Professor Victor Davis Hanson said Monday that the wave of statue removal in the United States is “about humiliation and power.”
“They always have a minority of a population that’s not about the icon on the statue, it’s about humiliation and power,” Hanson told “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“So if you’re going to take down Teddy Roosevelt at the National Museum, why don’t you go to Mount Rushmore and blow Teddy Roosevelt up? You don’t want to do that because the people in that area of the Dakotas might resist.”
Hanson suggested that if people really want to get rid of “Robert E. Lee’s head in Washington” they would also head to Stone Mountain, Georgia and deface a bas relief monument with Lee’s image on it. “They won’t do that because they know a few people will stand up and say, ‘you’re not going to do that.’”
Hanson said conservatives helped spur the destruction of American history by allowing Confederate statues to be taken down, if the local city council authorized it. (RELATED: Tucker Carlson: Black Lives Matters Believes In Force … When They Want Something They Take It’)
“The mob says back to them, ‘you want it gone, why waste the city council vote?’ It’s sort of like the Soviet Duma has to ratify a prejudged conclusion and it’s not ‘let the city council come to any conclusion they want.’”
Although statues of Confederate leaders were first targeted by protesters, that list has expanded to a variety of American leaders. Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Sunday that the statue of President Theodore Roosevelt would be removed from the entrance of the Museum of Natural History. Protesters Friday tore down a statue of President and Civil War Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco.
Supporters of statue removal argue that the structures promote historical figures who directly or indirectly supported white supremacy.
Hanson also jumped on the senior leadership in the American military who have endorsed renaming bases that are named after Confederate generals. “They glom onto the revolution thinking it’s going to carry them in their career to new trajectories,” Hanson argued. (RELATED: Tucker Carlson: Democrats Are Rebounding Because ‘Republicans Ran Away’ From Riots And Violence)
He said it is time for brave men and women who are prepared to say “it isn’t going to happen anymore, you’re not going to do it, come into my neighborhood and you’re not going to like what’s going to happen.”
Graffiti is seen on a burned out 7Eleven after riots and looting overnight on June 2, 2020 in St Louis, Missouri. Four police officers were reportedly shot in St. Louis overnight during violent clashes with protesters leading to looting and damage to local businesses. (Photo by Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)
Hanson defined the upcoming presidential election as no longer being about “Donald Trump’s tweeting. It’s not about Joe Biden’s cognitive impairment. It has nothing to do anymore with a lockdown, the virus, the economy, foreign policy. It’s an existential question, a … choice between whether you want civilization and you believe that America doesn’t have to be perfect to be good … and we’re not going to destroy all that people died for … ”
“And that’s the choice we are looking at. And I’m going to vote for civilization.”