The 1619 Project. This farce-masquerading-as-journalism argued that the United States engaged in its war of independence because American colonials wanted to keep slaves.

Then, in 2020, Democrats began tearing down the statues of generals such as Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, men tarred by the taint of the Confederacy, but also began defacing statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Their reasoning was that the American colonials and the Confederate rebels were both just slaveholders who were fighting to keep their slaves, making them all reasonable targets for the revisionists.

Of course, even honest leftists have admitted that the 1619 Project is among the purest garbage ever put to print. The historical record clearly shows that there’s no credible evidence suggesting that the colonials wanted independence to keep slaves. But if that sort of nuance is important, it should also be important that the historical record clearly shows that the Southern states didn’t simply engage in its failed war for independence because they wanted to keep slaves, either.

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Biden Admin Reverses Decision to Remove William Penn Statue

The Biden administration has reversed a decision by the National Park Service to remove a statue of William Penn from a park in Philadelphia. Penn was the founder of Pennsylvania (named for his father) in the late 1600s and is a revered figure in the state.

(Previous TGP report on the planned removal of the statue posted by David Greyson at this link.)

The Park Service recently announced plans to renovate the park where the statue is located, Welcome Park, to make it “inclusive” of Native Americans, even thought the park is built where Penn’s home once stood and is named after the ship, the Welcome, that brought Penn to the New World from England in 1682. The Park Service also planned to remove a replica of Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House, as well as a Penn timeline on a wall at the park. In other words, the Biden administration was erasing Penn.

The Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, is led by Biden appointee Secretary Deb Haaland, a radical progressive who is the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary.

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Removal of Confederate statue in Charlottesville causes division, with protesters calling it an erasure of history

The removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville polarized Americans on Saturday, as the United States continues to take down monuments that are now deemed too controversial.

In 2017, the proposed removal of the statue led to the infamous Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, during which a protester against the event was killed during a car attack.

Now, nearly four years after the rally, Charlottesville, Virginia has taken down the statue, with Mayor Nikuyah Walker calling it “one small step closer” to making the US “grapple with the sin of being willing to destroy Black people for economic gain.”

The removal was praised by some Americans, who called it “a great change” and called for the statue to be put in a museum or melted “into copper piping for a toilet.” One person even called for the Confederate flag to be banned next.

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