‘If the community doesn’t want the statue, the statue shouldn’t be there…’
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., refused to condemn the mob that tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore, saying, “people will do what they do.”
At a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi, who is from Baltimore, was asked about the Columbus statue, which was torn down and thrown into the Inner Harbor by protesters on Saturday.
The statue had stood near Baltimore’s “Little Italy” neighborhood since 1984.
The San Francisco liberal, whose father was mayor of Baltimore, is “not one of those people who is wedded to a statue of somebody someplace,” she said in response, according to Fox News.
“If the community doesn’t want the statue, the statue shouldn’t be there,” she said.
Asked again whether the statue should have been taken down by a commission or a city council instead of a “mob in the middle of the night,” Pelosi continued to make excuses.
“I do think that, from a safety standpoint, it would be a good idea to have it taken down if the community doesn’t want it,” she said. “I don’t know that it has to be a commission, but it just could be a community view.”
Pelosi has also called for the removal of Confederate statues at the U.S. Capitol.
Ironically, she’s remained silent on her father’s role in the dedication of several Confederate statues.
Thomas D’Alesandro, whose own statue in downtown Baltimore has yet to be pulled down by an angry mob, oversaw the dedication of a monument to Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee in 1948.
“Today with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions,” D’Alesandro said during his dedication speech, according to the Washington Examiner.
That same statue was removed by Baltimore officials in 2017, but Pelosi has yet to comment on it.
