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It’s Time to Put a Stop to This Depravity

South Carolina, June 24, 2020
  • toppled monuments

Get this: there are actually protesters in D.C. vowing to tear down the Emancipation Statue of Abraham Lincoln. Yes, the same Abraham Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves 157 years ago. In fact, former slaves helped raise funds to create this monument. And Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and led national efforts to abolish it, helped dedicate the statue in 1876.

Up in Madison, Wisconsin, mobs tore down a statue known as Lady Forward, which was sculpted 127 years ago by a woman, Jean Miner, who wanted to create a symbol honoring the women’s suffrage movement.

Then they went over and toppled a statue of Hans Christian Heg, a colonel in the Union Army who was an unwavering opponent of slavery.

In cities across the nation, rioters are tearing down or defacing America’s monuments with IMPUNITY. Albany, Birmingham, Boston, Dallas, Dearborn, Los Angeles, Montgomery, Nashville, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Portland, Raleigh, Richmond, San Francisco, and St. Paul, just to name a few.

In many of these cases, law enforcement was either ordered to stand down, or didn’t have adequate resources to stop the destruction. And it’s not just against public property like monuments and statues. Arson, looting, targeted assaults, vandalism, and other crimes have been verifiably attributed to these mobs.

This is NOT how civilized, rational people advocate for change. Yet unless I’ve missed something, most of my colleagues on the left have been COMPLETELY SILENT on denouncing this violence.

However, I've absolutely no problem calling it like I see it: these are criminal acts that MUST be stopped. Failure (or refusal) to do so only encourages lawlessness, and emboldens those who are trying to bring destruction, chaos, and harm.

Law enforcement’s purpose – the reason they exist – is to protect life and property, in that order. It’s time to put a stop to this depravity.