Statues

‘Just rejoice’, as Mrs Thatcher once said about something else. The government’s decision to debug our national security by getting rid of Huawei is the right one (although seven years is much too long). The puzzle is why it did not happen earlier. At the end of January, I interviewed the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, when he came over here. We knew by then everything we needed to know about the Chinese government’s control of Huawei and the lack of trust this must engender. The British government also heard clearly from Mr Pompeo — and from Australia — that its preference for Huawei 5G threatened the deep trust of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership. Yet it sent him away empty-handed.

Even the most ardent Trumpist must admit that it has been a bad few months for the President. The COVID-19 crisis robbed Donald Trump of his strongest argument for re-election, the economy, and made his administration seem ineffectual. He was wrongfooted by the riots after George Floyd’s death. The country has been in chaos under his watch. He has looked weak, even disorientated. His polling slid.Yet Trump, ever the reality entertainer, loves a comeback story — and last night he launched his. Under the heads of Mount Rushmore, on a blue-white-and-red dais, the President marked Independence Day with a fiercely patriotic and defiant speech. It was an address that tackled, head on, the crisis that has rocked America in recent weeks.

Will nobody think of the pigeons? That thought has repeatedly occurred to me, as beloved roosts for generations of urban pigeons have been toppled in one city after another on both sides of the Atlantic by the radical left, in the greatest eruption of iconoclasm since the era when Theodora graced the burlesque stage in Constantinople. Tearing down Confederate war memorials, it turns out, is a gateway drug to toppling statues of Catholic saints, Civil War abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln himself. Gradually, it has dawned on a horrified, watching world: they don’t hate Confederates. They hate statues! All statues!Now, thanks to the actions of a lawless few, countless pigeons in cities in America and Europe have been rendered homeless.

'While Biden was in his basement, @realDonaldTrump had 5.3 MILLION+ viewers tune in to his rally,' wrote GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel last week. It's a variation on a theme for the Republican party of late: take the vacant airwaves left by a subdued Biden campaign and fill them with spurious claims about the whereabouts of the presumptive Democratic nominee. Sure, Biden has been quiet, relative to Trump — who isn't? — but he hasn't been totally basement-bound. The former vice president has been venturing out for socially distanced local speeches. He gave one on healthcare in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Thursday, stopped off in the Pennsylvania towns of Yeadon and Darby the week before, and hosted an economic round table in Philadelphia on June 11.

The Summer Of Our Discontent is in full swing and the social guillotines — at first applied to legitimate injustice and prejudice — have now come for history itself.We watch as mobs tear down statues and monuments to the past. The destruction is supposedly performed in the name of justice, but can we seize true justice by destroying the past?American history is a fascinating and sometimes tragic tale of oppression and rebellion, injustice and progress. There is a push and a pull to it all that has led us to be the most successful and prosperous society in human history.Undoubtedly there has been much pain: but how can we know how far we’ve come if we’re not allowed to see where we’ve been?The history of black America is an exhaustive tale of overcoming.

So now they have come for Teddy Roosevelt. The large bronze statue of TR on horseback, flanked by a black man and an American Indian, will be removed from the spot it has graced since 1940 in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Why? According to Warren Wilhelm Jr — known to some as Bill de Blasio — the statue is being moved (to where no one yet knows) ‘because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.’ Does it? I don’t think so. I think both flanking figures exude strength and dignity. I also think they stand in solidarity with the jovially commanding figure of Roosevelt.

Violent left-wing activists have taken to styling themselves as antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists’, though their street-fighting tactics resemble nothing so much as the Brownshirt thuggery practiced by fascists themselves. This did not stop NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson from likening these hooligans to the heroes of World War Two. On the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, while America’s cities still smoldered after days of riots and looting, Liasson took to Twitter to call the Normandy invasion the ‘biggest antifa rally in history’. Dumb jokes are nothing new on Twitter. For many liberals today, however, it’s no laughing matter.