In the wake of the Charleston shooting, cries to remove the Confederate battle flag from the public eye have intensified. In addition to several politicians openly questioning the public display of the flag of their states and cities, retailers including Wal-Mart, Amazon, and e-Bay have removed the flag and related items from their inventories.
Emboldened by the apparent success of the flag censoring campaign, the social justice safe space movement has dialed up its rhetoric to eleven, calling for the razing of Confederate war hero statues in the south and the removal of references to slavery from the public discourse. The boldest of these calls to action came when CNN hosts Ashleigh Banfield and Don Lemmon discussed taking down the Jefferson Memorial.
Banfield began the discussion, noting that Jefferson was a slave owner and noting “there is a monument to him in the capital city of the United States. No one ever asks for that to come down.”
Co-host Lemmon offered a lukewarm response: “There may come a day when we want to rethink Jefferson. I don’t know if we should do that.”
Thomas Jefferson, of course, authored the Declaration of Independence and served as the third president of the United States. Removing references to him from the public discourse, and history generally, is a denial of who we are as a nation. Jefferson’s clear articulation of the principles of liberty and equality laid both the philosophical and popular foundations of our Revolution.
Coming on the heels of Louis Farrakhan calling for the US flag to be removed from public display, this is further evidence that the church of the perpetually outraged is in the midst of a full-throated roar of defiance against everything that made this nation great.
The social justice warrior contingent has gotten so out of control that Apple even removed video games from the app store because the Confederate Army in the Civil War games flies the Confederate flag.
Rather than an effort to make people comfortable, this is an obvious and ham-handed attempt to stifle free speech and dislocate people from their cultural roots.
The retailers that have gotten rid of Confederate paraphernalia have no problem selling Nazi flags, and shirts emblazoned with notorious racist homophobic murderer Che Guevara. The radical left lionizes a pope who is a South American communist.
What do those things have in common, aside from their negative impact on the world?
None of them are of America. None of them symbolize positive values of hope and freedom. Rather, they represent retrograde forces that are still alive and well. The fabric of our society is fraying under their direct assault.
