Chicago City Council Identifies 41 Potential Targets for Next Purge of Monuments
As violent crime engulfs the Democrat-run city of Chicago, conscientious officials have their priorities straight: They’re working to tear down “insensitive” statues.
On Thursday, the Chicago Monuments Project met for the first time to discuss destroying 41 historical monuments and statues that revisionist leftists now deem racist.
So far, no final decision has been made, WBBM-TV reported.
Alderman Rossana Rodriguez, a Democratic Socialist, claims that statues commemorating historical figures such as Italian explorer Christopher Columbus must be demolished because they contribute to “systemic racism.”
“It contributes a lot to all of this systemic racism — right?” she said of the temporary removal of a Columbus statue from Grant Park in July, according to WBBM.
Moreover, Rodriguez suggested that American history should be rewritten to negate its Western foundation and promote an alternative left-wing narrative.
“How are we represented?” she asked. “How are our stories being told?”
The history-nullifying agenda in Chicago took shape in February when the Chicago Monuments Project released a list of 41 statues that it said should be considered for removal because they allegedly do the following:
- Promote “white supremacy.”
- Demean American Indians.
- Memorialize individuals with connections to slavery.
- Present “selective, over-simplified, one-sided views of history.”
- Do not sufficiently include stories about “women, people of color, and themes of labor, migration, and community building.”
- Create “tension between people who see value in these artworks and those who do not.”
Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot has called the sanctioned vandalism “a racial healing and historical reckoning project.”
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She too echoed the left-wing sentiment that it’s important to rewrite history using today’s “woke” standards.
Among the statues that are being considered for destruction include those of former Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and William McKinley as well as Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.
In addition to Columbus, “problematic” statues of white explorers Leif Ericson, Francis Drake, Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet were also tagged for potential eradication.
Baltimore just tore down the Columbus statue ✊?✊?✊?✊?✊? #blacklivesmatter pic.twitter.com/uX5ty8oI3f
— Spencer Compton (@spencercompton) July 5, 2020
Ron Onesti, president of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian-Americans, is furious about the removal of Columbus statues. He said that marginalizes and negates the contributions of Italian-Americans to U.S. history.
“I can tell you, the Italian-American community firmly believes that we want the statues back,” he said, according to WBBM.
“By taking them down, we are disrespecting and dishonoring the contributions that Italians and Italian-Americans have made to this country.”
Onesti added that it’s insensitive and tone-deaf to tell Italian-Americans that they must disavow a longtime cultural icon.
“I can’t imagine any other ethnic group would allow someone else to dictate what another ethnic group’s heroes, or icons, or legends should be,” he said.
Statues of Washington, Lincoln and other historical figures have been under siege as leftists try to erase American history.
Students are calling for an Abraham Lincoln statue to be torn down because he “owned slaves.”
There’s just one problem. He didn’t. pic.twitter.com/l8wWXISpE6
— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) October 30, 2017
This alarming trend began in earnest in 2017, shortly after former President Donald Trump took office. At the time, Confederate statues were the primary target.
The campaign has since expanded to include other historical figures that those on the left suddenly find problematic, even though they did nothing about it during the eight-year tenure of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president.
Amid the left’s race-baiting hysteria, NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley emerged as one of the few voices of reason who argued against the mass destruction of statues.
Barkley, who has voted mostly for Democrats, shared his thoughts in an August 2017 interview with Rick Karle of WVTM-TV in Birmingham, Alabama.
“I’m not going to waste my time worrying about these Confederate statues,” he said. “That’s wasted energy.”
#ConfederateStatues A unique take from #CharlesBarkley pic.twitter.com/l9Dz43sLp3
— Rick Karle WVTM 13 (@RickKarle) August 17, 2017
Barkley — who has exhorted the black community to address the epidemic of black-on-black violence — said black Americans should focus on important issues, not useless virtue-signaling.
“What we as black people need to do is: We have to worry about getting our education,” he said. “We need to stop killing each other. We need to try to find a way to have more economic opportunity and things like that. … Those things are important.”
If leftists want to cancel people with “connections to slavery,” they should start by impeaching Vice President Kamala Harris, whose family has a long history of slave ownership.
Here are the names of the 200+ slaves owned by Kamala Harris’ ancestor Hamilton Brown in Jamaica in 1817. One of the largest planters in Jamaica, Brown now has a town named after him, Brown’s Town pic.twitter.com/6QnBpEQyez
— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 12, 2020
That’s a move that at least 74 million Americans can wholeheartedly support.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
