Beware the False Reporting on Trump, Charlottesville, and the Need to Erase History By Destroying Statues

The tag line and mission of Bolduc and Bracci is to “Level a Tilted Playing Field.”  This references the well-known fact that there is an extreme leftist-liberal bias in the media.  Presently, the media complex is working in lockstep to destroy President Trump, and is using Charlottesville as its new front.  Through false reporting, the media is working to paint Trump as a white racist bigot, despite his decades-long career in the public eye showing he is anything but that.

It is difficult to put this issue into words, but writer Dov Fischer, self-described as a Jew from Manhattan, does a good job of stepping back and putting today’s issues into perspective, discussing the truth about what Trump actually said in totality, and providing real history references.   His article at Spectator.org  is titled “And Yet President Trump, In His Classically Inartful Way, Was Absolutely Right.”

That article is linked here: (click)

Fischer on Trump’s statements:

“Watch him say what he said, not what others said he said.

I just did something fascinating. I just watched the President’s entire 14-minute impromptu news conference at Trump Tower on Monday that sparked all the latest barrage of anti-Trump screeds from the left media that will criticize him every day, no matter what he does, augmented by the “Never Trump” Republicans and neo-conservatives who will not rest until they can re-conquer the political party they lost because of three terms of two failed Bush presidencies, followed by the two failed Presidential candidacies of Sen. John McCain and of Gov. Mitt Romney.

Not the reportage about the conference, but the entire 14 minutes unedited, uninterrupted. I found myself agreeing with his every word. I did not find his tone or demeanor “unpresidential” in the least. He sharply and explicitly condemned the Nazis and White Supremacists unequivocally. He also condemned the extreme leftists who premeditatedly came armed with weapons to smash up a demonstration that, rightly or wrongly, had been granted a legal permit. (I personally wish that ACLU liberals were not so proactive in advancing the right of Nazis to get permits to rally at public venues, but the demonstration had a permit. Meanwhile, the Antifa Alt-Left thugs came with flame-throwers, bats, and shields, and they came to fight.) All the while, the police did nothing for much too long. Chaos and violence ensued.”

With all of the misreporting about what Trump has actually said, and who actually participated at the Charlottesville protest, articles such as Fischer’s are needed to level the playing field on an issue that continues to be used politically to further gin up public divide in our country, and to isolate our president by creating a false image painting him as a racist.**

**Note:   This isolation tactic is akin to our local Naples Daily News editors and writers who paint Collier County school board member Kelly Lichter as “boisterous” (click for prior report) because Lichter simply wants the school district to focus on education in the classroom — and to eliminate the Superintendent’s mission drift into the collectivist, “collaborative” projects which our community’s so-called “leaders” and “non-profits” find so endearing.  Threatened by Lichter, our local establishment and the media they control seek to destroy her.

Fischer’s article goes beyond Trump into the issue of destroying statues that have stood for decades if not centuries in our country.  Yes, it is understandable how some may find those statues offensive if they take them only as symbols of a southern culture protecting slavery.  But where does this end, and to what extent might those statues be symbols of other things, such as the principle of Federalism wherein state’s rights are paramount to the federal government?  Cannot those states honor soldiers and military officers who fought not for “slavery,” but to defend state’s rights?  If Florida sought to secede from the U.S. today, and an actual war was occurring, would you or your children fight to defend your family, your home, and your neighbors — or would you join the federal army, and seek to destroy your own family members?  This is not to decide one way or another, but to consider the reality of the choices that those citizens of southern states had to make when civil war erupted.  In that context, might there be some understanding of the citizens of those states honoring their own fallen heroes who fought not to protect “slavery,” but to protect their own family members during a time of war?

Not everything deemed “offensive” needs to be cleansed from society.  That is a very dangerous concept.  Free speech is protected not to ensure the “popular” speech, but to preserve “unpopular” speech.  Many important free speech and land use decisions by our U.S. Supreme Court involve protecting the rights of those who society finds least respectable.  (Think the case of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 1988 Florida Supreme Court, defending Larry Flynt’s First Amendment free speech rights).  Our U.S. Supreme Court recognizes the rights of these people to speak their minds — not because the Supreme Court agrees with those thoughts, but because it is dangerous to squelch free speech, as to do otherwise will lead to tyranny.

Is the destruction of Civil War statues not the same thing, only in “symbol” or “image” form?

On that point, Fischer states the following:

There is no easy answer for the statue issue. I have seen that issue for years and years, long before it became the Issue du Jour. In my travels for several months through the South and at the great Civil War battlefields, I saw the monuments everywhere: in main thoroughfares along Monument Row in Richmond, at the State Capitol in Nashville, at street corners. At the South Carolina state capitol in Columbia, they have preserved the broken walking stick attached to the monument of George Washington, so as never to forget how Sherman’s men ransacked the state and even desecrated the monument of Washington. Similarly, they have refused to repair Union cannonball damage to the building, preferring instead to cover gaping holes with metal patches that starkly remind visitors of the attack that happened there. I have seen the aesthetic beauty and passion that went into sculpting those monuments, and I have read the inscriptions that breathe not a word about slavery nor the social injustices of the Confederacy but of brave young boys, who never owned a slave — the vast majority of Southerners never owned slaves — but who gave their lives for their communities, for their honor, in some cases even for their women.

As a Jew hailing from the North, whose persecuted East European ancestors did not even arrive in this country from Russia and Poland until a quarter century after the Civil War, I also perceived that those monuments constitute a horrible daily insult and vile dishonor to African Americans and, frankly, an incomprehensible curiosity for a country that had defeated the Confederacy and had reunited. What indeed were all those monuments to the losing side doing all over the place? I came to a sense that perhaps those monuments should be moved to Civil War museums, to the great preserved battlefields at Antietam/Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, Bull Run/Manassas, Fredericksburg, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Shiloh, Lookout Mountain, Cold Harbor, Vicksburg, and Petersburg. (Gettysburg already has its full complement.) Perhaps move them to cemeteries where Confederates lie buried.

But I do believe, as President Trump tried to say in his way, that many of those at the demonstrations indeed were decent people motivated solely by wanting peacefully to preserve the heroes of their history, oblivious to the ramifications — that, sadly, their history includes much that is shameful, even if Lee solely was motivated by a soldier’s rules of honor and service, as taught at West Point; even if Jackson was motivated solely by that same code of a soldier’s honor and service, amplified by a religious believer’s sense that he had a duty to country.

President Trump sadly is correct. George Washington owned slaves. So did Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and James Madison at Montpelier. So did many who signed the Declaration of Independence. Shall we take down the Washington Monument? Shall we rename the nation’s capital and the state where the liberal Democrats of Seattle govern? Should we tear down the Jefferson Memorial? Is there now yet another reason to change the name of the Washington Redskins!

And, while at it: How about encouraging some violent street-fighting in Manhattan, tearing down the Peter Stuyvesant statue in Manhattan and renaming that eponymous public school? He was the most vicious anti-Semite of pre-independence America.

As Trump says, where does all this end?  Take, for instance, this report that Vice Magazine now decries “Let’s Blow Up Mr. Rushmore”  (click here):

Vice Magazine’s call to “blow up Mt. Rushmore.”

The racial division presently occurring in this country is indeed worrisome; equally worrisome, however, is the use of that issue to justify the squelching of speech — in oral, written, or symbolic form.  Either of these issues could ultimately lead to the demise of our nation and the symbol of freedom for which it stands.

RELATED ARTICLE: Is Our County’s Worship of Superintendent Kam Patton Enabling a Culture of Teacher-Student Sex Abuse?

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