Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced the removal of hundreds Confederate statues and other monuments in the United States following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
In a podcast interview that was broadcast live from the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, Mr. Kennedy, an independent candidate for president, portrayed the removal of statues honoring the Confederacy as “destroying history,” echoing similar comments made by former President Donald J. Trump in support of the monuments.
While defending the statues, Mr. Kennedy also said that there were “heroes in the Confederacy who had no slaves,” but when he later chose an example of a Confederate figure he idolized, he mentioned Robert E. Lee, a prominent general in the rebel army who owned slaves.
“I have a visceral reaction against the attacks on those images,” Mr. Kennedy said on the podcast, which was hosted by Tim Pool, a right-wing commentator. Mr. Kennedy was specifically asked about the removal of a statue of Lee in CharlottesvilleVa., in 2021. He added that “if we want to find people who are completely virtuous in every area throughout history, we would erase all of history.”
Statues and other monuments glorifying the Confederacy were erected – most of them at the height of Jim Crow era – as part of a movement to change the Myth of the Lost Cause, which in various iterations portrayed the Confederacy's uprising as a noble defense of Southern values, or falsely claimed that the Civil War was fought over “states' rights,” not slavery. Many of the monuments also distort history black Americans are depicted as loyal to white southerners in their slavery.
Hundreds of Confederate symbols have been removed since 2020, pushed by social justice activists and local communities who saw the monuments as glorifying an ugly history of racism against African Americans. More than 2,000 of them the symbols remainespecially in the South.
Mr Trump equated their removal to “changing history” as he defended some participants a violent gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, who had collected to protect the later statue of Lee DELETED. Mr. Trump later resisted attempts to rename nine Confederate army bases that had been named after traitorous Confederate generals who fought against the American army.
The candidate in 2020 is President Biden supported the removal of Confederate statues, as well renaming the army baseswhich was ultimately the case carried out during his administration.