Cultural Revolution is so hot right now. As fate would have it, the week’s most important cultural fault line appeared in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, just a few blocks from my home. A violent, apparently Marxist mob – as evidenced by their internet champion, Joe Rivano Barros, a white Stanford alum who has publicly branded himself a champion of the working people – destroyed the statue of Ulysses S. Grant. I… admittedly lost my cool.

Destroying historical and cultural icons is of course a well-storied tactic of violent Marxists, though it has been recently confused in America by the well-meaning introspection of young people grappling with the United States’ legacy of slavery and the Confederate South. Statues of Confederate figures and generals have been targeted for years. The question – why are we celebrating these men? It’s obvious we should not be. Immediately following the Civil War, it was important to reintegrate the North and South. That meant there was perhaps a more complicated cultural calculus at work in the late 19th Century. But Jim Crow-era celebrations of the Confederacy came to evoke something altogether different, and cannot be justified. The problem is, for many people, this was never about the Confederacy. This was always about the United States in general. America is increasingly observed by our cultural founts of power as force of tremendous historic evil in the world, and therefore all heroic celebrations of America must be eradicated. If this was not already clear to you, the destruction of the statue of Ulysses S. Grant should make it obvious this is not about race. Grant inherited one slave in his life, a man named William Jones, and freed him. Then he conquered the Confederate South, and vanquished the institution of Southern slavery. He placed black and indigenous men in prominent positions of power. As president, he tried his best to help the freed slaves toward prosperity, but was ultimately thwarted by pro-Confederate Democrats at the turn of the century.