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Is the cancel culture dead? Perhaps some extremists will never stop trying to silence people whose views they oppose. It’s also hard to believe that activists will never again denigrate historical figures for the sake of a contemporary political narrative. But the good news for our discourse and our understanding of history is that sometimes cancellations can be cancelled. Roger Kimball writes at the Spectator: This weekend, two statues
were installed on the White House grounds. On the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building stands a statue of Christopher Columbus. On the south side is “Freedom’s Charge,” a life-size portrayal by Chas Fagan of two soldiers in the Continental Army, one with a rifle, the other with a billowing Bunker Hill flag… Just a few years ago, no emblem of American achievement was safe from crusading vandals…That statue of Columbus that now stands at the White House is an exact replica of one that protesters toppled, smashed and dumped into Baltimore harbor in 2020. The new statue is fabricated in part from pieces of the original fished out from the harbor. First dedicated by Ronald Reagan in 1984, the statue’s reincarnation was
rededicated by President Trump last October. Another casualty of that rage for repudiation was a magnificent equestrian statue of Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Delaware. On July 2, 1776, despite suffering from cancer and asthma, Rodney traveled 80 miles through a raging storm to Philadelphia to cast Delaware’s deciding vote in favor of independence. His vote assured that the Declaration of Independence was passed unanimously. In 2020, on the occasion of Rodney’s 292nd birthday, President Trump noted that Rodney was “not just a Founding
Father, he was a fighter for American freedom, serving under the command of General George Washington at Trenton during the Revolution. Washington bestowed his ‘sincerest thanks’ for Rodney’s service, commending his character as deserving of the ‘highest honor’ and describing his devotion to the American cause as ‘the most distinguished.’” For the better part of a century, a statue of Rodney on horseback and holding a copy of the Declaration stood in Rodney Square in Wilmington, Delaware. But on June 12, 2020, the statue was removed, another victim of the the anti-American revisionist rage that had gripped the country. To redress that erasure, President Trump announced that a statue of Caesar Rodney would be added to the National
Garden of American Heroes, “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans who have ever lived.”
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