Virginia Republicans remained silent over the weekend as statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, as well as famed explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, were torn down in Charlottesville following a multi-year effort by the left-wing city council, aided by Democrats in Richmond, that helped kicked off the nationwide removal of statues and monuments deemed too white by the left.
Crews worked Saturday morning in front adoring left-wing crowds of supporters to destroy the monuments to Generals Lee and Jackson, with city officials then calling a snap meeting with almost no notice made to the public to vote on the removal of the famed Lewis and Clark statue. After a unanimous vote by the far-left council, the same crew that tore down Lee and Jackson was immediately re-dispatched to erase more history. The statue also depicted Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s female Shoshone Indian guide.
The far-left took victory laps over the historical vandalism, with former Charlottesville Vice Mayor and “Our Black Party” co-chair Wes Bellamy claiming that “God literally promised me this would happen” over Twitter, and Vice Mayor Nikuyah Walker, who ran for office under the tri-color “pan-African” flag, telling local media that the monuments’ removal would help bring the end of “whiteness as supreme” in the city and the nation.
Though GOP nominee for Governor Glenn Youngkin was joined at campaign stops in Southwest Virginia over the weekend by Lt. Governor nominee Winsome Sears and Attorney General nominee Jason Miyares, the candidates at the top of Virginia’s GOP ticket seemed to have remained silent as the statues came down.
Despite the national media attention, and the issue of preserving American history ranking high on the agendas of conservative Virginia voters in 2021, recent social media posts from the campaigns have also remained mum on the monument destruction, giving voters another reason to accuse the candidates of trying to “out-centrist” their Democrat opponents to win election.
“Removing the Lee statue was never about the Civil War, the Confederacy, or even slavery,” 2017 GOP nominee for Virginia Governor Corey Stewart, who made the defense of American history a centerpiece of his campaign, told National File after the statues came down.
“We know that because within hours of removing Lee, they ripped down the statue of Lewis and Clark and their American Indian guide Sacagawea. It’s about erasing American history. And they won’t stop until it’s all gone – unless we stop them.”
Charlottesville’s monument fight attracted national media attention in 2016 and 2017, after then-Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy, who has been at the forefront of the left’s anti-American history movement, was exposed for a series of anti-white posts to Twitter in which he also declared that “it ain’t rape if she moan.” The national spotlight continued to shine on the Central Virginia city as violent left-wingers, often accused by local conservative activists of operating under the command of Bellamy and other city council members, physically clashed with monument supporters, culminating in the 2017 Unite the Right Rally, the mainstream media-endorsed narrative of which was used as a key campaign wedge issue by Democrats during subsequent election cycles.
As seems to remain the case in 2021, most Republican politicians publicly distanced themselves from the Charlottesville monument fight, ultimately seeming to surrender to the radical left for fear of being labeled a racist.
