Federalist senior correspondent John Daniel Davidson joined Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to explain why the Left’s impulse to tear down Confederate monuments is totalitarian. Davidson noted that leftists calling for the destruction of statues memorializing Confederate figures has been going on for quite some time.
“I remember two years ago we had the 150th anniversary of the Confederate surrender and you had people in the mainstream media at that time calling for the desecration of Confederate graves,” Davidson said. “Not just tearing down statues but digging up remains, removing them. You know, bulldozing over cemeteries — and this iconoclastic impulse is native to the Left. This is what China’s cultural revolution was all about. If you want to see where tearing down statues by mobs will get you, look at pictures of China’s cultural revolution where they tore down statues, temples.”
“This is not about the Confederacy,” he continued. “This is not about the Civil War. This is about political power and it’s about a small group of people on the Left trying to exert outside influence on American politics by following in the footsteps of Mao, of the armed thugs in Weimar Republic, of the Taliban. These are tactics that are well-known. You start by tearing down statues, and burning books, and eventually you go after people.”
“This is what happens with identity politics,” he said. “If you push identity politics, eventually you get around to identity politics for white people, which is a dangerous thing in a country that has a huge white majority. You know, this is why the Left has been sowing these seeds of what’s been happening for a long time. Are they surprised eventually some white people are going to say, ‘Yeah, let’s do identity politics,’ and we have white identity politics. It’s all poisonous garbage.”
“It’s totally un-American, too,” Davidson said of the totalitarian impulses exhibited by both leftist protestors and white supremacists. “America is not about ethnicity. It’s not about national origin. It’s about creed. There is no place in the American constitutional system for identity politics, left or right. Plain and simple.”
