statue monument

belated? see RE Lee

SEE STORY 1 TRUMP HEGSETH

see neo-confederacy

7 24 also buildings re-named

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AN 6 26

A former Republican presidential adviser just called out President Donald Trump for promoting treasonous ideas on his social media accounts.

“A gift generated by AI. Except there's a problem — can you count the stars?” Steve Schmidt, who advised President George W. Bush, posted on his Substack on Tuesday. “The star count of the Confederacy. The Confederate flag is, and always has been, the MAGA flag. And so on this — the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, on the edge of the 250th anniversary of our independence — when a corrupt Supreme Court will decide whether the 14th Amendment means what it says and says what it means.”

The Confederacy consisted of 11 states that illegally seceded from the United States of America in 1860 and 1861 to preserve slavery within their jurisdictions and guarantee that it could be spread to the Western territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). President Abraham Lincoln, who like Trump was a Republican but unlike Trump supported the Constitution over far right elements in the South, ultimately defeated the Confederacy, preserved the Union and emancipated the slaves.

“On that day, this day, Donald Trump has — is — once again raised high the stars and bars, the symbol of treason that killed 800,000 Americans and is a ready replacement for the swastika at European hate rallies,” Schmidt wrote. “It is very simple, and it is what it has been for ten years: on America, or Trump. But know this — any man who would post this abomination is no American president. What he is, is Jefferson Davis's successor. A traitor to American liberty.”

As of 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) determined there were roughly 2,000 Confederate monuments remaining in the United States.

“While the term ‘domestic terror’ did not exist back then, the actions of those who championed the so-called Lost Cause mirror what we see today,” Lecia Brooks, the SPLC’s Chief of Staff and Culture, wrote to Salon in 2022. “All of this iconography was used as racist props to intimidate and remind African Americans of their place, first and foremost. Their widespread placement allowed the Confederacy to reimagine its treasonous acts as a noble effort while minimizing their brutal role in preserving slavery.”

She added, “The perception of being disrespected, dishonored, rejected, or treated as inferior — what psychological professionals call ‘narcissistic wounds’ — can be powerful drivers of violence.”

Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election is similar to the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause” mythology, according to experts, because both rely on myths to justify their cause. While the Lost Cause mythology claims that the Confederacy fought for a noble cause rather than being treasonous white supremacists, Trump’s Big Lie holds that the 2020 election was stolen from him even though the president has long claimed that any contest he loses was rigged (including the Emmy Awards for not nominating his reality TV show “The Apprentice,” the 2016 Republican Iowa caucuses and the 2016 popular vote) and his claims about the 2020 election were conclusively debunked by the American legal system.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” conservative writer George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post in February. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

Upon taking office in both of his terms, Trump has tried to promote Confederate iconography such as by hanging a portrait of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at the West Point library.

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AN TC 4 26

Christopher Columbus is back. At least, a statue of him is back, reinstalled by US President Donald Trump on the White House grounds in late March – part of the president’s stated mission to cancel “cancel culture”.

The resurrection of Columbus made good on Trump’s 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”.

The statue is in fact a replica of the original thrown into Baltimore Harbor by protesters on Independence Day 2020 during the Black Lives Matter upheavals of the first Trump presidency.

The protests targeted monuments “honoring white supremacists, owners of enslaved people, perpetrators of genocide, and colonizers”. But damaged pieces of the Columbus statue were later salvaged and became a model for the copy.

Trump has since championed Columbus as “the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth”.

He might have chosen any statue of the explorer and navigator from Genoa who pioneered European colonisation of the Americas. But clearly reinstating one removed by his opponents sends a more powerful message.

‘Improper partisan ideology’

Restoring statues to their original location isn’t simply about undoing their previous removal. It’s designed to reverse what some see as attempts to “erase history”.

And it has a long history of its own. Roman emperors once feared being condemned to obscurity through “damnatio memoriae” – having their statues destroyed, coins melted down and names chiselled from the facades of buildings.

Trump’s executive order was very much about retaliating against those who want to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology”.

