This Memorial Day, as we stop to honor our fallen comrades, past and present, at cemeteries and monuments across the land, we must also pause to remember that the Left and their mainstream, regime-approved allies have spent years waging a fierce and fanatical campaign of deliberate destruction against memorials to this nation’s war dead.
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The assault accelerated after 2015 and reached its frenzied peak in 2020 amid the summer of love and the destructive and deadly George Floyd riots. More than 160 Confederate memorials—tributes to soldiers who fought and died in the bloodiest conflict in our history, claiming as many as 750,000 lives—were removed, toppled, or consigned to storage out of sight from public view in Democrat strongholds from Richmond to Baltimore to New Orleans. These were statues and monuments commemorating farmers, tradesmen, and young men who answered the call of their states, believing they defended and fought for the honor of their homes and way of life. Mobs pulled down and damaged statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and even Ulysses S. Grant, as well as many others. Meanwhile, the authorities—cravenly cowering before the madness of the wild and raging crowds instead of trying to quell or subdue them—officially removed statues, not only of Confederate heroes like Generals Lee and Stonewall Jackson but also of the so-called “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln, too. All this took place in the name of what one Stanford professor rightly characterized as “an overdue racial reckoning for America”—or, to speak more plainly and less timidly, as punishment for the country’s perceived past sins against “people of color.”
But regardless of what Stanford professors and other resentment-ridden intellectuals might say to excuse or condone this reckoning, this was never meant as a serious engagement with the past. It was iconoclasm driven by present-day spite: applying racial hatred masquerading as universal morality and using it as a sledgehammer to smash the memories of men from another time and, ostensibly, another world while ignoring the war’s deeper complexities and the genuine acts of valor on both sides. The reconciliation that was made possible, and not even long after the Civil War itself, meant honoring shared sacrifice and preserving monuments as bridges to national healing and heartfelt peace. As I have said in these pages before, the contemporary Left demands the reverse: endless punishment for perceived past injustices, tearing down monuments to historical memory and greatness, and sowing division—either because it knows not what it wants other than to hurt and to maim or for the cynical end of attaining political power or both.
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Mercifully, at least for the time being—let us hope it lasts for more than just a mere moment—the tide has turned somewhat. In President Trump’s second term, restorations are underway—including the Reconciliation Monument at Arlington and other symbols of shared heritage. These gestures reject the Left’s desperate and drastic desire to destroy in favor of a mature wish to look up to, admire, and take inspiration from what is noble and awe-inspiring in our past and in the deeds of the men who gave their “last full measure of devotion” to ensure that we, the living, have a country to care for at all.
On this Memorial Day and beyond, those who can should do more than simply observe the ritual of cooking out with family and friends, as important and as lovely as that truly is. Visit the remaining memorials. Teach the truth—sullied and unsullied—about the past and the present to the next generation. And give them something to live for and to love, to fight for and to defend. The Left seeks to disregard or destroy the memory of the fallen who impede their pernicious project of remaking America through rancor. Remembering those fallen men—all of them—is essential to reclaiming our true inheritance and ensuring that this American nation does “not perish from the earth.”
