Retired Lt. Col. Allen West, a former Florida Republican congressman, slammed left-wing protesters for their latest public vandalism in which a Rochester, N.Y. statue of African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass was broken from its pedestal and dragged toward the cusp of a gorge.
The statue of Douglass was dismantled and taken on Sunday from Maplewood Park, a site along the Underground Railroad where Douglass and Harriet Tubman helped shuttle slaves to freedom. President Trump condemned the vandalism on Monday, saying in a tweet: “This shows that these anarchists have no bounds!”
West told “Bill Hemmer Reports” on Monday that the attack on Douglass shows the protesters have no grasp of American history or even what their end goal is. He praised Douglass as a true leader of the civil rights movement, having advised President Lincoln and lobbied for the cause of abolition.
West also blamed the state of American public education as part of the reason the protesters appear to be so ignorant.
“Once upon a time we did teach history, and we did teach civics, and then it was replaced by this thing called social studies, which is just whatever cultural or ideological agenda is prevalent in the day,” he said.
“But you think about [it], you tore down the statue of a man who was once a slave [and] who became one of the great political influencers and figures in the United States of America and adviser to President Abraham Lincoln. [Douglass was] the reason why we had the Emancipation Proclamation and the reason we had the first Black soldiers to serve in uniform — the 54th Massachusetts Regiment — that tells me that we have a generation, this cancel culture generation that is ignorant of our own history and they are going out and pursuing a goal and objective that they don’t really understand.”
West noted that protesters have also thus far vandalized a Boston memorial to the 54th Massachusetts regiment — the story of which was chronicled in the 1989 Matthew Broderick/Denzel Washington film “Glory.”
West, who penned a 360aproko News Opinion piece on the meaning of Independence Day, said that he discards the protesters’ claim that America is a malevolent country, mentioning his upbringing in then-segregated Atlanta.
“When I think about [President Trump’s] message over the weekend I reflect back on my own life … In 1971 I was born in a blacks-only hospital. I grew up in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood that produced Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement,” he said.
“My dad fought for this great nation at a time when it did not provide him with the rights and privileges as it did for others. He fought against [German] National Socialism and Italian fascism… I think that’s what we should be talking about, the things that make us unique, and the quality of what makes us unique and not this cancel culture who’s going out and destroying the statue of Frederick Douglass.”
West told host Bill Hemmer the “mob” will never be satisfied nor reach a point where they stop the public acts of defiance. He compared the protesters to the children who “throw a tantrum” in the grocery store that they didn’t have a product they wanted — then complain more once they get the product because they haven’t gotten enough of it.
“It never ends because you cannot appease the mob. You can’t compromise with them and you can’t come to any rational solution,” he said.
