RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the great gifts the British writer George Orwell gave us, in addition to his classics 1984 and Animal Farm, was a clear and uncompromising look at dangerous ideologies. In “Orwell and the British Left,” British writer Ian Williams recalls Orwell’s underlining of “the old, true and unpalatable conclusion that a Communist and a Fascist are somewhat nearer to one another than either is to a democrat.” Orwell’s well-observed conclusion nonetheless scandalized many on the left who rallied behind the Marxist phrase “no enemies on the left.”

Sadly, a quarter century after the fall of Communism, too many leftists are still ignoring Orwell and refusing to acknowledge the reality of left-wing brutality. In the wake of Charlottesville, eyewitnesses and reporters agreed that while the violence was instigated by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, it was countered with bloody counterattacks by left-wingers and black-shirted anarchists wearing masks. There was a clear asymmetric outcome to the violence: A white nationalist mowed down protestors with his car, killing a 32-year-old woman.

But that didn’t mean there were no victims of left-wing violence. Antifa — short for “anti-fascist” — protestors came armed with pepper spray, bricks, and clubs. Antifa members believe that racist speech is violence and that they must counter it physically, not just oppose it with rhetoric or better ideas.

As the New York Daily News reported, among antifa’s victims were journalists:

Taylor Lorenz of The Hill was punched in the face by an antifa for recording a fight between the two groups; she tweeted that her assaulter told her not to “snitch, media bitch.” A videographer from Richmond’s WTVR covering a counter-protest got a concussion from head blows with a stick.

In addition, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times tweeted from Charlottesville:

The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding “antifa” beating white nationalists being led out of the park.

Nor is Charlottesville the only place that antifa activists have crossed the line. Peter Beinart has a piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine noting that rioting by antifa forces forced University of California at Berkeley officials to cancel speeches by Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopolous earlier this year.

In April, threats by antifa supporters convinced the Portland, Ore., police department that they couldn’t guarantee security for the annual Rose Festival parade. The parade’s sin? Allowing the local Republican party to have Trump supporters march under the GOP banner in the parade. The parade was canceled, to the delight of many in the hob-nailed boot Left that makes Portland, well, such a special place.

But most of this has been swiftly swept under the rug or underreported by liberals and much of the mainstream media. On Friday, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held its monthly meeting in Washington. A liberal member introduced a stirring denunciation of the Nazi, KKK and white-nationalist participants in the Charlottesville rally.

But then Commission member Gail Heriot introduced an amendment that would have added the following:

Though we support peaceful protest and note that most of the counter-demonstrators were peaceful, we condemn violence by anyone, including violence by so-called antifa demonstrators.

Heriot, an independent, was supported in her amendment by Peter Kirsanow, a Republican appointee and African American from Cleveland. But they received no other support from the five commission members appointed by Democrats. Chairwoman Catherine Lhamon complained that Heriot’s amendment would “water down” the main resolution, when all it did was make clear that the commission wished to condemn violence of any kind.

They end up protesting free speech advocates instead.

Tens of thousands of left-wing activists converged on Boston Saturday to protest “white supremacism” during a “free speech” rally in which organizers disavowed white supremacism. The counter-protesters were under the impression that the free speech rally would be similar to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week that became violent and left a woman dead. But they were wrong. The rally was organized by a free speech group with no connection to white nationalists or Nazis. The protest on Saturday seemed to be either a result of mass hysteria fanned by a rabidly anti-Trump MSM, or a massive astroturf effort funded by the usual suspects on the organized left. Or a combination of the two.

An organizer for Boston Free Speech, the group behind the rally, told Boston.com that the group is not associated with the white supremacists and wrote in a Facebook post prior to the event that hate groups were not welcome.

John Medlar said his group is mostly comprised of Boston-area students in their mid-teens to mid-20s.

While Medlar defined Boston Free Speech as “intentionally neutral libertarians,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a blog post Monday that the rally “has been organized under the auspices of the alt lite,” also known as the New Right, a “loosely-connected movement whose adherents generally shun white supremacist thinking, but who are in step with the alt right in their hatred of feminists and [ illegal] immigrants, among others.”

