Backlash to Removal of Robert E. Lee's Statue

On social media, Confederate sympathizers groused

After Richmond, VA removed an iconic statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in 2021, former president Donald Trump deplored the removal of “the magnificent and very famous statue. Our culture is being destroyed and our history and heritage, both good and bad, are being extinguished by the Radical Left, and we can’t let that happen!”

Playing to his base, he insisted that Lee remains an American hero and strangely, would have decimated the Taliban in Afghanistan. “That disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago,” he said. “What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don’t have the genius of Robert E. Lee.” Clearly, Trump sees white evangelicals, neo-Confederates, and white supremacists who turned out for him in higher-than-expected numbers, as an integral part of his political base.

Despite Trump’s incitement — imagine if he were still president when Richmond removed Lee’s statute! — and this symbolic Confederate retreat, Virginia, so far, remains peaceful. Republican candidates for governor and lieutenant governor this year even say they agree with the decision to remove the statue. The Richmond City Council, presumably representing the city’s residents, voted unanimously in 2020 to permanently remove all Confederate statues from the city. There has been no groundswell to defeat council members for their decision.

Even so, the removal of Lee’s statue has created a backlash. On Facebook, thousands of Lee supporters groused about the statue’s removal, complaining about the erasure of civil war history, calling the perpetrators “sickening woke leftists”; “spineless RINOS”; “communists” “right out of Adolph’s playbook.”

In fact, the Lee statue wasn’t erected until 1890