Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the army to refurbish a 1914 Arlington Confederate Monument, which was taken down by woke lemmings, and restore it by 2027. The monument, located at the sacred ground of Arlington National Cemetery, is one of the cruelest and most racist monuments in the country, depicting chattel slavery and depicting faithful slaves and kind white masters. Congress passed a law in 2019 preventing the Department of Defense from naming or renaming anything after the Confederacy, resulting in the monument’s removal.
The monument was removed due to a Republican-controlled Senate law directing the Pentagon to remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America. Congress overturned Trump’s veto with a supermajority, creating a Naming Commission to execute the order. The commission members were shocked by the overt racist imagery and anti-U.S. sentiments when they visited the Confederate monument in 2022.
Hegseth’s claim that the monument was done in the spirit of reconciliation is a perversion of U.S. history and an insult to everyone buried in Arlington Cemetery. Instead of spending $10 million to restore the monument, we should commemorate the 1,800 United States Colored Troops and thousands of other U.S. Army Civil War soldiers buried in Arlington who helped destroy chattel slavery, freed 4 million men, women, and children from human bondage, protected democracy, and saved the United States of America.
