Guys, we are so, so back.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that many of the statues that were cowardly taken down and hidden away during the 2020 George Floyd riots are quietly returning to where they belong.
This was 2020 at the tail end of BLM's terror:
And this is today:
Yes, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that there is a move to restore statues taken down, and that Columbus may actually honor its namesake once more.
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."
'We will no longer live in the shadow of our ugly past,' Mayor Andrew Ginther, a Democrat, said at the time. Columbus's detractors tie the Italian explorer to the brutal subjugation of native civilizations in the Americas. His supporters say Columbus should be lauded for his discoveries, not blamed for what followed.
Y'all, I sort of forgot how insane peak woke was. Columbus, Ohio, had an ugly past because of Christopher Columbus? A great man who never even set foot in Ohio.
Totally crazy.
And now they're being sued to put it back.
The city's Columbus statue for now lies on its back inside a fenced storage facility, monitored by security cameras and adorned from head to toe with a strand of yellow caution tape. In April, a coalition of Italian-American groups filed a federal lawsuit claiming the statue's removal was illegal and demanding its return.
'The silent majority is becoming vocal,' said Jack Conte, 67 years old, the lawsuit's organizer. 'You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.'
The pressure to put these statues back up is largely coming from the Trump administration's efforts to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this July 4th.
The Department of Interior is putting up statues of American heroes and encouraging others to do the same.
The Trump administration is helping lead the charge ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary next month. In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one that protesters sank in Baltimore's Inner Harbor in 2020 ...
The Interior Department recently installed a statue of Caesar Rodney, a Delaware signer of the Declaration of Independence and a slave owner, in Washington's Freedom Plaza. The monument had been removed from its spot in Wilmington, Del., in 2020, and put into storage.
Oh no! Not a slave owner! The horror!
'You either celebrate the 250th and the historic people and events and enter into the drama of the heroic choices made by the revolutionary generation,' said Vince Haley, an adviser to the president on anniversary initiatives, 'or leave it to those who would readily distort our history and use it as a political instrument.'
The wokies are super mad about the efforts to honor the men who made our country great, of course, and they're still acting like they can guilt people into wokeness.
Nicole Moore said certain statues shouldn't return to public spaces. She is president of the National Council on Public History, which represents historians and museum administrators. 'Humans are complicated. But what's not complicated is racism. What's not complicated is genocide,' she said. 'When we know the history, we have to ask ourselves, do we want to celebrate this person?'
Yes, we do want to celebrate Columbus. We do want to celebrate signers of the Declaration of Independence. No, we don't care that they owned slaves in a society where it was just the norm.
Put the Columbus statues back up. Put up the Washington and Jefferson statues. Put up the Caesar Rodney statues. We want to celebrate America and not cry over fake narratives pushed by woke ideologues.
And while we're at it ...
In December, a stone highway marker honoring Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, suddenly appeared in Marion Square, planted alongside a major thoroughfare in a hub of picnics, farmers markets and celebrations in Charleston, S.C.
At a subsequent meeting of the city's Commission on History, Dale Theiling, one of the commissioners, explained that Charleston had agreed to release the monument to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The group dropped a lawsuit against the city that it had filed after the statue was pulled from a public school in 2021 and put in storage.
Lee's return to public view was aided by locale. Marion Square is owned by a private organization, the Board of Field Officers of the Fourth Brigade of the South Carolina Militia, which got the land from the city in 1833. The Fourth Brigade granted a request to erect the monument in Marion Square, said Theiling, who also serves as the group's chairman.
This one was on private property, for goodness sakes.
There is a lot of nonsense to undo from 2020, but restoring our monuments and history has to be near the top of the list.
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