Tom McLaughlin: The party controls the past

“He who controls the past controls the future … He who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell. Here in 2017, the left is firmly in control of both academia and media and is using both to control the past. That’s what played out last weekend in Charlottesville, Va. The Charlottesville City Council voted 3-2 to remove a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee which had been there for a century. Nearby is a statue of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Both Lee and Jackson were Southern heroes. They were also Democrats, but you won’t hear about that in media or academia.

They fought for the Confederacy and that makes them villains in the view of the 21st century left, which is in firm control of the Democratic Party. No matter that most slaveholders were Democrats. No matter that Democratic U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia who served until his death in 2010, had also been a member of the KKK. There were so many Democrats south of the Mason/Dixon line, the party referred to it as “The Solid South.”