“He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbour without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile. He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick, without his tyranny; Napoleon, without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward.” Benjamin Harvey Hill (former Confederate Senator from Georgia), 1874.

“He had a calm and collected air about him, his voice was kind and tender, and his eye was as gentle as a dove’s. His whole make-up of form and person, looks and manner had a kind of gentle and soothing magnetism about it that drew every one to him and made them love, respect, and honor him.” Samuel R. Watkins, veteran of 1st Tennessee Regiment, 1881.

Last weekend, the communist city council of Charlottesville removed Lee’s statue and, as a scorched earth policy, even demolished its base.

Christopher Caldwell, in Claremont Review, marvels at how quickly a minority mob of radicals has seized power nationally and successfully enforced its own crude and simplistic ideological perspective.

As recently as 2014, biographer Michael Korda was able to describe Lee in Clouds of Glory as “universally admired even by those who have little or no sympathy toward the cause for which he fought.” Korda might have been thinking of Dwight Eisenhower, who considered Lee one of the four greatest Americans and hung his portrait in the Oval Office alongside those of the other three (Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Lincoln). “General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation,” Eisenhower wrote, “selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.”…

Lee had a good 20th century. The greatest biography of him remains Freeman’s Pulitzer-winning life—heroic and punctilious, if a bit purple for modern tastes. It has had its measured defenders and its measured detractors, though almost all readers accepted its assessment of Lee’s importance.

In our own century, things have changed. The urgent, invective-filled attacks on Lee that are beginning to appear would have seemed overheated even if the Civil War were still going on. …

The reassessment of Lee’s position in American history has almost everything to do with a shift in the way we talk about race. This shift has come about the way most recent shifts in intellectual fashion have—not so much because of any new historical information but because of the arrival in journalism and academia, by a process so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, of the bureaucratic oversight and litigative intimidation enabled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

RTWT

Stonewall Jackson’s monument was pulled down along with Lee’s, and the tricoteuses of Charlottesville celebrated their victory by voting unanimously to add their city’s famous statue of explorers Lewis & Clark to the purge list.

Statue of Lee removed from Charlottesville, VA park.

CBS19:

Charlottesville Circuit Judge Richard Moore has ruled that the statues are war monuments, which are protected under state law. That likely means the city doesn’t have the legal right to take them down.

In his nine page ruling, Moore cites the fact that both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are depicted in their military uniforms and on horses associated with their time in the Civil War.

“I believe that defendants have confused or conflated 1) what the statues are with 2) the intentions or motivations of some involved in erecting them, or the impact that they might have on some people and how they might make some people feel,” Moore writes. “But that does not change what they are.”

Moore finds the issue to be so clear-cut that “if the matter went to trial on this issue and a jury were to decide that they are not monuments or memorials to veterans of the civil war, I would have to set such verdict aside as unreasonable…”

The lawsuit was filed after Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the statue of Lee in early 2017. City councilors Mike Signer, Kathy Galvin and Wes Bellamy are named individually for their roles in that vote, as are former councilors Bob Fenwick and Kristin Szakos.

While legal analysts have said this ruling could sink the city’s defense, Moore notes that this ruling doesn’t guarantee the plaintiffs will prevail.

He still has several other motions under consideration.

Plaintiffs spokesperson Buddy Weber says plaintiffs are pleased, but also cited the remaining motions as questions that still need to be answered.

In an email, city spokesperson Brian Wheeler says the judge now has to decide whether the city has to pay damages and attorneys fees and whether that question will go to trial in September.

In his ruling, Moore writes that he hopes to rule on remaining motions in the next month.

No police intervention occurred even when black ANTIFA counter-demonstrators used aerosol flame-throwers.

My various left-wing correspondents are all energized by the violence in Charlottesville, and are demanding that those of us on the Right take the blame, apologize, and get busy denouncing all those racists and White Supremacists.

It’s sad to see left-right violence, including pepper spray and baseball bats, on American streets, reminding us all a bit of Weimar Germany. But it was obviously not the Conservative Movement, not even the Alt-Right, that brought about these kinds of poisonous national divisions, that fostered all the chauvinistic identity politics, and that provoked the violence.

