Traditionalists backed by the Trump administration are pushing to restore memorials taken down following the protests, the Wall Street Journal has said.
US traditionalists are suing and lobbying with the support of the Donald Trump administration to resurrect memorials which were removed during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Dozens of monuments to European and American historical figures were taken down after the nationwide protests and riots which followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, in what WSJ dubbed the “statue wars.”
Ohio’s capital Columbus, named after the famed Italian explorer, took down a 22-foot-high statue of him from City Hall in 2020. At the time, the city’s Democrat Mayor Andrew Ginther called it a representation of the country’s “ugly past.”
In April, a coalition of Italian-American organizations filed a federal lawsuit to have the monument restored, calling its removal “unlawful and discriminatory.” They argue the statue is a symbol of Italian-American heritage, civic history and a longstanding cultural bond between Columbus, Ohio, and Genoa, Italy, where it was made.
“The silent majority is becoming vocal,” WSJ cited the lawsuit’s organizer Jack Conte as saying. “You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.”
The Trump administration has supported the effort. Just over two months after taking office in 2025, the US president signed an executive order to reinstate monuments removed since 2020, if they were taken down as part of what he called an effort to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one that protesters sank in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor during the nationwide protests.
Ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary on July 4, the Interior Department returned a statue of Delaware Founding Father Caesar Rodney to Washington’s Freedom Plaza. The monument was removed in 2020 amid criticism that Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was also a slaveholder.
A total of 261 US historical monuments were removed, vandalized or toppled during the BLM protests, according to World Heritage USA data. More than half were related to Confederate figures.
Nice, well let’s return some of ours:
1. Captain John Fane Charles Hamilton Monument (Hamilton City) The softsock cuntcil caved in to threats by maori elder taitimu maipi to tear down the statue physically. HCC cited to care for public safety and PC BS .
2. Captain James Cook (Gisborne). A monument of Captain James Cook was removed from titirangi hill in 2018/2019.
3. Plaques Removed: In Marton (Rangitikei District), In 2020 the council removed a plaque from a Captain Cook statue that described him as the “discoverer” of New Zealand, wokenowledging that maori arrived centuries earlier, “discovering” enslaving and eating the real natives, the moriori (then later they “discovered” to enslave each other).
4. In April 2026, Woman effigy denied. Auckland cuntcil’s broad chair Trish Deans announced the derision to cave in to the Japanese ambassador to New Zealand, Makoto Osawa, agitating against the Korean Garden Soc. who wanted to instal a commemorative sculpture of a “comfort woman”. The Japanese Ambarrasser warned such statue (depicting sex-slave atrocities committed by Japan during WW2) could “cause division and conflict between New Zealand’s Japanese and Korean communities!?!
Getcha a*se outahere!
Does this put the Maori ‘totem’ poles in danger?
Of course not. Every commemorative effigy is part of civilization.
…and civilisation ‘trends’. (verb)