At The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan writes of the recent scandal involving Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (abridged):
Once that picture with the blackface and the Klansman came out, there is no way you can continue to be the governor of the commonwealth of Virginia.”
So decreed Terry McAuliffe, insisting on the death penalty with no reprieve for his friend and successor, Governor Ralph Northam.
Yet Northam had all but sworn Saturday he had no knowledge of the 1984 yearbook picture and that he was not either man in the photo.
McAuliffe, who is considering a run for president, joined Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Julian Castro, and Joe Biden in the pile-on. All washed their hands of Northam.
That a moderate Democratic governor is near friendless in a fight for his life reveals much about the Democratic Party.
By week’s end, Virginia Democrats were bewailing the “horrible” history of their state, where, in 1619, the first slave ship arrived at Point Comfort with men and women from Africa who would work the plantations until the Civil War ended, 250 years later.
One cannot rewrite history.
Four of America’s first six presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe—were Virginians. All were slave owners. Richmond, the capital of Virginia, was the capital of the Confederacy. The commander-in-chief of the Confederate armies was a Virginian, Robert E. Lee.
The most memorialized of Virginia’s heroes, in its monuments and statues, are colonists, Revolutionary War and Confederate soldiers and statesmen, and 19th- and 20th-century senators and governors. Almost all supported slavery or segregation.
When the Warren Court outlawed segregation in 1954, Virginia and the South replied with the Dixie Manifesto, declaring open defiance and “massive resistance” to the court order to integrate.
Should Western civilization be held responsible for what it has done through the centuries to persons of color the world over? Should we conduct a purge of monuments to all of America’s “white racists,” as antifa and its allies are determined to do in Virginia?
The Democratic Party may believe that by throwing Northam to the wolves, it will satisfy these forces. It won’t.
We are at the beginning of a Kulturkampf to purge America of all monuments and tributes to the white males who created, built, and ruled the country.
After Northam, the left will demand that the Democratic Party nominate a candidate who will echo their convictions about America’s past.
Read more here.
If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for my free weekly email.