Relocating a memorial to a more prominent location – from Baltimore to the White House, for instance – goes one step further. It amplifies the significance of the historical figure and the symbolic restoration of their reputation.

But sometimes just restoring a statue to its original site is symbolism enough.

Statue of Albert Pike in Washington DC, 2025. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

The memorial to Albert Pike, for example, was and is the only outdoor statue of a Confederate general in Washington DC. Pulled down by protesters in 2020 and returned in 2025, its merits have long been debated.

Pike was a disgraced figure, accused of misappropriating funds and allowing his troops to desecrate the bodies of Union soldiers. There are also alleged ties to an early version of the Ku Klux Klan.

In the words of congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, “Pike represents the worst of the Confederacy and has no claim to be memorialized in the Nation’s capital.”

Advocates for the statue’s retention note there is no mention of the Confederacy or depiction of a military uniform, only Pike’s contribution to the American Freemasons.

But when the statue was pulled down in 2020, Trump certainly took sides: “The DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our country.”

‘Woke lemmings’

Of course, history isn’t always simple, as memorialising the American Civil War shows.

Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia was established in 1864 as a national military cemetery, with a Confederate section dedicated in 1900 as part of the effort to promote reconciliation between the North and South.

Its Confederate Memorial (designed by a Confederate veteran) features a female figure representing the South holding symbols of peace. A bronze relief below depicts sanitised images of slavery: a woman caring for white children, and a man following his owner into battle as his servant.

A biblical quotation below preaches peace: “They have beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

But another quote in Latin – “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” – references Julius Caesar’s victory in the Roman civil war and casts the South’s defeat as a noble lost cause.

The monument was erected in 1914, removed by Congress in 2023, and is scheduled to return in 2027. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on social media it “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history – we honor it.”

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama addresses a rally before a statue of Caesar Rodney in Wilmington, Delaware, 2008. Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images

Defiant choices

Similarly, an equestrian statue of Founding Father Caesar Rodney – installed in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1923 and removed in 2020 to prevent damage by protesters – highlights these contested readings of history.

Rodney is famous for riding all night from Delaware to Philadelphia, through a thunderstorm, to break a deadlock and cast the deciding vote in favour of American independence in 1776.

But as well as being a brigadier general and signatory to the Declaration of Independence, he owned 200 slaves on his family’s plantation.

The statue is now scheduled to reappear for six months, this time in Washington DC, to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary on July 4. It will be installed in Freedom Plaza, named in honour of Martin Luther King Junior.

Placing the contested statue of a famous slave owner in a space dedicated to a Black civil rights leader is a provocative, if not defiant, choice. And it shows again how powerful symbols and symbolic actions can be.

The argument that removing statues also erases history doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It conflates public visibility and symbolic placement with actual knowledge of the past.

In that sense, reinstalling controversial memorials is, in itself, an attempt to rewrite history by erasing a more recent past and returning to an old, disputed status quo.

Garritt C. Van Dyk, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Waikato

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an 9 25

President Donald Trump is making it clear that he is sick of talking about Jeffrey Epstein and wants to move on, yet the scandal surrounding the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) files on the billionaire financier and convicted sex offender isn't going away. And some Trump critics, according to HuffPost reporter Brandi Buchman, are using a satirical Trump/Epstein statue to troll the U.S. president.

"A 12-foot statue of President Donald Trump and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein holding hands and prancing together was erected on the National Mall early Tuesday, (September 23)," Buchman explains. "Three plaques appear alongside the satirical faux-bronze statues, courtesy of a mysterious group that goes by the name The Secret Handshake. The plaques note the statues are 'in Honor of Friendship Month' in September."

One of the plaques, according to Buchman, reads, "We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his 'closest friend' Jeffrey Epstein."

The statues, according to Buchman, come from a group calling itself The Secret Handshake.

