Nancy Pelosi has recently ordered the Capitol to remove portraits of former Speakers who had served in the Confederacy…to which the Academy Award nominee James Woods asked her via Twitter “How about your buddy, KKK leader Robert Byrd?” I know March Madness was cancelled but talk about a slam dunk. Good one Woods!
This isn’t necessarily a bad question either. Robert Byrd, who served in the Senate – as Minority Leader 1981-1987 and Majority Leader 1987-1989- was in fact a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Robert had even written the following in 1944 to Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo: “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side…Rather I should die a thousand times and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
To which, if you must destroy statues, then consider these four. Robert Byrd, Che Guevera (in New York City), Margaret Sanger (at the Smithsonian), and Vladimir Lenin (in Seattle).
Back to Robert, the Washington Post remembers him as an “exalted cyclops” of the Ku Klux Klan who apologized for his youthful indiscretion and early votes in the Congress – notably a filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But, of course, Hillary Clinton labeled him as a man of “surpassing nobility” and with “the heart and soul of America.”
Pelosi also loved the guy too…big shocker. “While some simply bore witness to history, Senator Byrd shaped it – and strove to build a brighter future for us all…He never hesitated to speak truth to power. He was a voice of reason during times of war and economic hardship..And he always stood on principle, even when others did not,” Pelosi said upon his passing.
Of course people can change, but who’s to say which former Confederate Speakers held which beliefs during their terms? Then there’s the Senior Democratic lawmakers, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who knelt for nearly 9 minutes during a moment of silence in the Capitol Visitor Center. They wore African kente cloth scarves that also represented the Ashanti Tribe – one that promoted slavery. It’s not the best time for Democrats to display tokenism and cultural appropriation when they can’t even do their research. The little performance provided more outrage than praise on social media as it was pure virtue signaling to an empire that was involved in slave trade.
Safe to say, the Dems should stop cherry-picking what statues they want removed before their double-edged sword stabs them in the back. That’s the issue. Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrat Party wants to erase the sinister dark history of starting the Civil War, founding the KKK, and installing Jim Crow laws. It’s a good thing this is all in the Library of Congress…for now.
