Which Statues Should Stay? Which Should Go? |
Which Statues Should Stay? Which Should Go?
Conservatives are not being hypocritical when they say it’s okay for Cesar Chavez statues to go, but other civic statues to stay standing.
Arthur Schaper | March 30, 2026
I’ve previously written that the United States should cancel Cesar Chavez and remove his images from the public square. Regardless of the alleged heinous crimes against women and children, he was a dedicated leftist committed to the union labor movement against farmers (and consumers) who didn’t respect free enterprise or free trade among the citizenry.
For me, this blunt decision brings up a larger question: If we should feel no compunction about tearing down Chavez, does that make conservatives in particular and common-sense Americans in general hypocrites because we opposed leftists removing other statues?
What’s the standard? Where do we draw the line? To form a more perfect union, should we scrap all the statues?
The slippery slope of social policy is real. We shouldn’t idly tear down everything we don’t like today just because our standards, knowledge, or public opinion have changed over the decades or even centuries past.
Furthermore, we must not ignore the subversive undercurrent about statute removals: Marxist agents in this country want to wipe out our entire history. Consider George Orwell’s devastating yet accurate maxim from 1984:
He who controls the present controls the past He who controls the past, controls the future.Advertisement if (publir_show_ads) { googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener("slotRenderEnded", function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == "div-hre-Americanthinker---New-3028") { googletag.display("div-hre-Americanthinker---New-3028"); } }); }); }
He who controls the present controls the past
He who controls the past, controls the future.
The important point, then, is to remember the past, not erase it. The same communistic miscreants who tried to erase two and a half centuries of American history also push climate alarmism, open borders, LGBT ideology, and collectivist ownership of property. They cannot succeed if the American people remember and revere their country, past and present.
In 2020, communists........