Thursday night under the cover of darkness, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot sent a crane into Grant Park to remove a beautiful statue of Christopher Columbus that had stood for decades.

Afterwards, the crane was deployed to nearby Arrigo Park to tear down another Columbus statue that had long stood as a monument to America’s beginning.

Here’s why we should care: Earlier this week, a group of hundreds of thugs that police said resembled a military platoon tried to tear down the Grant Park statue.

Drone footage of the attack showed an elaborate command structure with supply lines delivering new projectiles for the assailants to throw at the police, who had encircled the statue to protect it.

The police stood their ground for an hour. Multiple officers suffered concussions; one may lose an eye after being hit by an explosive device. The officers were ordered not to use weapons, so they had to engage in hand-to-hand combat merely to protect themselves.

The police, and civilization, won that battle.

But now, just a few days later, the left-wing political leadership of Chicago — cowards one and all — have caved in to these left-wing storm troopers. And they didn’t even have the courage to do it in the light of day.

The political left in America increasingly refuses to defend our country. It won’t defend symbols of our national pride — our national anthem, our Constitution, or our Declaration of Independence.

It won’t defend our borders. And it won’t defend the police who keep us safe.

It wants to defund the police and our armed forces. Increasingly, it is neutral at best when confronted by our enemies, especially communist China.

As the Trump administration takes on the growing danger from communist China, the left instinctively takes our enemy’s side.

Do you think the world is a dangerous place? Of course you do. And yet Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) this week led an effort to pass an amendment to drastically cut funding for national security. Thankfully, there are enough patriots left in Congress that the amendment failed.

But there will be other opportunities, especially if Joe Biden becomes president. Sanders did little to help Hillary Clinton after she won the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. But he’s being a team player this time around. Biden’s inner circle is full of former Bernie staffers. And Sanders is advising the former vice president as he develops the party’s policy platform. There’s a good chance defunding the police and defunding our armed forces will be part of that platform.

There are a lot of differences between the left and right in America. But the most fundamental difference has to do with how each side perceives this country, between those who still believe America deserves defending and those who want to tear it down.

This is the battle that will determine America’s future — and indeed whether America has a future.

Pompeo Takes on China

A big part of the battle for America’s future will be waged against communist China. While the left attacks America from within, China continues to build its military power and economic leverage and is increasingly willing to use it to destroy us from without.

Twenty-five years ago, the U.S. business community and both party establishments supported granting “Most Favored Nation” trade status to China. They argued that it would be economically beneficial to everyone and would encourage China to become more democratic and change for the better. I said then that trade with China would change the U.S. much more than it would change China.

China has accrued enormous economic benefits from that engagement. It now has the resources to build a huge military. Meanwhile, the U.S. lost millions of manufacturing jobs. And what did we receive? Just a bunch of cheap consumer goods we don’t need.

I mention this because the Trump administration has made taking on China a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a major policy speech Thursday at the Nixon Library in California that should be seen as a clarion call for all Western democracies to confront China. “What do the American people have to show for 50 years of engagement with China?” Pompeo asked. “The old paradigm of blind engagement with China has failed. We must not continue it. We must not return to it.”

Pompeo is right. Beijing proves every day that we cannot trust anything it says or does — from its unfair trade practices to its horrible human rights abuses to its lies about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. What many Westerners don’t seem to understand is that the communist Chinese have a completely different value system than we do. They won’t think twice about lying to our faces if it advances their interests.

Meanwhile, China has ordered the closure of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu in retaliation for the Trump administration closing the Chinese consulate in Houston. The Trump administration did so after finding evidence that China was attempting to steal trade secrets from us.

Revealingly, a top Communist Party official at the consulate is refusing to leave. This is yet more evidence of the increasingly aggressive posture China is displaying around the world.

Pompeo’s address was the fourth in a series of foreign policy speeches by high-level Trump administration officials laying out what President Trump believes will be our greatest security and economic threat over the next 50 years.

Pompeo didn’t mince words, comparing the threat posed by communist China to the threat of the Soviet Union that defined the second half of the 20th century.

“President Reagan dealt with the Soviets on the basis of ‘trust but verify,’” Pompeo said. “When it comes to the [Chinese Communist Party], I say: ‘Distrust and verify.’”

Chinese Communist Riots

The American people generally agree with President Trump that the COVID-19 virus is a “Chinese virus.” It originated in China and likely leaked out of a bio-weapons lab. Then the Chinese communists lied to the world about the virus while they expanded their control over emergency supplies that would be needed to fight it.

Now there are rumors and unconfirmed reports that communist China is attacking us again. When the Trump administration ordered the closing of the Chinese consulate in Houston, the official explanation was that the consulate personnel were engaged in stealing U.S. intellectual property.

But Gordon Chang, a well-connected analyst and expert on China, is reporting that the “consulate had links with protest groups in the United States providing financial and logistical support.” That hasn’t been proven yet. But what is proven is that the Chinese Foreign Ministry is engaged in a disinformation campaign that is intentionally stoking racial discord in the United States.

Sometimes it is hard to discern whether China gets its talking points from Pelosi, Biden, Sanders, and AOC or whether those politicians get theirs from communist China.