Robert E. Lee and Elon Musk
A Confederate memorial is gone. This week the city of Charlottesville, Virginia melted down the bronze statue of Robert E. Lee.
As reported by NPR, the memorial has been part of the college town’s square for approximately 100 years. In 2017, neo-Nazis and white supremacists rallied around the statue because the city was planning on removing it. Heather Heyer was killed by a white nationalist at the rally. In 2021, the statue was taken down. After legal battles with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the sculpture was donated to Swords Into Plowshares. The group promised to melt it down to create “a more inclusive public art installation.”
Last week Lee and his horse, Traveller, finally met the furnace.
All of this made the Twitter/X king upset. According to Mediaite, Elon Musk is certain Lee’s descendants are not long for this world. A Twitter user called Lee “literally [an] ancestor.” A rather weird construction but no matter. The user continued by insisting his/her “kind is hated and many seek our extinction…” Musk heartily agreed: “They absolutely want your extinction.”
Outside of a very short afternoon love affair with a Confederate flag hat, my hatred for rebel iconography knows no bounds. Walked away from nerdy booty (he read books, drank coffee, and was cute) because he used the term “war of northern aggression.” Despite this red zone disdain for everything Confederate, not once have I considered the “extinction” of a group of people. I will consistently insist honoring treason in the public square is one of the oddest tricks in U.S. history. The eyes will roll when people attempt to make the CSA into a racial haven (see this clown talking about “Hulk Lawyer”). Civil War nerd James will suck his teeth when people insist the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Apparently, as reported by a 2015 McClatchy-Marist Poll, 41 percent of Americans don’t think human bondage was the reason for all that lost blood.
Hopefully Musk, and his Confederate sidekicks, will explain how this equals wanting some to face “extinction.”
That’s the wish of those yelling “Jews will not replace us.”
Wondering if the person who claimed Robert E. Lee as an ancestor was Robert E. Lee IV, whom I met in the late 1970s when I was a staff correspondent covering EPA's laboratories then located in Research Triangle Park NC. He was, indeed, a descendant of Lee and was very proud of that fact.