The centerpiece of a new exhibit in Los Angeles is a mangled junkyard of a statue, with horse and human limbs glommed together like some kind of zombie Ichabod Crane. Now dismembered beyond recognition, the piece was once a statue of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
In 2021, the statue — along with its better-known counterpart, a statue of Jackson’s friend and commanding officer Robert E. Lee — was removed from downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, four years after the city council voted to remove them. Lee’s statue met its demise in 2023, torn apart and melted down in secret. The haunting footage was later broadcast, as if to taunt those who hoped to see it preserved.
Now, it is Jackson’s turn for public defacement. His head has been severed from its body and his face from its head, which hangs from the top of the newly configured statue like a 21st-century head on a pike. The two men, both depicted atop their beloved war horses, once stood two blocks apart. Now, they have met similar ends, pulled apart piece by piece by those who fashion themselves their cultural conquerors.
The Jackson statue — if you can call it that anymore — is part of a new exhibit presented by two Los Angeles galleries, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Brick, titled “Monuments.” Along with Jackson’s mangled remains, the exhibit showcases other Confederate memorial statues, which also bear scars from the abuse of angry mobs. The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, which once stood in Baltimore, is still doused in red paint. A dual statue of Lee and Jackson bears the spray-painted caption, “BEWARE TRAITORS.” A statue of Jefferson Davis, presented toppled on its back, is splattered with pink paint and has its face crushed in. Interspersed with these desecrated statues are works of modern activism, like a photo of an overweight, naked black woman standing in shackles in the middle of a New York City intersection.
The display is a statement of not just provocation but subjugation. Ancient armies once put the corpses of their conquered enemies on display to reinforce their defeat; the same is happening here.
A New York Times review of the exhibit called the original statues “works of Jim Crow-era propaganda.” Now, they have been remade into works of George Floyd-era propaganda.
The conquerors in this scene are the BLM Marxists who hate not just the long-dead slaveholders of the South but all things white and Western. Understand this: It’s not just about the faults of Confederate generals. Every accusation of racism and oppression that could be legitimately leveled at the slaveholding South has been leveled with equal fervor at the American experiment, its founders, and you, its beneficiary. It’s why not just Confederates but Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Christopher Columbus, and Teddy Roosevelt have been subjected to the same treatment. (Along with the statues of Lee and Jackson, the city of Charlottesville also removed a statue of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacajawea. It remains to be seen if that statue will meet the same gruesome fate as its former neighbors.)
[READ NEXT: The Monument-Destroying Mobs Don’t Hate The Confederacy, They Hate America]
Nikole Hannah-Jones, famous for her factually challenged rewrite of American history through a culturally Marxist lens, preaches that the “white race” is “the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.” Lest you think she’s only talking about the Founding Fathers, she clarifies: “the descendants of these savage people … continue to be bloodsuckers in our communities.” Those are not the words of a person merely out to punish Confederate statues, but of someone who wants to bring down the entire system. The BLM industrial complex is predicated on the belief that America and Western civilization at large are a bourgeoisie that must be punished collectively for the sins of capitalism and colonialism. (If you don’t believe me, go read Ibram Kendi.) Punishments range from being passed over for college acceptance to being stabbed on a train.
The Times’ art critic Jason Farago suggested the garish display in Los Angeles “faces down past and present hatreds with startling confidence.” But as my colleague John Daniel Davidson notes, that’s wrong.
“The exhibit is itself a manifestation of present hatreds — projected back into our shared past, flung forward at our posterity, and aimed directly at those … alive today who would have preserved these monuments untouched,” he says. “The entire exhibit is a monument to hatred, in the present day, of country and countrymen.”
That’s exactly right. The director of the Brick gallery, Hamza Walker, told the Times the whole exhibit was practically “an excuse to get one of those things” — canceled Confederate monuments, that is — “into Kara’s hands.” Once in possession of it, artist Kara Walker started with what she described as a “gruesome beheading” of the statue, which was cheered by her onlookers. “This was basically mine now,” she told the Times. (Walker has previously admitted she is an “unreliable narrator.”)
Those are the words and actions of a plundering revolutionary, not a historical curator. Farago unwittingly admits as much, comparing the exhibit to “the graveyards of toppled totalitarian sculpture you can see in … post-Soviet states.” Toppling statues is always an act of revolution, whether military or cultural. And when it happens, history shows us the mobs are quickly dissatisfied with their bronze victims and move on to people. This Confederate soldier was strung up on a street pole for defending a way of life that was infected by racism. Do they accuse you, American, of anything less?
Farago described Walker’s approach this way: “Treat [the statues] as your inheritance, and use them as you like.” It’s the same approach the BLM crowd takes to America herself, which they claim was built by stolen people on stolen land.
If Jackson’s mangled carcass is any indication of what they have planned, watch out. As Farago admitted, the “perversity” is “very much the point.”
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