My colleague Catherine Salgado chronicled the welcome return to the nation’s capital – just in time for America’s celebration of its first 250 years – of a number of larger-than-life statues that had previously adorned a city of iconic monuments.
Now, heading into America’s 250th birthday, Freedom Plaza features 13 statues honoring our founding. The number 13 seems to be a tribute to the original 13 colonies. ‘This exhibition featuring Caesar Rodney and the 12 Soldiers of the Revolutionary War is a powerful tribute to the patriots whose service and sacrifice helped secure the freedoms we enjoy today,’ Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox News.
While the movement to remove some of America’s most iconic and beloved statues has long smoldered, it caught fire in 2020 with the George Floyd riots and the anti-American sentiments pushed by Black Lives Matter (BLM), Antifa, the legacy media, and the Democrats.
Across America, statues of figures that defined this nation’s history were toppled by mobs, vandalized, and dismantled by the very governments charged with their care and custody by earlier generations. Wokism, it seemed at the time, had won. And that’s why the tearing down of statues is not just a matter of form. Symbolism matters.
If you had a conversation with a leftist circa 2020 about the removal of certain statues, it may have gone something like this.
You: “We shouldn’t be taking down statues of the men and women who built this country.”
Them: “Why are you getting so worked up about a chunk of stone or metal? What’s the big deal?”
And later in the conversation, the leftist might have said, “You can have your statues, but they belong in a museum, out of the general public view.”
The truth is, if statues were just chunks of stone or metal, then why does the left make such a big deal about trying to remove them? The statues weren’t bothering anyone, but all of a sudden, after years of walking past them without noticing them, leftists in unison were triggered by them. Obviously, the left does feel statues are a big deal.
Protesters just took down the Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore’s Little Italy. pic.twitter.com/ViPk5eKOtz
— Louis Krauss (@louiskraussnews) July 5, 2020
As for the directive to hide those statues in museums, that is as disingenuous a head fake as you’ll ever get from a leftist. What do you think happens once all the statues are in a museum? Two things: The left tries to close the museum, or it “accidentally” burns to the ground from a catastrophic fire. We’ve seen this with Catholic churches in Canada, which now have a tendency to spontaneously erupt into flames.
In an indictment of the quality of education in America’s public schools – particularly in the teaching of American history – mobs of unemployed, SSRI-fueled, gym-class dropouts didn’t even know who most of the statues depicted.
No statue was immune from the ignorance and violence of the left. President Abraham Lincoln, who freed America from slavery with the sacrifice of thousands and thousands of Union soldiers, was not immune. Christopher Columbus was a frequent target. Same for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. It wasn’t just Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson they were after. It was just about every man, usually, who played a role in American history.
For that, the left convicted them of the crime of being men of their times. They were “convicted” for not being born in the 21st century and not being sufficiently woke hundreds of years before the very term “woke” was coined.
If any of these memories still bother you, I have some good news. The statues are starting to come back.
Traditionalists are suing and lobbying local governments to resurrect memorials to Confederate generals, Founding Fathers and European explorers. Many of the statues disappeared from town squares and other public places during the pandemic-era protests against police violence and racism following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
Ohio’s capital, named for Christopher Columbus, took down a 22-foot-high, 3-ton statue of its namesake from City Hall that year. Officials declared the 1955 gift from sister city Genoa, Italy, had come to represent ‘patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness,’ the Wall Street Journal reported.
The destruction of history is well underway as the city of Columbus, Ohio tears down a statue of its namesake. pic.twitter.com/KCbaWKzNZX
— Ian Miles Cheong (@ianmiles) July 2, 2020
The Journal reported that the statue currently resides in a storage facility under high security. Meanwhile, a group of Italian-American groups has sued, claiming the removal of the Columbus statue was illegal, and they demand its return.
“The silent majority is becoming vocal,” Jack Conte, 67, and the organizer of the lawsuit, told the Journal. “You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.”
And so, people like Conte, along with the current occupant of the Oval Office, are working to turn the tide. Feast your eyes on the return of Christopher Columbus to Columbus Circle in the District of Columbia. This is thanks to President Donald Trump’s efforts to clean up Washington for America 250.
Before and after footage of Columbus Circle in Washington DC
You’ve gotta see this pic.twitter.com/FyVUAGQFES
— Grant Godwin – The Typical Liberal (@the_typical_lib) May 28, 2026
Other efforts from groups like the Sons of Italy in places like New York are working to bring back dignity to and appreciation of American history in their own way. And it’s working.