Medlar disagreed with this characterization of the rally’s organizers and said he wished the league had reached out to his group directly instead of rushing to judgment.

“We are a grassroots coalition of local progressives, libertarians, and conservatives,” he wrote in an email to Boston.com. “… The topic of our event is free speech itself, and issues related to free speech. [Every] speaker at this event was invited to speak about issues related to free speech, not their other personal politics.”

Medlar, a 23-year-old Newton native, said Boston Free Speech is not associated with any of the groups from the Charlottesville rally, echoing statements put out by the group on Facebook Tuesday, Saturday, and June 17.

Medlar told Boston.com that most of the groups that are involved with his organization are currently “right wing” because they are the ones who “feel their free speech is mostly under threat.” In response to a report in the Boston Herald Friday alleging that members of the Massachusetts Ku Klux Klan were planning to attend the free speech rally, he said on Facebook that his group “reserves the right to dismiss anyone” at their event.

“If we are made aware, at any time, that hate groups are attending our rally we will ask them to exercise their free speech elsewhere,” the post said. CONTINUE AT SITE

The week before Charlottesville, Liz Warren, the newest and biggest fraud from the left, came out against a more centrist Democratic Party. The N.Y. Times op-ed page had actually allowed some Democrat moderates to publish a piece pleading for moderation on the left, and Liz instantly struck back. She thereby outsmarted Hillary, and a lot of what is happening today is a fight between left and lefter in the party.

Charlottesville followed a week later, and Liz earned Antifa brownie points for pushing back against moderation.

But the trouble with turning hard left too many times is that you end up in the same place you started, as in the classical French observation that “les extrêmes se touchent” – roughly, “the extremes meet each other.”

The left works hand in hand with the Ikhwan (the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Hitler’s time), and it’s no surprise at all that CAIR (the U.S. front for the Brothers) immediately endorsed the leftist mob response to the murderous provocation battle in Charlottesville.

The Swastika is the perfect symbol for Antifa, because anyone with only a smidgen of history will recognize Antifa as another neurotic repetition of the worst moments in history. The people who pay for, recruit, and organize ruckus-makers teach radical street theater, and hey, if somebody gets killed, you just blame the innocent.

This is the whole purpose. Innocent people getting killed are a small price to pay for the glorious revolution, as Obama taught in his ACORN Alinsky trainings.

What is more un-American than calling for the assassination of our legally elected POTUS Trump? Wanting to kill a political enemy is the very definition of all the tyrannical war cults in history. Now that liberals have found their inner Stalinist again, they have become what they claim to hate. Calling for a presidential assassination is an open confession of totalitarian murder fantasies, the same nightmare fantasies that drove actual assassins – against JFK, against Pope John Paul II, against Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and against Abraham Lincoln.

What we are seeing today is not just talk of assassination. It has already resulted in a near fatal assault on Republican congressmen. It drove that mad young man in Charlottesville to panic, and in due course, we will find out what actually happened, through the court system. Only fools jump to instant conclusions, but then we are governed and preached at by fools every single day. Republicans have happily jumped into the public dirt pool along with all the other fools. Just keep track of who said what at this critical moment, and dig it out at election time.

These are dark, very dark signs of bad trouble to come, and there is no reasonable doubt that our jihadist enemies are working hand in hand with the likes of Antifa.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a Nazi-time network of violence-prone Muslim radicals, also called Salafists. Barack Hussein Obama, Code Pink, and Bill Ayers provoked the so-called Arab Spring rebellions at the start of the Obama years, including the Ikhwan in Egypt, all of them in alliance with other bad characters, including child-killing terrorists like Hamas, Hezb’allah, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the rest.

Obama’s Arab Spring fraud led to tens of thousands of deaths in Arab countries – a point very widely understood in places like Egypt. The methodology of the Arab Spring is identical to Antifa, because mob agitation is the same all over the world.

After the Arab Spring crashed into slaughter, Obama just laughed it up in his public appearances, but no sane observer doubts his lifelong links with the murderous left. He wrote about it in both autobiographies, and it will no doubt show up in his third autobiography that’s now coming up.

The American Thinker has long pointed out massive evidence for direct collusion between the left and Muslim terrorism, because it’s been plain for anybody with the guts to see it. We have not been the only ones to call them out, but you can easily search AT’s archives to verify that.

