I am sick at heart that our entire political leadership is cowering before mobs of vandals seeking to destroy our collective memory of the past.  But now we see mob rule imitating the tactics of the Red Guards of China's Cultural Revolution, who destroyed that nation's precious artistic and literary heritage in the name of revolutionary purity, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, who blew up ancient Buddhist statues — to almost universal condemnation outside the Islamic world.

Slavery may be the "original sin" of America, but until recent days, courage has been seen as more of an American virtue than a French one.  But where is the condemnation of the vandalism of our historic artistic heritage by mobs tearing down statues, rather than following democratic processes and getting them removed to museums or less public display areas, which would be a perfectly reasonable solution to offense taken at honoring heroes of the Confederacy?

Did anyone ever expect that the president of France would teach a lesson in courage to the POTUS?

French President Emmanuel Macron publicly disavows racism but says colonial-era statues will stayhttps://t.co/cHzRzElXwX pic.twitter.com/C72iCsya2F

— TIME (@TIME) June 14, 2020

Brandon Moore of RedState provides a transcript:

"We will be inflexible when it comes to tackling racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination, and new strong decisions will be made to reinforce the egality of chances," Macron said in the video. "But this noble fight is perverted when it turns into communitarianism, into a false rewriting of history."

"This is unacceptable when it is picked up by separatists. I tell you very clearly tonight my dear fellow citizens, the Republic will not erase any trace or name from its history," he continued. "It will not forget any of its deeds or take down any statue. What we need to do is to look all together with lucidity on all of our history and all our memory. Our relation to Africa in particular so we can build a present and a possible future from one to the other side of the Mediterranean."

Twitter video screen grab.

If the Republic survives, this era will become an enduring blot of shame for the madness tolerated and even promoted by the commanding heights of our political, corporate, academic, and media establishments — in other words, our entire institutional leadership class.