In the next few days, Governor Abbott and other GOP leaders will decide whether to rip out a plaque put up by the Children of the Confederacy, which has stood in our state capitol for almost 60 years. It doesn’t endorse slavery, white supremacy, or any other evil. The plaque simply asserts that the Civil War was a complicated affair. In fact, it tries to depoliticize our state’s part in the Confederacy, by commemorating those thousands of Texans who died for nobler causes—such as the sovereignty of states, or local patriotism, or resistance to the growth of a rigidly centralized country. Now leading Republicans, including Governor Abbott, are bowing to those who assert a simplistic, up or down moralism that condemns a huge swathe of our past, and dishonors our founding fathers.
We do in fact face a stark choice today as Texans and Americans: Will we vandalize our monuments and sanitize the past to patronize the latest craze in professional victimhood politics.
What difference does a plaque make? Let me talk to you about the death of a thousand cuts. All across our country, and even the Western world, self-righteous, cocksure activists have decided what’s right and wrong. We’re ruled more than ever, from the halls of academia to the notes we send our friends, by politicized trends, fueled by outrage. From a full spectrum of opinions, we’re being herded like chattel into narrow, little pens. Increasingly, everything that doesn’t fit the latest craze among leftist activists is simply labeled “hate speech.”
What’s next? Facebook shut down the account of preacher Franklin Graham, for defending the right of women to have privacy in the bathroom. Did you know that you can get banned from Facebook or Twitter for refusing to accept transgender ideology? That’s the new theory—no one had heard of it five years ago—that biological sex means nothing. That’s not the finding of science, or the outcome of research. It’s the outcome of a political pressure campaign, economic blackmail, and even the threat of “hate speech” prosecution.
Instead of a vibrant country where people of deeply differing beliefs can clash in the public square, while remaining friends and fellow citizens, we are becoming something sinister and strange: a land made up of witch-hunters, and those too afraid to resist them.
We have already seen that tearing down statues of Confederates quickly gives way to demands that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington also be removed. How long before every general who fought in our Indian wars must end up in the Memory Hole? We’re already seeing pressure to break up and whitewash the Alamo memorial in San Antonio. Why not? Isn’t it, in the eyes of academic elites and ethnic group activists a monument to imperialism by slaveholders? If you disagree with that, be careful. Soon enough you’ll find yourself lumped in, willy-nilly, with hatemongers and skinheads. Because there are only two categories now: “woke” devotees of the latest grievance politics, and presumptive racists and bigots, who must be silenced, exposed, and ruined. Look up the word “intersectionalism” and you will better understand the far-left’s chilling agenda.
Mussolini in Italy, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, each declared the past erased, and announced a new “Year Zero.” They knew, as Orwell wrote, that to control how we read the past is to gain control of our future.
The Democrats in the U.S. House have just introduced a bill to abolish the Electoral College. Their pretext? That it is somehow “racist.” Soon, every careful piece of Constitutional prudence our forefathers created will get tossed on the same trash heap as the statues of Robert E. Lee. At least, that’s what will happen if even the “conservative” leaders of conservative states like Texas cave in at the first hint of moral blackmail, which demands that everything, past, present, and future, be homogenized and sanitized to suit the loudest or best-connected activist.
A new state senator, Pat Fallon (Dist. 30), has kept his promise to introduce the Texas Historical Protection Act (SB 226). Apparently, Sen. Fallon is not just a “campaign conservative,” but a real one. Let Gov. Abbott and your state representatives know that you support Texas history.