After helping to elect Donald Trump and pilot his White House through the turbulence of its first seven months, Stephen K. Bannon has left the administration and returned to Breitbart News, the conservative online news giant he captained before joining Trump a year ago.

What distinguishes Steve Bannon from other GOP operatives and conservative politicians are two things: vision and guts. The left in this country, the progressive and Democratic Party left is now organized around the anti-American creed of “identity politics.” This is the idea that “people of color” in America are oppressed by white supremacists – by people who are not “of color” and only a general purge of white racists and suppression of their free speech will rectify the injustice. This is the new racism, which serves as the principal weapon in Democrat attacks not only on the Trump White House but on all Republicans and patriots who oppose them.

“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” Steve Bannon told the American Prospect. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the Left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

You can probably count on one hand the number of Republican office-holders who think clearly and strategically like that. Or maybe one finger.

It is because Bannon understands the civil war which has now engulfed the political life of this nation that the secessionist left has focused its most vicious attacks on him, calling him a white nationalist, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite. Such attacks are transparently false, but they are in line with the left’s attacks on all their opponents as racists and fascists. These are the verbal equivalents of a nuclear option in political warfare and they reflect the existential nature of the conflict that is upon us. It is existential because the left has aimed at nothing less than the foundations of our democracy.

This was not a battle that could be fully engaged from the White House itself because so many people including the mainstream of the Republican Party are not yet awake to the nature of the conflict. They are too eager to seek approval from progressives who hate them.

Some on the right are concerned that without Bannon’s White House presence, Trump will become a prisoner of the globalist tendencies inside the administration and the appeasement instincts of the Republican in Congress. But they are wrong. Trump will still be Trump. He is not going to abandon the agendas or bury the instincts that made him endure the most hate-filled campaign in the history of American politics because he loves this country and wants to restore its greatness.

Although conservatives may thrill to the president’s frequent street fights with the Left, a president cannot be a relentless rebel. He has to put together a non-ideological majority and pick his fights shrewdly. Trump has already expressed his appreciation for the asset Bannon will be to him outside the White House. “Steve Bannon will be a tough and smart new voice at @BreitbartNews…maybe even better than ever before,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Fake News needs the competition!” Yet, it’s more than fake news organizations that better look out when Bannon gets going.

Federal authorities are investigating whether sensitive data was stolen from congressional offices by several Pakistani-American tech staffers and sold to Pakistani or Russian intelligence, knowledgeable sources say.

What started out 16 months ago as a scandal involving the alleged theft of computer equipment from Congress has turned into a national-security investigation involving FBI surveillance of the suspects.

Investigators now suspect that sensitive US government data — possibly including classified information — could have been compromised and may have been sold to hostile foreign governments that could use it to blackmail members of Congress or even put their lives at risk.

“This is a massive, massive scandal,” a senior US official familiar with the widening probe told The Post.

Alarm bells went off in April 2016 when computer security officials in the House reported “irregularities” in computer equipment purchasing. An internal investigation revealed the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government property, and evidence pointed to five IT staffers and the Democratic Congress members’ offices that employed them.

The evidence was turned over to the House inspector general, who found so much “smoke” that she recommended a criminal probe, sources say. The case was turned over to Capitol Police in October.

When the suspected IT workers couldn’t produce the missing invoiced equipment, sources say, they were removed from working on the computer network in early February.

During the probe, investigators found valuable government data that is believed to have been taken from the network and placed on offsite servers, setting off more alarms. Some 80 offices were potentially compromised.

Most lawmakers fired the alleged “ringleader” — longtime IT staffer Imran Awan — in February. But Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former Democratic National Committee chief, kept Awan on her payroll until his arrest last month on seemingly unrelated charges of defrauding the congressional credit union.

For more than a decade, Awan, his wife, two relatives and a friend worked for 30 House Democrats. They included New York City pols Gregory Meeks, Joseph Crowley and Yvette Clarke and members of the sensitive Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees.

