Commenting on the type of people who are demolishing historical statues or demanding their removal, conservative author and pundit Mark Steyn said Wednesday that “We live in an age of stupid elites.”
“It’s actually tragic. What it is, I think, is a kind of civilizational regime change,” Steyn told Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “When you actually tear people away, uproot them from their entire civilizational inheritance … they have nothing to cling to … so destroying this poor old Norwegian abolitionist statue seems entirely reasonable to them.”
Carlson agreed, noting that so many of the most vocal activists are seemingly educated people. (RELATED: Protesters Vow To Take Down Emancipation Memorial Statue — That Was Entirely Funded By Freed Slaves)
“The most fanatical, the most brainwashed the dumbest of these mods tend to be the ones who went to Brown and Wesley and Duke. Why is that? I never see any HBAC repairmen pulling statues down.”
“I think we live in an age of stupid elites. I mean this is the kind of leisurely varsity, six and a half years to finish a bachelor’s degree in transgenderism and colonialism studies, that in the 19th cenutry you would have to have been the seventh son of a minor European grand duke to enjoy. Now people have expanded it so that the upper middle class go to univeristy to learn the correct attitudes,” Steyn said.
Steyn said though “there have been revolutions throughout history in which very evil persons have participated in, but I’m not sure the march of the morons isn’t actually more dangerous,” adding that having “too big a bow on your hair ribbon” could “get mistaken for a noose” — a reference to the claim that a noose was found in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage. An FBI investigation determined that no federal crime had been committer and that the noose had been there since 2019.
Citing the decision Sunday by Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to remove the statue of President Theodore Roosevelt from the entrance of the Museum of Natural History, Steyn said one piece of the artwork should be retrieved.
“They should leave the hind legs and the horse’s butt on top of it to represent the silence of conservative institutions during this great assault on Western Civilization.”
Protesters Friday tore down statues of President and Civil War Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and American anthem composer Francis Scott Key in San Francisco. (RELATED: Brian Kilmeade: Vandals Can ‘Defile’ Jackson Statue But ‘They Couldn’t Take Him Down’)
The Theodore Roosevelt Equestrian Statue, which sits on New York City public park land is seen in front of the The American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West entrance June 22, 2020. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared Monday that he considers the toppling of statues to be “a healthy expression” and a means of establishing “priorities.”
President Donald Trump said in a tweet Monday he had “authorized the Federal Government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison, per the Veteran’s Memorial Preservation Act, or such other laws that may be pertinent.”