Then They Came For The Liberals

[Riddick]

Edited & Excerpted From Daniel Greenfield's Article:

Forget the Confederacy. The Socialist Taliban pulling down statues have gone after Confederate statues, but their real targets have been civic monuments that symbolized unity and progressive politics.

In Madison, Black Lives Matter protesters toppled the Lady Forward statue that allegorically represents the state’s progressive politics. With its American flag, feminine iconography, and Lincoln reference, the Lady Forward statue embodies the old progressive ideas the Marxist thugs are destroying.

Toppling Lady Forward, like banishing Theodore Roosevelt’s equestrian statue, accompanied by an Indian and a black man to symbolize the former president’s friendship for other races, from the American Museum of Natural History, another icon of progressive symbolism, is no accident.

Confederate statues aren’t very threatening to the leftist cause, but the old progressivism, rooted in the conviction that America was a basically good country that would come to fully embody goodness, is still a competitor for the hearts and minds of the people that BLM and Antifa would like to see join them.

Radicals are attacking symbols of the historical narrative they hate because it undermines their agenda. Union iconography tells a story of the end of slavery. The Black Lives Matter narrative is that slavery never ended, not only in the South, not with the end of Segregation, and not even in the 21st century.

America was born in sin and never stopped being a racist society built on white supremacy. Revisionist history not only falsely accuses America of having been built around slavery, but is a component of a larger argument that slavery still exists today and operates using disguised modern institutions.

The movement to defund police derives from the conspiracy theory that the justice system is modern slavery, with police officers, prosecutors, and even people who call the police as the slave catchers, sellers, and informants in a racist system that cannot be redeemed, but must be entirely destroyed.

To radicals who think this way, Lincoln being presented as the man who freed the slaves is a myth that prevents people from seeing the entire narrative of history is a racist lie covering up the truth that slavery & Jim Crow did not end.

The conjunction of critical race theory and black nationalism contends that the original sin wasn’t really slavery, but ‘whiteness’. America will be as racist and oppressive as it is white. The only way to advance is through destruction.

An idea that, until recently, was almost universally held by most liberals was that racial progress is inevitable because of American values. The progressive memorials are being targeted for removal and demolition to bury that notion.

Destroying the work of the old progressives has more in common with the Taliban than just the demolition of old statues. Like Islamic theocrats, leftist mobs are destroying symbols of heresy.

The heresy embodied by everything from the Emancipation Memorial to the multiracial trio of Theodore Roosevelt and two minority men, is being symbolically destroyed to make way for the new theology of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi.

The larger symbolism is that the only way to redeem America is to destroy it as a nation.

[Riddick]

(Con't)

The new progressives occasionally mime optimism, but they are really savage pessimists.

One of the fundamental dividing lines between moderates and extremists is despair. Moderates are optimists, sometimes foolishly and wrongly so, while the extremists believe that the situation is irredeemable unless the most extreme measures are applied to tear apart and remake society.

While the media insists its political allies are moderates, their destructiveness and despair mark them as extremists whose essential message is that we can only be saved by destroying everything.

From Jonestown to CHOP, despair is the inevitable outcome of utopian ambition. Fanatics who are convinced the world must be saved or damned, that there is no middle ground between racism and social justice, pursue apocalyptic revolutions while seeking to punish the public for lack of progress.

It’s not the Confederacy, long defeated, they are out to kill, but the thing that all radicals hate the most, the moderate ideas on their own side that compete with them for the hearts and minds of their base.

The Marxist mobs are coming for the old progressives, the declining liberals, for anyone who still believes unity is more important than division, and we can find common ground through forgiveness.

It's not the Confederacy they’re after: it’s any alternative to violent revolution.

The mobs aren’t just here to smash up old Confederate officers. They’re out to destroy Lincoln and Grant, to tear down the Columbus statues erected by Italian immigrant groups who wanted to plant a civic flag to show they belonged, and the statues of assorted Union officers put up by other patriotic immigrant groups to show that they too had a place in the nation.

And what the mobs are out to destroy, most of all, is that old liberal vision of America. And, by the time they’re done, if there are any liberals left, they will throw them in the same rivers and fires in which they’re casting those old symbols of progress, the explorer who defied the skeptics, the men who envisioned a representative republic, the emancipation of the slaves, and a modern America.

The mobs are coming for our history and our future. They’re coming for America and for progress. Americans used to believe that things will get better. The mobs are here to destroy that hope.