The Patriot Post® · Canceling America

Last week, Columbus, Ohio, removed a 16-foot statue of its namesake, Christopher Columbus, following an order by Mayor Andrew Ginther who declare that “for many people in our community, the statue represents patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness. That does not represent our great city.” The statue, a gift from the people of Genoa, Italy, had sat in front of city hall for over 65 years. And it’s not just Columbus’s statue that may go the way of the dodo — the state capital is also mulling a name change. A petition trumpeting “Flavortown” has garnered 118,000 signatures.

The University of North Carolina recently released its new directives that include the requirement that all students be trained in the right-think tenets of leftist ideology. As explained in an email from UNC chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, it’s part of the school’s effort to fight “structural racism. This fall we will implement an online diversity, equity and inclusion training, similar to our required Title IX awareness and violence prevention training, for every person in our community to learn new concepts, broaden perspectives and allow us to work from a common set of terms.”

The list of resources for this indoctrination include such dubious works like the New York Times “1619 Project,” “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” “Me and White Supremacy,” and “75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice,” to name a few.

These are merely two examples of a growing trend now sweeping the nation, which is calling for the expunging of everything that may have been “offensive” and “oppressive” regarding our nation’s history. It’s cancel culture — the divisive and false notion that removing any evidence of that which “offends” will lead to a better, “safer,” and more “inclusive” society. In reality, cancel culture is the battle cry of revolution.

This revolution is fundamentally anti-American. It may have started with seemingly cogent complaints over Confederate statues and monuments, but it has quickly expanded into condemning all America’s past leaders and now our nation’s Founders.

Most tellingly is the unmitigated arrogance and self-righteousness exuded by this young generation leading this cancel-culture revolution. Seeing themselves as more virtuous than those who came before them, they are unwilling to actually learn from and appreciate the real and significant accomplishments of these historical figures they so easily and vociferously condemn. This cancel-culture generation is boiling down every American leader to their most base components of gender and race — and all their accomplishments are being erased on account of the common “failings” of the era in which they lived.

Ironically, these leftist revolutionaries idolize and lionize some of history’s most diabolical and despicable individuals. As Power Line’s John Hinderaker observes, “[Columbus] was a prince of a fellow compared with, say, the psychopathic mass murderer Che Guevara. Or the serial killers on an industrial scale, Lenin, Stalin, Castro and Mao, all of whom are A-OK, apparently, with American liberals.”

The end goal of this effort is all too clear — bringing an end to the greatest and freest nation the world has ever known. Unfortunately, those mind-numbed masses caught up in the “woke” mob don’t realize they are destroying their own future.