The group's leader, quoted anonymously, told HuffPost, "No one else publicly that we know of partied with Donald Trump, traveled with Donald Trump and visited at Mar-a-Lago just as a friend, not just as an associate. Since this is Friendship Month, we wanted to celebrate what is presumably, at least publicly, Donald Trump's only true friend."

an 8 25

Trump officials slammed for restoring Confederate general painting to West Point library RELee

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SEE HEGSETH ~ DEI JACKIE ROBINSON MEMORY HOLE

AN 6 25

'Making America racist again': Trump slammed for renaming military bases after 'traitors'

Ailia Zehra

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wi 2024

The naming of the library for Prosser came just before his retirement in 2016 after a tumultuous tenure on the court that included heated exchanges with Walsh Bradley, who was one of the justices who made the decision to remove his name from the library this week.

In 2011, Walsh Bradley asked Prosser to seek therapy to manage his anger after he put his hands around her neck during one tense incident. He declined to do so.

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aho/ doh let us recall that Charlottesville very fine ppl started over defence of reb statue, now Portland secret police continues/culminates?

trmp triples down, take $ from mil if rename forts?!

this is about metaphorical extension? long used in law?  escaped AA slaves were contraband?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/1151617/

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authorized domestic surveillance to identify threats against monuments and statues in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting vandalism against federal memorials, according to a department memo obtained by Lawfare.

The document, issued by the DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis, described “Activities in Furtherance of Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, Statues and Combatting Recent Criminal Violence.”

The document says DHS personnel are “collecting and reporting on various activities in the context of elevated threats targeting monuments, memorials and statues.” It also provides legal guidance on the “expanded intelligence activities necessary to mitigate the significant threat to homeland security” posed by threats to statues.

Senior DHS official Ken Cuccinelli appeared to refer to intelligence gathering on protests during a Monday interview with CNN.

“We got intelligence about planned attacks on federal facilities,” he said in response to questions about the administration’s controversial deployment of federal authorities to Portland. “If we get the same kind of intelligence in other places about threats to other facilities or officers, we would respond the same way.”

But the memo “makes clear that the authorized intelligence activity covers significantly more than just planned attacks on federal personnel or facilities,” wrote Benjamin Wittes, a Lawfare editor, and Steve Vladeck, a national security law expert at the University of Texas School of Law. “It appears to also include planned vandalism of Confederate (and other historical) monuments and statues, whether federally owned or not.”...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/candace-owens/candace-owens-defends-waving-confederate-flag-it-represents-element-history

also wore reb uniform?

https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/facebook-video**-doug-mastriano**-thanked-pro-confederate-armed-men-supposedly

720

2 minutes before midnight on Tuesday evening, the leader of the free world issued a veto threat through his Twitter feed.

President Donald Trump, using a racial slur, threatened to veto the Defense Authorization Act if it includes language to change the names of military bases named for Confederate generals.

The Confederate generals were enemies who killed hundreds of thousands of American troops to defend slavery. no lnx

I will Veto the Defense Authorization Bill if the Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren (of all people!) Amendment, which will lead to the renaming (plus other bad things!) of Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, and many other Military Bases from which we won Two World Wars, is in the Bill!

chris columbus 2 down? beheded?

uk bristol colton slaver

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blk car w/ blm logo?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/nascar-driver-who-quit-over-confederate-flag-ban-slammed-dems-over-checks-to-illegals/

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robt e lee

monuments to America’s racist history are getting toppled amid mass protests

Democracy Now

Monuments celebrating the nation’s racist history are coming down in several states after being targeted by protesters over the past week. On Wednesday, the city of Philadelphia removed a statue…

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/white-supremacists-see-escalating-tensions-in-small-north-carolina-town-as-an-opportunity-to-radicalize-armed-neo-confederates/

no lnx

White supremacists see escalating tensions in small North Carolina town as an opportunity to radicalize armed neo-Confederates

Written by Jordan Green / Raw Story October 20, 2019

Neo-Confederate activists and antiracists clashed briefly in Pittsboro, NC, a town west of Raleigh, on Saturday, when a man wearing a “Trump 2020” hat and a face mask attempted to drive a front-end loader festooned with Confederate flags down a street where the two groups were facing off.