The Democrats who hired the five suspects apparently did a poor job vetting them. Awan’s brother Abid had a rap sheet with multiple offenses, including a conviction for DWI a month before he was hired, and filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Most had relatively little IT experience. Yet they hauled in a combined $4 million-plus over the past decade. One, a former McDonald’s worker, was suddenly making as much as a chief of staff.

“These lawmakers allowed an insider threat to come into the House,” the official charged. “Computer equipment was stolen, taxpayers were robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars and sensitive data was compromised and possibly sold overseas.”

On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted Imran Awan on four seemingly unrelated felony counts including bank fraud, conspiracy and making false statements. They also indicted his wife, Hina Alvi. FBI agents seized hard drives and other evidence from their Virginia home.

The indictment says the couple wired close to $300,000 in fraudulently obtained funds to Pakistan in January, as the Capitol Police investigation heated up.

FBI agents last month collared Awan, 37, at the Dulles International Airport airport as he tried to board a flight to Pakistan. Alvi, 33, fled to Pakistan in March.

Now that prosecutors have Awan hung up on the fraud charges, they will try to squeeze him harder in the larger cyber-espionage investigation, according to the US official, who expects additional charges and arrests in the case.

Awan’s lawyer, Christopher Gowen, who has worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaigns as well as the Clinton Foundation, maintained that his client was only indicted “for working while Muslim.”

The investigation has touched Democratic leaders including Wasserman Schultz, who has been accused of protecting Awan. She stuck by her close aide, despite being briefed several months ago by House administrators and security officials about his “suspicious activities” on the Hill, sources say.

Wasserman Schultz attempted to downplay his alleged conduct, saying he was “transferring data outside the secure network, which I think amounted to use of apps that the House didn’t find compliant with our security requirements.” Such transfers though, could be a serious, potentially illegal, violation.

The US Attorney’s Office in Washington has taken possession of a laptop issued to Awan from Wasserman Schultz’s office, according to the sources, and she has reportedly retained counsel.

Earlier this year, she badgered the Capitol Police chief to return the laptop to her, even threatening him with “consequences.”

The congresswoman could not be reached for comment, but she recently told a local paper that scrutiny of her Muslim aide was motivated by “racial and ethnic profiling.”

Awan had access to Wasserman Schultz’s e-mails at both Congress and the DNC, where he had been given the password to her iPad. After DNC e-mails and research files were stolen during the presidential election, Wasserman Schultz reportedly refused to turn over the server to the FBI and instead called in a private firm to investigate and ID the hackers. The firm blamed the Russian government, while admitting, “We don’t have hard evidence.” The corrupted DNC server, held in storage, still has not been examined by the FBI.

Wasserman Schultz denies the DNC turned down the FBI’s assistance or that her congressional or DNC e-mails were compromised by Awan.

“This whole investigation pivots off Debbie Wasserman Schultz,” the official said.

“It’s clear that large bytes of data were moved off the secure network,” said another source close to the investigation, adding that Awan and the other four staffers under investigation had “full and complete access” to lawmakers’ e-mails, calendars, schedules, hearing notes, meeting notes and memos and other sensitive information.

Investigators are trying to determine if any classified information was compromised. Although the network that was breached is an unclassified system, it’s possible that members or staff cleared to handle classified information inadvertently sent such information in e-mails after getting classified briefings, sources believe.

“Logic dictates that sensitive data was compromised,” the senior official speculated. “An accused criminal with close ties to Pakistan had full and complete control over data that went out over the network.”

Paul Sperry is a former Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rejected calls for him to resign in protest of President Donald Trump’s response to violence at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend, and defended the president in a statement Saturday evening.

Mr. Mnuchin condemned the “actions of those filled with hate and with the intent to harm others.”

“While I find it hard to believe I should have to defend myself on this, or the president, I feel compelled to let you know that the president in no way, shape or form believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways,” Mr. Mnuchin said.

About 300 of Mr. Mnuchin’s classmates from the Yale University undergraduate class of 1985 posted a letter online Friday asking Mr. Mnuchin to resign in protest of Mr. Trump’s comments.

“It is your moral obligation,” they said. “We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing.”

