Sounding more like the Taliban every day! The rhetoric regarding Civil War statues may be undergoing a significant shift: from tear ’em down to melt ’em down. It’s not enough to remove the statues from the public square. Now they must be destroyed. The latest straw in the wind: The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center has submitted a proposal to Charlottesville City Council to melt down the Lee Statue that was removed earlier this year and use the bronze to create a new work of public art. The Swords into Plowshares project has received almost 30 letters of support from organizations and individuals, reports the Daily Progress. The saving grace of the tear-down-the-statues movement has been that the statues have been preserved with an idea that they might be placed in a museum or cemetery. Swords into Plowshares reopens the debate. The statues must be extirpated. One thing never changes. The Left is never satisfied. The Left always pushes for more.
It didn’t take long for that to get racialized! The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted 9 to 1 this week to allow unions to engage in collective bargaining with the county. Chairman Jeff McKay said collective bargaining will lead to better employee retention and service to the community. Yeah, right. When have public-service unions ever led to improved service to the public? Wokeness is not an ideology attuned to pleasing middle-class taxpayers. Indeed, trouble may be brewing before the ink dries on the resolution. SEIUrepresents about 2,000 Fairfax County employees. But some say it is too White. What? Fairfax Now quotes David Lyson, executive director of the Fairfax Workers Coalition, as saying, “The bargaining units are tilted toward wealthier white employees.” Uh, oh.
Social justice for perps, not victims. Admittedly, this item is a month old, but it deserves more attention than it’s gotten. Oscar Zaldivar, a Salvadoran immigrant, was indicated in 2019 on three counts of aggravated sexual battery and two counts of sodomy in connection with a young relative when she was between the ages of 5 and 10. For a years-long stretch the abuse occurred weekly. Raymond F. Morrogh, the Fairfax County commonwealth attorney at the time, offered a plea deal that capped his prison term at 30 years. Zaldivar rejected the deal. Then Steve Descano, running on a social-justice platform, replaced Morrogh. Arguing that Zaldivar was a first-time offender and that, at 53 years of age, he was not likely to reoffend, Descano negotiated the plea down to 17 years. So reported the Washington Post.
Judge Thomas P. Mann accepted the deal, but he was appalled. As the girl sat sobbing in his courtroom, he told her she had been victimized twice first by Zaldivar and then by prosecutors. “Make no mistake,” he said, “Your government has failed you.”
I have no way to prove this, but this is what I believe: Descano cut Zaldivar slack because he is a Hispanic immigrant — a Person of Color. Well, guess what, the girl he victimized was a Person of Color, too. How is it “social justice” to always take the side of the victimizers?
