Cancel Culture Leaps Backward Several Centuries to Target Dead Roman Emperors

Remember when the statue killers just wanted to get rid of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson? That’s what they suggested early on, but their target list always seemed to grow. They toppled Washington, Lincoln, an abolitionist or two, and even a statue literally promoting human progress.

At Brown University, an Ivy League institution that’s very exclusive and most Americans can’t afford to send their kids to, a group is trying to set Year Zero back to 63 BC.

Which they would probably render as BCE, for what it’s worth. The erasures don’t stop with hunks of metal and stone.

A Brown University student group, Decolonization at Brown, wants the school to remove two Roman statues displayed on campus, claiming the statues represent white supremacy and colonialism.

The student group at the Ivy League university in Rhode Island has lobbied the school’s Undergraduate Council of Students to support its initiative to remove of statues of Roman Emperors Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.

I hold no truck for Roman emperors or any emperors for that matter. Emperors tend not to be friends of human rights. But the notion that these very long dead Roman emperors somehow represent “white supremacy” ought to put an end to this campus nonsense.

The Gauls, the Picts, the other barbarian tribes the Romans fought and conquered…were mostly European and white.

But the nonsense won’t stop unless Brown and other universities put their foot down. What’s the likelihood of that happening? The Marxist mindset has thoroughly colonized our institutions of blinkered learning over the past many decades. That generation is going to demographically take power at some point. We can hope it won’t continue its scourge of all it doesn’t understand — which is pretty much everything, thanks to our absolutely terrible disgrace of an educational system — but hope isn’t a plan. I’m just not sure what the plan is.

Our schools aren’t teaching actual history anymore. They’re teaching ideology, not facts and ideas. Change my mind.

I’ve offered up a simple and inexpensive idea for dealing with statues, which involves using available technology to deliver more, not less, information about individuals and groups who’ve been frozen in time in bronze, marble, and so forth. I’m not just spitballing either. I produced and co-wrote one of the most successful interactive exhibits in Texas history a few years ago. So I know the tech and how to make it work.

No takers so far, and I’ve spoken with a government agency that preserves statues. Everyone in that space is either laying low or on the wrong side of preserving history. The terror of dealing with woke mobs is real and growing.

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