One week ago, Mr. Trump endured a weekend of criticism for saying in his first reaction to violence at a Charlottesville rally of neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups that there were “many sides” to the unrest. On Monday, he more explicitly condemned white supremacists, including the driver who killed a 32-year-old woman when he plowed into a crowd protesting the white nationalists.

‘While I find it hard to believe I should have to defend myself on this, or the president, I feel compelled to let you know that the president in no way, shape or form believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways.’
—Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin

But at a combative press conference in New York on Tuesday, Mr. Trump defended his initial response, saying both sides were to blame for the clashes. “You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” Mr. Trump said, with Mr. Mnuchin standing next to him. There were “very fine people on both sides,” the president said.

Mr. Trump faced an intense backlash, including criticism from members of his own party for what elected officials and business leaders said was a failure to provide moral leadership. Two CEO councils created by the White House disbanded, and the administration abandoned plans for a third panel on infrastructure.

The White House on Thursday issued a statement to deny rumors that Gary Cohn, Mr. Trump’s economic policy director, would leave the administration over the president’s remarks. Mr. Cohn was also at the Tuesday news conference. Messrs. Cohn and Mnuchin are both Jewish.

Mr. Mnuchin served as Mr. Trump’s campaign finance chairman before being named as Treasury secretary and has a close personal relationship with the president.

In his statement Saturday, Mr. Mnuchin implied that Mr. Trump’s political opponents, including Republican rivals in last year’s primary campaign, were unfairly seizing on the Charlottesville uproar to “distract the administration” from policy issues.

How dare he?

President Donald J. Trump stood before journalists on Tuesday and said the unsayable: “I think there is blame on both sides.”

Rather than denounce only the execrable white supremacists and swastika-wielding neo-Nazis who organized Saturday’s hate-o-rama in Charlottesville, Va., Trump observed that there was violence coming from the KKK side and from extreme leftists who opposed them with force — not with tranquility, as did those at a peaceful vigil Wednesday night.

The reaction to Trump’s comments was vitriolic:

“We can truly say his words have absolutely emboldened white supremacists,” said CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.

The Chicago Sun-Times called Trump “America’s bigot in chief.”

“This is not my president,” declared Senator Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii).

But if these and other Trump haters were outraged at Trump’s comments, where was their anger when the reliably liberal ACLU described the situation as it unfolded? “Not sure who provoked first. Both sides were hitting each other at Justice Park before police arrived,” the ACLU of Virginia declared via Twitter on Saturday afternoon. The group identified both factions in a video of an open-air brawl on Charlottesville’s streets. “The guy on the ground is a Unite the Right protester. Those in black and red are #Antifa protesters,” referring to far-left “anti-fascist” thugs. The ACLU labeled another violent snippet, “Clash between protesters and counter protesters.”

There was no angst when Reuters reported that “Many of the rally participants were seen carrying firearms, sticks and shields. Some also wore helmets. Counter-protesters likewise came equipped with sticks, helmets and shields.” Reuters correspondents Amanda Becker and Jeff Mason added, “The two sides clashed in scattered street brawls before a car plowed into the rally opponents, killing one woman and injuring 19 others.”

This AP photo from #CharlottesvilleVA is incredible pic.twitter.com/9YZ8SLHnPj
— don (@donswaynos) August 12, 2017

The fury was absent when NBC Nightly News’ Gabe Gutierrez explained that “witnesses say both sides came prepared for a fight.”

The Trumpophobes left their spleens unvented when the Associated Press published this headline, “View from the street: Police stood by as adversaries fought.”

And there was no venom when Charlottesville Police Chief Al Thomas said: “We did have mutually combative individuals in the crowd.”

ABC-TV affiliate WRIC reported that police nabbed eight people tied to this melee. While some clearly were white-power extremists, others were anything but. These include Troy Dunigan, 21, of Tennessee. “He was arrested Saturday for throwing objects at ‘Nazi protesters,’ according to court documents.” Beth Foster, director of the Mercy Junction Justice and Peace Center, told

Robert E. Lee was a great American. He was in rebellion against his country for four tortuous, bloody years. At the head of the Army of Northern Virginia, he came darn close to winning Southern independence. Lee was a brilliant field commander, full of audacity. His daring was a gift and a bane. He was a man of integrity. He was a man of his place and time. He deserves our remembrance and respect.

