Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/the-last-time-a-frederick-doug.html
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It just had to be Rochester. Well at least this didn’t happen in Buffalo.
A new statue will be up eventually. Solid cast iron. Larger than before. Significantly harder to take down.
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Not a good reason for Rochester to be in the news today.
Does anyone doubt this will turn out to be a bunch of MAGA nut-jobs, responding directly to Trump’s dog-whistling over the weekend about liberals tearing down statues? Retaliation plain and simple. Unfortunately once you get a bit outside the city, there are plenty of confederate flags and Trump2020 lawn signs to be seen 
Now, talking of statues in Rochester that do need some attention, here’s one… https://talkerofthetown.com/2020/06/18/on-the-defacing-of-reflecting-in-nathaniel-square-and-restoring-the-grave-of-americas-first-professional-racist-in-mt-hope-cemetery/
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It wouldn’t surprise me, but whether or not they’re explicitly MAGATS, the consequences of their actions are the same; they’re carrying water for Toadstool. In then end, the destruction of this Frederick Douglass statue is a Trumpian event, regardless of whether the perpetrators of the racist vandalism intended it to be.
https://twitter.com/popehat/status/858722120620265473?lang=en
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We know what happened here - we’ve just seen it.
BLM stages a peaceful protest,
Racists smash windows and looting results.
Trump and GOP accuses all protestors of being looters.
Communities call for removal of monuments to confederate figures,
Racist smash statue of black leader
Trump and GOP accuses all monument changes of “cancel culture” and anti-American
We are not so easily fooled.
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Yeah. They were shouting racial slurs…
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You are correct, but it occurs to me that a similar “restorative justice” sentence wouldn’t work if it was black people getting punished for destroying a Confederate statue.
“We already DO know all about Robert E. Lee and his contributions to the world. That’s why we tore down his statue.”
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Oh, so now it’s dangerous, left-wing “cancel culture,” but when the statue previously got damaged, when the Emmett Till memorial got shot up (over and over), it was just random vandalism that didn’t mean anything? Funny that.
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The Second American Civil War has already started. This is just the opening. We went through exactly the same crap last time. There were months of terrorists committing crimes in the dark before it finally came out in the open at Fort Sumter. It will be the same this time. I figure it will be some time in October when the white supremacist scum finally grow a pair and do something really overt.
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Lots of examples on that front. I read that it’s an unofficial tradition for cops to shoot at assassinated Black Panther Party founder Fred Hampton’s grave marker, though I never found a source for the claim. Certainly someone has been taking a lot of shots at it.
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Yeah, I have hazy recollections of various other statues and memorials being destroyed, defaced, having hate symbols put on them, etc. over the years, and assumed one could find a consistent pattern of those kinds of attacks through the 20th century. They’re not given much attention though, usually, just dismissed as the work of “individuals” (even when groups are implicated, even when it happens over and over again for years).
Apparently just in mid June, a statue of tennis player Arthur Ashe had “white lives matter” spray-painted on it, and a memorial to a lynching victim was destroyed. Those didn’t seem to get much press, presumably because they obviously couldn’t blame them on BLM-affiliated protestors.
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Yeah. “BLM violence” is “organized violence,” paid for by George Soros, of course. White supremacist violence is committed by lone nuts. Never mind that the latter enactors have long been far more “organized.”
And to think that so many white Americans think they no longer live in a racist country. Let alone a deeply racist one, with white supremacy functioning almost like its spinal cord.
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I’m also looking at all the media coverage of the riots and looting and violence, that unquestioningly associate them with the protests. Because not only is that not something we know was always connected - property damage was happening far from the scenes of the actual protests, targeting locally-owned Black businesses, BLM and antifa were being blamed by Republicans for violence that turned out to be perpetrated by boogaloo dudes. (With Republicans not only never correcting themselves, but using it as a justification for attempting to criminalize antifa - while still chumming around with boogaloo groups. Meanwhile boogaloo-affiliated gunmen showed up to “protect” communities from imaginary rampaging antifa.) Not to mention, the violence and property damage going on around protests were either caused by or responses to police violence. When the cops stopped attacking protesters, the protests became peaceful - and the media stopped covering them, even though they were as big (or bigger than) ever.
It’s double standards, false narratives and projection all the way down.
White supremacy as America’s spinal cord feels like a disturbingly accurate simile.
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