On Monday night, the campus mobs claimed their latest victim.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, outraged student protesters tore down a statue honoring “Silent Sam,” which was originally meant to represent the typical Confederate soldier. This act of vandalism came after activists sought the memorial’s removal through legal and administrative means but came up empty.
The debate over Confederate statues is complicated, and left-wing students may very well be justified in calling for certain memorials to be removed—yet angry mobs and vigilante vandalism are a recipe for disaster.
A video circulating online shows students yelling while they pull the already-vandalized statue down with ropes. The crowd erupts into cheers when it tumbles to the ground, even though someone could easily have been injured amid the chaos and smoke bombs. This scene shouldn’t be cause for celebration—it should give you chills.
It’s eerily reminiscent of the violent riots at the University of California, Berkeley, where members of the left-wing group Antifa dressed in all black, destroyed property, and violently assaulted peaceful conservative organizers. The statue-toppling incident at UNC is a step toward this type of illiberal activism, and students need to realize that violence and vandalism ought never be the answer, and rarely win others over in the long run.
Still, the students might be correct when they insist that Confederate statues should be taken down. I can’t imagine asking African-American students at UNC to walk past memorials to slavery on their way to class. It seems beyond insensitive, and almost downright absurd. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu put it best in 2017 when he said: “In the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans—or anyone else—to drive by property … occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country, and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd.”
But there remains a legitimate argument that memorials to the Confederacy shouldn’t be taken down. It’s clear that the South was on the wrong side of history in the Civil War and that slavery was an immoral abomination, but that doesn’t necessitate that we tear down every statue featuring a Confederate soldier or leader.
At the opening of the African-American History Museum in Washington, D.C., former President George W. Bush endorsed keeping our country’s more sordid moments transparent. “A great nation does not hide its history,” Bush said. “It faces its flaws and corrects them.”
Perhaps, then, the Civil War statues should remain in place, as a reminder of the ugly history that, in some ways, still shapes our country. Yet this is an important debate that must be resolved through discourse, not destruction.
Even if the memorials should be taken down, vigilante justice just isn’t the way to do it. One columnist at UNC Chapel Hill’s student newspaper wrote that the statue’s destruction made him feel “hopeful,” and a UNC academic department focused on Southern studies said the removal was a step toward “eras[ing] attitudes of white supremacy, [and] eliminat[ing] racial violence in our society.”
Really? I can’t imagine how students could feel “hopeful” in the face of the reality that they attend a university where mob justice rules, campus rules go ignored, and administrators appear feckless. If lawlessness is allowed to fester on campus, the next target might not be someone so easily condemnable as a Confederate soldier.
After all, we live in an age where left-wing students activists view mainstream (and Jewish) conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro as “Nazis,” and revile respected scholars like Charles Murray as purveyors of “scientific racism.” Our politics have become so toxic that activists on both extremes, but particularly the campus left, view their political opponents as mortal enemies. We simply cannot afford for discourse to descend into destruction, and vandalism is certainly not a step toward racial harmony.
The same logic used to justify the destruction of “Silent Sam” could be used to rationalize violent assaults on any number of campus speakers or visiting guests. Regardless of their stance on Confederate monuments, that’s a future that no student should find “hopeful.”
Brad Polumbo (@brad_polumbo) is a contributor to Red Alert Politics. He is an assistant editor for Young Voices and a student at UMass Amherst.