After antiracists blocked the driver, a local man identified as Sam White, neo-Confederate activists spilled into the street demanding that he be allowed to pass. Neo-Confederates, at least one of whom was armed with a holstered pistol, and antiracists engaged in shoving and grabbing before police separated the two groups and cleared the roadway.

For weeks, Pittsboro has been the scene of increasingly tense confrontations between neo-Confederates, many of them armed, and antiracists, after the Chatham County Board of Commissioners voted 4-1 to give the United Daughters of the Confederacy an Oct. 31 deadline to remove the Confederate monument in front of the Chatham County Historic Courthouse — at the center of a roundabout in the middle of town. A conglomeration of neo-Confederate groups led by the Virginia Flaggers responded about a month ago by erecting a Confederate flag across the street from Horton Middle School, a historically black school named for Moses Horton, a former slave and published poet. The move has been received by many townspeople, black and white, as a deliberate act of racial intimidation.

A scuffle broke out in Pittsboro after antiracists blocked a masked man on a front-end loader with Confederate flags pic.twitter.com/SdBgPgm7dY

— Jordan Green (@jordangreentcb) October 19, 2019

The escalating conflict over the monument has attracted the attention of overtly white supremacist groups who see an opportunity to radicalize neo-Confederate groups that claim that they are not racist and are merely motivated by a desire to protect “heritage.” Members of the League of the South, a group that advocates the creation of a white ethno-state in the former states of the Confederacy and took part in the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. two years ago, have shown up in Pittsboro on three previous occasions.

Saturday’s rally also caught the attention of Billy Roper, a neo-Nazi organizer in Arkansas, who warned his followers that antiracists would attempt to tear down the Confederate monument. Roper promised in a post in advance of the rally that he would have a report this weekend on his podcast about “the accelerating situation in Pittsboro.” Accelerationism is a concept embraced by an array of white power groups, including Atomwaffen, that violence and chaos is desirable because it will hasten the collapse of society and bring on a race war.

Antiracists march thru Pittsboro, NC to counter-protest neo-Confederates opposed to the removal of a Confederate monument #Pittsboro pic.twitter.com/ljIqhUsVRy

— Jordan Green (@jordangreentcb) October 19, 2019

Pittsboro lies on a political and cultural fault line in North Carolina, with a split between the more progressive residents in the urbanizing northeast corner closer to the Triangle — the urban area comprised of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill — and more rural, conservative areas to the west. Chatham County was narrowly carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016, while in some rural precincts Trump earned as much as 88.8 percent of the vote. After protesters tore down Confederate monuments in Durham and Chapel Hill, and the city of Winston-Salem removed its monument, neo-Confederates view the impending removal of the monument in Pittsboro as a dangerous tipping point.

“The conflict was unavoidable, given what’s happening across the nation, and what’s happening in the Triangle,” said Randy Voller, the former mayor of Pittsboro and former North Carolina Democratic Party chairman. “We’re the next logical place. The added fuel to the fire is the notion of putting up a Confederate battle flag across from a historically black school. They know that the Confederate flag is negative iconography, and they’re trying to use it as leverage to get the county commission to back down from removing the monument.”

The “Pittsboro Confederate Monument Rally” was advertised as taking place in front of the historic courthouse at noon. Antiracists from Chatham County and across the Triangle region responded with a “unity march” to a parking lot across from the courthouse beginning at 10 a.m. The unity march, which drew about 200 antiracists, represented a compromise between local residents rooted in nonviolent traditions and more seasoned activists from the Triangle who uphold a principle of de-platforming to make neo-Confederates feel uncomfortable.

Kirsten Coleman, one of the speakers at the rally, recalled attending Northwood High School in Pittsboro and seeing the Confederate soldier atop a pedestal in front of the historic courthouse.

“Every single day that was what I had to face, and see that this town was not welcoming to me or my people,” Coleman said. “This is a clear indication that we have never been welcome here. And yet it is a place where we have built our families. We have worked tirelessly, and yet we have never been welcomed. I want a place, a nation — not just in Pittsboro, but all across the United States where we can live up to the principles that some of the founding fathers put into the Constitution about all men being equal.