Our friends on the Left are demanding that we denounce all the demonstrators protesting the removal of the Lee Statue and that we agree to identify all of them as “White Supremacists” and dismiss their motivations as “racism.” There were clearly some fringe group crazies participating in the demonstrations and some unsavory people were present, but that doesn’t make everyone who demonstrated a Nazi, a Klan member, or a White Supremacist.

I don’t recall any time I have ever heard our friends on the Left denouncing the most extreme communist radicals responsible for violence. Actually, they offer excuses, blame the anger of their radical extremists on America and the rest of us, and when their bomb-building murderers get out of jail, they give them teaching positions at universities.

So, sorry, I have no intention of identifying the generality of demonstrators as White Supremacists. I think they were mostly normal people defending their regional and cultural identity, who had been at last pushed too far, who were finally fed up with being insulted and marginalized.

I don’t think most people there had any connection at all to the crazy person from Ohio who drove his car into the counter-demonstrators or to the zanies carrying Swastika flags. And it seems obvious to me that left-wing local and state government took a partisan role, instructing state and city police to stand aside and let ANTIFA thugs intimidate and rough up the demonstrators trying to defend the monument.

The Left, today, is playing its usual propaganda games, trying to stigmatize and shame the opposition, but I think they fail to understand that they’ve been using the same tactics and techniques too long. The Alt-Right is reading Saul Alinsky, too. Their pet media has lost credibility with much of the country, and a lot of us are just completely tired of having the Left play the Race Card.

Erection of Lee Monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, 1924

VDare claims the police were on ANTIFA’s side.

[T]he police did not protect demonstrators from Antifa and did little to prevent confrontations. Attendees of the demonstration, rather than walking a clear path to the park, were instead forced to walk through a line of screaming protesters. Liberal clergyman and elderly women held signs about “peace” and “love” and smiled benevolently—as violent Leftist protesters attacked from the crowd. They are as culpable as the Antifa themselves for the violence unleashed.

But that was not close to the worst. Demonstrators did not need protection from Antifa. All the police would have had to do to ensure a safe demonstration was simply go home—which is what happened in Berkeley. Patriots equipped with shields, inured to Antifa tactics of throwing bricks and spraying mace, had secured Lee Park (excuse me, “Emancipation Park”) and may indeed have outnumbered both Antifa and counter-demonstrators in terms of pure numbers. Several were armed, and the city fathers should be offering Unite The Right activists tearful tributes for the latter’s saint-like restraint in not opening fire despite more than justified provocation.

If police had done nothing, the public would have been safer. Instead, unforgivably, the police attacked (not dispersed—attacked) the legal demonstration, threatening attendees with arrest if they stayed in Lee Park.

Then activists, totally unprotected by police, were deliberately funneled into a gauntlet of attacking Communists, in a kind of Kill Zone. Injuries on both sides were predictable. (Of course, much like cuckservatives who bow and scrape to the Main Stream Media, the police were then insulted by the Communists for their trouble.

This could have been a relatively stable situation: a patriot demonstration protected by its own shield wall (and ideally, by police who actually did their job) along with a separate group of Leftist protesters, with both groups enjoying the right to free speech supposedly guaranteed them by the Constitution.

Instead, the police precipitated a running battle which engulfed all of Charlottesville. The result: Antifa running wild and chasing down isolated pockets of Unite The Right attendees as the latter defended themselves as best they could, with bystanders were caught in the melee. Police showed no interest in doing anything other than threatening patriots with arrests for “unlawful assembly.”

In contrast, of course, Leftists were free to disobey the laws and marched merrily down the streets, many chanting “Black Lives Matter!”, causing chaos as they went. As Rebel Media’s Faith Goldy reported, this was an absurd “double standard.” Anarcho-Tyranny was the order of the day in C-Ville.

I don’t look upon VDare as an unimpeachable source, but we are not going to find a lot of descriptions of yesterday’s violence sympathetic to the demonstrators trying to defend the statue. It does make sense that the police would be on counter-demonstrators’ side, they are working for the same City Council that renamed the park and that voted to remove the statue of General Lee.

RTWT