Pat Buchanan: How long will the vandals run amok?

The left’s war on America’s past crossed several new frontiers last week.

Portland’s statue of George Washington, the father of his country and the first president of the United States, the greatest man of his age, was toppled and desecrated.

In Portland also, a statue of Thomas Jefferson that stood at the entrance of a high school named for the author of the Declaration of Independence was torn down. In New York, city council members demanded the Jefferson statue in city hall be removed.

Anticipating what was coming, the New York Museum of Natural History got the permission of city hall to have the giant statue of Theodore Roosevelt astride a horse, flanked by an African and a Native American, removed from the front of the museum.

With Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt all under attack, three of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore are now repudiated by the left.

Our Taliban have moved on, past Columbus and the Confederate generals, to dislodge and dishonor the Founding Fathers and their patriot sons.

In Philadelphia, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution, with its statue of Washington, was defaced. The tomb is the final resting place for thousands of soldiers, known but to God, who died in the struggle for American independence.

“Committed Genocide” is the charge scrawled on the memorial.

Local authorities or police did not stop the vandals. One wonders what will happen should the haters of Washington and Jefferson decide to torch their ancestral homes at Mount Vernon and Monticello.

Still another line was crossed last week in the war against the past.

A statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park was toppled. Police watched as hundreds gathered to take down the general and 18th president, who accepted the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

We erect statues to remember, revere and honor those whom we memorialize. And what is the motivation of the people who tear them down and desecrate them?

In a word, it is hate. A goodly slice of America’s young hates this country’s history and the men who made it. It hates the discoverers and explorers like Columbus, the conquistadores and colonists. It hates the Founding Fathers and the first 15 presidents, all of whom either had slaves or coexisted with the injustice of slavery. But hating history and denying history and tearing down the statues of the men who made that history does not change history.

So, where are we going?

Today, as was true in the 1960s, the American establishment is on the run. It recoils from mob action but cannot bring itself to condemn those tearing down the statues, for it basically agrees with them and seeks to marshal their energy to help it get back into power in November.

But this cannot go on. The political and propaganda war on the cops, the vandalism of the statues and memorials, the disgracing and dishonoring of American heroes cannot go on indefinitely. At some point, in the near future, the establishment, and its questionable political instrument, Joe Biden, will have to have his Sister Souljah moment, and stand up and stay, “This should stop.”

For, whatever happens in this election, the American people will not stay united around a party and a movement built on the proposition that America has been, from before its birth, a racist criminal enterprise.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. And a society whose history is hated by millions of its members will not survive.