Seemingly not content to just destroy her state’s rule of law and election system, Democrat Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has declared war on Virginia’s heritage and, more specifically, those who dedicate themselves to preserving it.
The newly minted governor signed a bill on Monday that revoked tax exemptions from several Confederate heritage organizations, including the state’s divisions of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Spanberger also recently signed a bill that ceases the production of specialty license plates bearing the likeness of Robert E. Lee.
“Governor Spanberger’s signing of this bill is a proud moment and an important step forward for Virginia,” state Delegate Alex Askew, who sponsored the bill and has campaigned for it for several years, stated. But the question is: A step forward toward what? A Virginia that hates its own history, that curses those men of the past who built the state and made it what it is today?
Spanberger’s signature represents, as The New York Times put it, part of “a yearslong Democrat-led push to shake off the state’s legacy as the capital of the 11 Southern, slaveholding states that seceded from the country in the 1860s.”
And indeed it has been a years-long campaign by the left to erase Virginia’s, and America’s, history. The era that began with the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and reached its fever pitch during the fiery George Floyd riots of summer 2020 saw the slow but sure disappearance of Confederate history from the public sphere. Even some Republican politicians found a convenient scapegoat in long-revered Southern symbols.
During a BLM riot in Richmond, Virginia, in May 2020, extremist agitators attacked the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy with “incendiary devices.” The building, deeded to the organization by the state in 1950, was filled with countless Civil War-era documents and artifacts. The resulting fire and destruction caused $4.1 million in damage to the building and its contents, according to a lawsuit filed by the UDC. The wanton vandalism that night also extended to the multiple Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue, including the famous equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee that was removed in 2021.
The UDC was founded by Southern women in 1894 to “honor their family members and ancestors who served in the Confederate military or contributed to the Southern war effort.” And because of this, Virginia’s Democrats seek to strike back for the sin of honoring their ancestors through charitable work. The new law is intended to cripple an organization that mostly dedicates itself these days to civic engagement of a decidedly nonpolitical sort — helping homeless shelters and food banks.
And, of course, the radical leftists didn’t stop at Confederate monuments. Statues and memorials to the Founding Fathers, Christopher Columbus, and Teddy Roosevelt all came under attack during the heyday of race wokeness. Many of the memorials and museums that escaped physical attack were otherwise “contextualized” into oblivion with asides and nitpicks that drilled into patrons’ heads that America’s ancestors were very bad people.
But this law signed by Spanberger constitutes a new escalation. It is no longer about pieces of paper that need to censored or statues of bronze that need to be ripped down; it is about people who need to silenced and punished for daring to believe that America, and the South in particular, has its own unique identity independent of the left’s racialist and globalist dogma.
Spanberger is sending an unequivocal message — it’s open season on those who would honor American history and the heritage of their ancestors. And the full force of the state will be used to quash them.
Virginia is almost synonymous with the Civil War. Some of its greatest commanders hail from the state, and countless battles were fought within its borders. Union and Confederate blood has hallowed its ground as the place where the nation nearly tore itself apart — and came back together at Appomattox. No matter how fervently the leftists who have seized control over the Old Dominion state try, it’s simply impossible to divorce the Civil War from Virginia’s identity.
Up until the last 15 years or so, Virginia embraced that identity, because prior to the race-grifting phenomenon of the 2010s, the vast majority of Americans recognized the simple fact that Americans are a particular people with a particular identity and a unique history. Moreover, people recognized that we could honor that history without explicitly endorsing every aspect of it. For nearly a century and a half after the end of the Civil War, it was taken for granted by a majority of Americans that Southerners could honor their Confederate ancestors without defending slavery. That attitude only began to change after the left began its systematic campaign to demonize American history as a whole and to undermine Americans’ sense of identity for their own aims.
There are still those who will not forget Virginia’s past and will continue to honor it, even if all the statues and all the museums and all symbols have been shut down or destroyed. And that fact makes those people the ultimate target for the left’s hatred of this country and its history. The left cannot settle for merely snuffing out the fire of America’s heritage; they will ultimately seek to snuff out the people who continue to tend the flame. And in states like Virginia, they have the full power of the bureaucratic state at their disposal.
A people without a history, or who are ashamed of their history, are easily manipulated by the whims and ambitions of the dystopian, tyrannical left. Without an identity, they can be convinced that their ancestors really were irredeemable monsters, and that their descendants truly deserve to have their country depredated and stolen from them. A people without a history has no future.
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