A group of Italian Americans at the Blauvelt Sons of Italy Lodge in New York is receiving massive praise after cleaning and relocating a statue of Christopher Columbus that was defaced with red paint, toppled, and thrown into a lake in Richmond, Virginia during the 2020 BLM riots pic.twitter.com/aNtmLn5lX1
— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) March 23, 2026
In Charleston, S.C., the return of a marker honoring Robert E. Lee has taken place but not without its share of leftist outrage.
If you were to ask a leftist today what they know about Lee, chances are it would begin and end with, “He was a Confederate and a racist.” Some may add “traitor” to Lee’s resume.
What they don’t care to know is that until about five minutes ago, Lee was largely regarded as one of the more notable figures in American history. What they likely don’t know is that he was a top graduate at West Point. He served with distinction for the U.S. in the Mexican-American War, and the Union offered him a command when war broke out between the states. As was the norm during his time, Lee’s loyalty was to his state before country, and he was born in Virginia.
For that primary reason, when Virginia seceded from the Union, his loyalties went with his home state. Had Virginia decided not to secede, Lee would have been a Union commander. The important thing to understand is that Lee was not an ideologue or a revolutionary. He was a soldier.
For his part, President Abraham Lincoln still considered Lee and all who served under him Americans. Without this nuanced understanding, which today’s keyboard warriors and leftists have no use for, reunification of a nation would not have been possible.
Don’t count on opponents of that highway marker to get any of this. In the wake of the George Floyd protests and the emergence of the anti-statue movement, the City of Charleston decided to turn the Lee monument over to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). In return, the UDC ended the lawsuit it filed after the monument was removed from a local school in 2021.
Since then, a request was made to an organization called Field Officers of the Fourth Brigade, which is a private organization that owns Charleston’s Marion Square and has owned it since 1833, long before the Civil War. The group granted the request, and now the Lee monument sits in Marion Square on private land. Of course, that’s not acceptable to the left. You can’t just remove it from a school. You can’t just remove it from government property. Now, the criterion for the display of the highway marker is that it should not be visible to the public. Period.
A member of Charleston’s History Commission proposed a resolution to remove the Robert E. Lee highway marker in Marion Square. But the city doesn’t own park, leaving the commission without recourse. https://t.co/QCxYki7Skg
— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) April 2, 2026
See how that works? The put-it-in-a-museum crowd isn’t happy until you hide history from public view. While the left will allege that any attempt to dust off a statue, a monument, or a highway marker that remembers a Confederate figure is an attempt to revive the Confederacy, groups like The Fourth Brigade have said that’s not it at all. Dale Theiling, a Charleston commissioner, said, “That’s not the goal.” He said the Fourth Brigade “is here to protect South Carolina’s, particularly Charleston’s, military history, and that’s what this is.”
Moving over to the Lone Star state, the good news from Texas is that the Texas Rangers Major League Baseball team has returned an iconic (law enforcement) Texas Ranger statue to public view.
Sam Blum of Long Beach, CA is very concerned that the Texas Rangers have a statue of a Texas Ranger.
The NYT uses a sinister shadow image in its headline. Not until 2/3rd of the way down do we get an actual look of the statue — from a bad angle.
This is how propaganda is cooked https://t.co/JhYowbsFyf pic.twitter.com/8zuh1077fL
— Douglass Mackey (@douglassmackey) April 15, 2026
The Journal reported that in the spring of this year, the baseball team would bring back a statue that had previously been on display at Dallas Love Field airport. It was removed in 2020 after the left’s outrage machine contended that the model for the “One Riot, One Ranger” statue was a racist.
To emphasize, the left’s problems with the statue had nothing to do with the Texas Rangers law enforcement agency, its members past or present, or that the statue commemorated a dark page in Texas’s history. Not at all. All the fuss was over someone no one ever heard of. It’s been alleged that the model for the statue might have been a racist in the 1950s. That’s it.
That’s how ridiculous the left’s rage machine was and is if you let it. Thankfully, at the baseball offices in Dallas, saner heads have prevailed.
Obviously, the left will be dragged kicking and screaming into a commonsense world where we can remember history for all of its highs and lows, the good and the bad. The left only wants to recognize its own revisionist narratives, and it does so by censoring the history books, the history curricula in schools, and by removing most of our monuments and statues.
Symbolism matters. It’s how we remember and honor our past, and sometimes, it’s how we remind ourselves not to repeat it. The good news is that we have people on the side of American history who are working to return our history to the public square. And they are winning, one statue at a time.
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