“This current anti-monument wave degrades what originated as a legitimate grievance: the presence of Confederate monuments, many erected during the Jim Crow era to perpetuate the Lost Cause myth and advance white supremacy. But that idea has been taken over now by what has turned into a mob intent on willy-nilly eradication of chunks of American history…

“During the recent protests in Boston, we saw the spray-painting of the Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial, a monument to the first African-American regiment to fight in the Civil War and an emblem of racial reconciliation and harmony. On Friday they toppled a statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco. Never mind that as President, Grant enforced Reconstruction, lobbied for passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal

Similarly, “Philadelphia protesters went and defaced a statue of Matthias Baldwin, an abolitionist who had attacked slavery, fought for black people's right to vote, and founded a school for black children that he ran largely out of his own pocket. He did more to advance the principles of equality and justice than most people alive today, yet protesters slandered his memory with the words ‘colonizer’ and ‘murderer’ spray-painted in bright red across his face. As if in a frenzy of self-parody, protesters have similarly defaced memorials to Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill (the man is honored for defeating the Nazis), and even Charles de Gaulle…

“This is where it becomes clear that the Left's iconoclasts do not care for the facts or the history. If their concern had anything to do with removing memorials to racism and white supremacy, they would not have touched Baldwin’s statue. But they did — because Baldwin is a white man who existed in the past. As such, he must be considered part of the problem. America’s entire history deserves condemnation, according to the Left… The things we’ve accomplished as a nation, including the unprecedented harmony we enjoy amid racial diversity, do not matter as much as the flaws of the past do.”
Kaylee McGhee, Washington Examiner

“We don't honor any of the founders because they were sinners — because they owned slaves or shared common, bigoted attitudes of their day. We honor them for those things they did that were bigger than their time. We honor them because they risked hanging and made great personal sacrifices to establish a free, prosperous republic governed by and for its people — including, ultimately, people of all races… When we celebrate our Founding Fathers, we're celebrating the egalitarian values they espoused in spite of the fact that most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders…

“Defending our celebration of the Founding Fathers doesn't necessitate defending their worst crimes. In fact, it's the perfect time to acknowledge how messy and tragic the origins of the greatest nation in history were from the start. But we ought to defend the men who gave us a republic with the DNA to become a nation where we strive to instill equal rights under the law.”
Tiana Lowe, Washington Examiner

“There are those who say that Western civilization itself ought to be undone — that monuments to people such as these ought to be destroyed because of their participation in an endeavor that included global colonialism and racism…

“[But] Just about every pre-modern political regime was predicated upon the idea that its purported superiority justified treating outsiders over whom it ruled as if those people were not human beings. Aztecs murdered their war captives as human sacrifices to their gods. Many black Africans did not see other black Africans as fellow human beings to be protected against white slave traders; instead, they simply captured them and sold them to profit themselves. Mongol conquest of Russia and China was brutal and tyrannical as the warrior clan ruled on its own and for its own benefit…

“Modern Western civilization and its revolutionary ideals, however, have allowed for the peaceful, pan-racial democracies protesters say they want. The West’s ideals of universal freedom and human equality permit it to reform itself peacefully and extend the reality of freedom to fit the reality of human diversity. We take a multiethnic, free state for granted, but no such thing had ever existed before modern times. That is the achievement that statues to people such as Washington and Grant honor, an achievement that makes today’s protesters possible.”
Henry Olsen, Washington Post

Finally, “There is no doubt that [Roosevelt] partook of the prejudices of his time and reflected some of its worst intellectual influences, particularly Social Darwinism. But he was the characteristic American of the early 20th century, who exulted in his country and made enduring contributions to it. It is for that, that we honor him, and the museum of natural history is one of the obvious places to do it, given that his father was a founding member and TR was a great naturalist and conservationist.”
Rich Lowry, National Review