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3 Protesters Who Allegedly Tore Down UNC Confederate Statue Get Slammed with Consequences

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Destroying property whose message your values don’t coincide with has recently been adopted as an unalienable right by liberals everywhere.

The criminal justice system, alas, does not agree.

Three individuals who tore down a statue of “Silent Sam” — a Confederate war soldier meant to mark the South’s war dead — were charged with offenses, according to Fox News.

“North Carolina Police filed charges Friday against three people they say played some part in tearing down a century-old Confederate statue during a protest this week,” Fox reported. “Hundreds of student protesters gathered at the University of North Carolina’s campus in Chapel Hill Monday night to bring down the statue known as ‘Silent Sam.’

“Using ropes and violent force, the protesters toppled the statue which had stood that ground since 1913.

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“The university said in a news release that the unidentified individuals were not affiliated with the school and they have been charged with misdemeanor charges of rioting and defacing a public monument.”

“I will tell you absolutely that we had no anticipation of any plans to tear down the statue,” Chancellor Carol Folt said on Thursday.

There are two interesting facts to note here.

The first is that, like so many other violent events on college campuses (see also: Berkeley, University of California at), the perpetrators weren’t actually students.

Do you think these individuals should serve time if convicted?

They were outside agitators who thought that their values ought to be brought to taxpayer-supported institutions by violent, destructive force. Just don’t expect them to extrapolate that same tolerance for taxpayer-supported values if, say, Ben Shapiro is expected to give a peaceful address.

The second is that these statues are meant to commemorate those who died for the South during the Civil War. Liberal groups commonly argue the statues were put up to enforce white supremacy and intimidate African-Americans in the South during the postbellum era.

Except they weren’t. The South didn’t need to. They had Jim Crow, a rigged justice system, the Klan and terrorism in the form of lynchings to do all of this, and all brought to you courtesy of the Democrats.

Bluntly put, they certainly didn’t need statues to accomplish any of the things anti-statue agitators claim these monuments were meant to do, and they would be a stupid waste of money if that was what those who erected them meant for them to do. Logic 101 tells us these statues were to simply commemorate those who had fought and fallen in the Civil War.

Many of the students at the University of North Carolina, when “Silent Sam” was first put up, had probably lost not-so-distant relatives in the war. It was a traumatic event that the South was still processing — and the statue now stands as a historical monument both to that trauma and those who died.

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If protesters want to “contextualize” the statue by putting up a plaque explaining why they think the deaths of Confederate soldiers aren’t really worth remembering, that’s fine. I guarantee you, given the state of academia in the 21st century, almost any chancellor would have acquiesced.

That’s not what these “protesters” wanted to do. They wanted to destroy history — and property along with it.

Liberal activists think that sort of thing is fine. We think destroying history is a fundamentally unserious and dangerous way to deal with it. The law thinks destroying property is illegal.

Three individuals just found out that last part the hard way.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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