The left – and the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, the race industry, and establishment go-alongs – want to destroy our history. Destroy anything that honors the men who fought for the South in the Civil War. Destroy, as the left does – here and abroad – history that doesn’t comport with its worldview. Destroy it or ignore it and rewrite it, as the Stalinists did. As Orwell warned.

That’s a villainous mindset. It contains an awfully destructive logic if not defeated. The left won’t stop at discarding the soldiers of the South’s rebellion. It will advance to anything and anyone the left deems inconvenient to its narrative – a narrative it fashions to gain power and control over all of us. If successful, the left will turn with a terrible vengeance on our founders. It will eviscerate the nation’s leaders in the generations up to the Civil War, and then beyond. It’s a means to tyranny.

Goes the left’s argument: the South’s secession was to preserve an evil institution, slavery – negro slavery, precisely. In large part, it was. But we live in dumbed down times, when schools fail to teach, or foist revisionist history on our kids; when history is barely remembered, much less understood; when tens of millions of citizens are open to falsehood, misrepresentation, and certainly lack of context about the momentous events and times and people in the past who shaped our nation.

Robert E. Lee was intimately connected to the nation’s beginnings. From Biography:

Lee was cut from Virginia aristocracy. His extended family members included a president, a chief justice of the United States, and signers of the Declaration of Independence. His father, Colonel Henry Lee, also known as “Light-Horse Harry,” had served as a cavalry leader during the Revolutionary War and gone on to become one of the war’s heroes, winning praise from General George Washington.

Lee married Mary Custis, whose great grandparents were George and Martha Washington. He graduated from West Point and distinguished himself in the Mexican-American War. In the small postwar army, Lee rose to the rank of colonel. He served as superintendent of the United States Military Academy.

Lee’s star rose when he was ordered to quell John Brown’s rebellion at Harper’s Ferry. He was then regarded as a possible leader of the Union army should civil war come.

When the war came, Lincoln offered Lee command of Union forces. Lee declined. It’s important to understand why – and it wasn’t because Lee was pro-slavery. Like most every American, he was, first and foremost, a citizen of his state: Virginia. When Virginia seceded, Lee acted from conviction: his duty lay with his state.

Modern Americans often travel across state lines. They relocate for work or lifestyle. They fail to appreciate mid-19th-century life. Though change was coming, Americans were still overwhelmingly rural, rarely venturing more than a dozen miles from their villages or farms. The nation was only loosely knitted together through the Revolution, rudimentary media, religion, and culture. The Civil War commenced just 72 years after Washington was sworn in as president.

Slavery had been contentious from the time the Constitution was debated and drafted. It remained contentious, in ebbs and flows, throughout the early decades of the republic. The 1850s saw an escalation in tensions and conflict about the issue. Lincoln’s election in 1860 proved the deal-breaker for 11 lower Southern states.

Atlanta’s Peace Monument was damaged by protesters Sunday night, though it was erected in 1911 to urge reconciliation after the Civil War, not to celebrate the Confederacy.

The sculpture features an angel standing above a Confederate soldier, guiding him to lay down his weapon. Protesters traveled in Atlanta from Woodruff Park to Piedmont Park, where the Peace Monument is located, and some desecrated it, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The scene was only protected by one police officer, who was surrounded by black-clad Antifa protesters shouting “pig.”

“I completely understand what happened,” Thornton Kennedy, a sixth generation Atlantan who has taken his children to visit the monument many times to explain Atlanta’s history, told the Journal-Constitution. “It’s a statue that, to the observer, looks like a Confederate memorial.”

Atlanta author Goldie Taylor tweeted, “The Peace Monument is NOT a Confederate memorial. It was erected to honor those who worked to reunify the country after Reconstruction.”

The Journal-Constitution also reported that Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields expressed regret about how her officers dealt with protesters Sunday who defaced the statue.

“I feel like that we should have identified, removed, and arrested a couple of people earlier in the march, absolutely,” Shields said in an interview with Channel 2 Action News.

Shields said that by the time it was clear arrests were necessary, “We couldn’t identify them. And that’s not acceptable. We have the intelligence, we have the probable cause, we need to take action.”