“If you cannot defend Lee, you cannot defend Washington.”

If you cannot defend the Confederate Memorial at Alington National Cemetery, you cannot defend Mount Rushmore.

I credit @Jeff_Davis1808 on Twitter with the first quote. The second is a derivative that is just as true. I know it is true because I have seen with my own eyes that Confederate statues are not the only things under threat. Non-Confederate statues have been removed from New York City. The recent removal of a Philip Schuyler statue from a traffic circle in Albany is another case in point.

Brooks D. Simpson, Foundation Professor of History at ASU, posted a comment about the process used in the removal of the Schuyler statue. Many anonymous Twitter handles in the so-called Southern heritage community tried to call him out. In this case, he got the best of them. Dr. Simpson is correct when he wrote in a follow-up Tweet:

“To the degree that monuments are ‘history,’ they are historical artifacts of the people who erect them, not the people they portray.”

This is a strong argument for the preservation of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery as I and others have written. It represents the history of reconciliation in the country in the early 20th century. Dr. Simpson made another important point in his defense of his Schuyler Tweet:

“I've always said that the greatest enemies of Confederate heritage are its advocates, and we see proof of that every day on Twitter.”

I blocked several anonymous people on Twitter recently for this very reason. There are many fine anonymous “advocates” of Southern and Confederate heritage on Twitter. There are also anti-Semites, Nazi sympathizers, and white nationalists who try to align themselves with the defense of Southern heritage. This is harmful and plays right into the hands of those who want to destroy a memorial in a cemetery. Our adversaries are not wrong about everything.