NYC Leaders Ignore Illegal Alien Crisis, Push Maoist Cultural Revolution

The revolution continues in New York.

As illegal immigrants flood New York City, the City Council remains hard at work ensuring that every once-venerated symbol of America is stripped from public places.

On Tuesday, the New York City Council’s Committee on Civil and Human Rights held a hearing to discuss the removal of historical statues in public places. The criteria for removing these statues are expansive enough to include most of the more than 2,500 works of public art in the city. 

I imagine this costly endeavor will suit the members of the City Council just fine.

New York City is buckling under the weight of an illegal immigration crisis. Last month alone, New York spent $300 million on the issue, according to Mayor Eric Adams—but it will spare no expense in carrying out a Maoist-style cultural revolution.

Just remember this as New York crawls groveling to the federal government for aid.

On the list of villains to remove from pedestals and scrub from public places are George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and Peter Stuyvesant. The latter is the Dutch governor of New Netherland, which became New York, to name just three.

This isn’t just about statues and history, though. It’s about social revolution and control. The committee is additionally looking to implement “anti-racist training” for all city employees and contractors. (New York state is considering reparations, so look forward to that, too.)

There’s been some local political resistance to the Left’s plans for mass cultural vandalism.

“This is little more than an attempt by the radical Left to rewrite our nation’s history,” said Joann Ariola, a Republican City Council member from Queens.

I agree entirely, which is why I wrote my book “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” The Left wants to remove and replace everything the country was built on and to start again from year zero.

“The radical Left has been trying to reframe our nation as one born from evil, and it is time we put our foot down and say, ‘Enough is enough!’” Ariola continued. “The Founding Fathers and the others who worked so hard to establish this great country should be celebrated, not eliminated from memory.”

Good answer to this nonsense. It’s the only answer that should have been given from the outset.

The iconoclasm we’ve faced in America and the West has nothing to do with the Confederacy.

Many historians and legacy media publications mocked then-President Donald Trump when he said in 2017 that after tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee, the Left would go after Thomas Jefferson and Washington next. It didn’t take long before many of those same people and institutions joined in on the iconoclasm and happily tore down Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, too.

The initial targeting of Confederate statues and monuments was just a precursor to a larger war on our history. In the United States, the target is every symbol of the old, pre-cultural revolution republic.

The Left doesn’t just seek government power; it aims to create an entirely new framework of justice and notion of the “good.” Crushing resistance to that plan requires erasing every public display that might cause some to think that our brave new world of perfect utopian equality imposed by propaganda, force, and fear isn’t so great after all.

It’s not a surprise to see Washington and Columbus as the latest targets of this movement.

The now-deceased Marxist historian Howard Zinn—who has had an outsized and baleful influence on high school and college students for generations—smeared Columbus in “A People’s History of the United States.” He clearly saw the Italian explorer as a symbol of the emergence of global capitalism and the arrival of the Christianized West in the New World.

As such, Columbus—who once stood for our country’s embrace of bold exploration and even immigration and tolerance—must go.

Washington is the Father of Our Country, a once near-universal hero to Americans of all backgrounds. He was the indispensable man of the Revolution, and without him, it’s quite possible the United States and the Constitution would have been killed in the cradle.

If Americans can no longer celebrate this man, then the republic is truly dead.

The fanatics know this, which is why they want him gone.

Widespread iconoclasm by mob has slowed a bit since 2020, but don’t take that as a sign that the problem has abated. That actually demonstrates the mob’s success. In Charlottesville, Virginia, for instance, there’s hardly a statue left in the city. It’s now filled with empty plots and pedestals.

More importantly, what reached a fevered pitch with riots a few years ago has been institutionalized. The de-Americanization of America now continues steadily and purposefully with little internal resistance.

Once the woke iconoclasts found out how easy it was to dismantle Confederate statues, they moved the target. American institutions complied, offering no resistance, and have eagerly joined the crusade to purge our past.

Don’t bother sending statues to museums. At best, they’ll be treated as objects of shame to be “contextualized,” meaning their legacy will be reframed to fit leftist narratives. More likely, they will be “disappeared” to a vault somewhere, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-style. In some cases, they will just be melted down.

In public places, statues to Columbus and Washington are now being replaced with statues and monuments to celebrate the values of the new regime.

If that continues, the United States will no longer be a country in any meaningful sense. Someone will rule, and others will obey. Life will go on as it has through human history, but the self-governing dream of the Founders—made reality by the generations that followed—will be dead.

If we want to triumph over the anti-civilizational forces that now hold near-total institutional power, we need to do more than just stand athwart history. We have to go on the offensive, especially now that so many Americans are truly fed up with the demands of the diversity, equity, and inclusion cult.

States and localities need to build new statues to Washington and Columbus. “Anti-racist” propaganda based on critical race theory and other Marxist ideas needs to be banished from school curriculums and government training materials.

Corporations that embrace this insanity need to be exposed, mocked, and boycotted.

This is not about conserving, but actively rebuilding, what we’ve lost.

That’s how to win in this revolutionary moment. Never give an inch to those who want to eliminate everything you hold dear while imposing a ruthless ideological tyranny.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.