“We as people of color have to circle that statue and deal with the intimidation,” she said in an interview afterwards. “We’re not going to be intimidated anymore. We’re going to discard the fear and intimidation. We’re going to get our rights.”

The promised neo-Confederate rally never transpired at the historic courthouse. Instead, they gathered at the Confederate flag site across from the middle school over the course of the day, reaching a peak of about 60 people. After the antiracist rally across from the courthouse, antiracists dressed in black massed across the road, with the auxiliary antiracist gathering outnumbering the neo-Confederates two to one.

The League of the South did not play a prominent role in Saturday’s flag rally, although James Shillinglaw, who attended a conference co-hosted by the League of the South in June in Tennessee, showed up.

League members have conspicuously displayed their flag at previous rallies in Pittsboro, and on Oct. 5, a North Carolina activist displayed the League flag, along with a black “Q” flag from a pole on his truck at the site across from Horton Middle School.

The “Q” flag, which is embraced by League members and more extreme members of the neo-Confederate movement, honors William Quantrill, a Confederate guerilla leader who led an 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kans., resulting in the massacre of civilians and burning most of the town.

Howard Graves, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Quantrill’s campaign holds a particular relevance for current-day neo-Confederates and white secessionists.

Graves said that Michael Hill, the president of the League of the South, has “said about Charlottesville that it should suffer the same fate as Lawrence, Kansas. That encapsulates the view that any municipality that goes against Confederate values should suffer violence, full stop.”

“With Pittsboro, it seems like there are protesters that have centered on this iconography,” Graves added. “We’re seeing them incorporate this more into their identity.”

In addition to an array of neo-Confederate groups, including CSA II, ACTBAC NC and Heirs to the Confederacy, Saturday’s flag rally attracted several members of the Hiwaymen, a far-right group with an anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ stance that participated in the Unite the Right rally and a Patriot Prayer gathering in Portland, Ore., along with at least one member of the Proud Boys.

Responding to a statement by the rally organizers that League of the South members would not be welcome n Pittsboro on Saturday, Hiwaymen leader Billy Helton angrily declared on Facebook Live: “We will stand with LOS. We will stand with Billy Roper.”

While insisting that he and the Hiwaymen are not white supremacists or “Jew-haters,” Helton told his audience they agree with the League and Roper on a couple points. “And that’s keeping our society together and putting Christianity out front, and protect our history and heritage,” Helton said. “Sorry, if you ain’t into that, you can go to hell.”

On Saturday, Pittsboro resident Crystal Wright surveyed the neo-Confederate flaggers with dismay.

“They have hidden motives,” she said. “There are things that are very dark here.”

She recalled that on Sept. 28, a North Carolina neo-Confederate activist named Tom Parnell pointed at a black antiracist protester and said, “I got a rope for you.

“If you’re standing out here for this monument, what correlation does a rope have?” she asked.

Artis Johnson,who was also standing across the road from the neo-Confederate flaggers on Saturday, confirmed that he was the recipient of the racist threat.

Tempers flared as the afternoon wore on. Twice after the front-end loader festooned with Confederate flags was turned back by counter-protesters, antiracists crossed the road to the side where the neo-Confederate flaggers were gathered. In one instance, they stole a Bible, and Molly Conger, an antiracist from Charlottesville taunted them by tearing the pages out and lighting it on fire, while admonishing, “Sweetie, I looked and I didn’t see anything about the defense of the Confederacy. Are you sure you got the right version?”

Later, after the two groups dared each other to fight, antiracists crossed the street to oblige, and Proud Boy Jay Thaxton shoved an antiracist before police broke up the altercation.

The taunts continued from one side of the road to the other. Among those still itching for a fight was Johnson.

“Meet me in the fucking grass, bitch,” he yelled across the road. “I’m from a fucking slave family.”

Joran Green is the senior editor at Triad City Beat, an altweekly in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina.

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