Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

While I am certainly not a fan of Identity politics, I do agree with the White Nationalist movement on the removal of Confederate monuments, though probably not for the same reasons. It never seems to make sense to me how these same monuments, which have been sitting on public grounds for decades or even centuries are suddenly triggering people in the year 2018.

One of the reason is likely due to a fundamental ignorance that many people have about the Civil War. Thanks to the power of government schools, people have the long-held misconception that the war was a black and white conflict over slavery. It is true that Abraham Lincoln was not at all a fan of slavery, but most of his actions up until he passed the Emancipation Proclamation, showed a severe indifference to ending “The Peculiar Institution.” Even the Emancipation Proclamation was half-hearted since it only meant to free slaves in states that were in direct rebellion against the Union. The idea of emancipation wasn’t even that popular among Northern troops, many of which had deserted their units after the Emancipation Proclamation was announced. There were also draft riots in New York perpetrated by people who didn’t want to put their lives on the line to free slaves in the South.

Also, I am pretty sure when the people took up arms for the Confederacy, it wasn’t for the right to own slaves, which only one percent of the population in the South was able to exercise. To be fair, neither side of the conflict could exactly be considered just or virtuous, when it comes to freedom. The South of course did cling onto an institution that was not only barbaric, but not even all that effective. They were also staunch believers in conscription and would hire the town bullies to round up deserters of the Confederate Army, even after it was clear that the South had no chance of winning the war. It was the North who went out of their way to prove that they weren’t above committing atrocities against noncombatants, which is why they encountered so much resistance during the Reconstruction. I don’t think the conflict was as black and white as it has been portrayed in government school textbooks, so neither side had much of a moral high ground in the war, though an argument could be made that the South had a legal right to secede from the Union. Yet as L. Neil Smith pointed out, they made a serious mistake when they chose to fire on Fort Sumpter.

Another reason for why people have recently found themselves triggered by Confederate statues is that certain Civil Rights groups have so few demons to fight these days that they have to attack statues that in their minds represent slavery. For whatever their reasons may be for the PC crowd wanting to destroy monuments, I don’t think we should be appeasing them. Sadly, there are people who just don’t get it.

On an episode of Steven Crowder’s show, Louder with Crowder, the host criticized Trump when he compared the demolition of Confederate monuments with that of the eventual removal of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson monuments. Crowder said that Trump was wrong to compare George Washington with the people that wanted to tear apart the country that Washington helped build. It’s amazing how someone as sharp as Steven Crowder can be so incredibly clueless at the same time. I don’t know how Trump’s point went over Crowder’s head when it seemed clear to me that Donald Trump was making a slippery slope argument about how the controversy won’t end with the removal of Confederate statues. It turns out that Trump has been proven right. You now have Social Justice Warriors demanding that monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson be taken down, since both these men were slave owners. We even saw the Snowflakes vandalize monuments to Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln. I suppose that Columbus got his flak from the way he treated the indigenous people when he made his voyage to the Americas, but what exactly do the Snowflakes have against Lincoln? I always thought that most Americans revered Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. Maybe it’s because they thought that he was too white for their taste.

If that wasn’t bad enough, we actually had a sports announcer from ESPN who got benched from announcing a UVA football game because he happened to share the same first and last name of Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. What is really sad is that you actually have people defending this insane decision. I think at this point we have already gone down the slippery slope and hit rock bottom. Both Gavin McInnes and Tucker Carlson were pretty much spot on when they said that the Snowflakes will never be satisfied with tearing down Confederate monuments. As a lover of history, I believe in preserving all history even if it’s the kind that we are the least proud of, so that we will have something to remind us of our mistakes as well as our accomplishments. We can’t allow Snowflakes to have their way because once they succeed in destroying any historical monument they don’t not like, they will then move on to rewrite our history to the point to where we will no longer recognize it. I’m sorry, but I hold history way too sacred to see it altered or destroyed by a bunch of pansies who don’t know how great they really have it in the United States.