‘Preserving the history, as ugly as it may have been, can be a sign and a symbol of how good it can be…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., slammed the protesters tearing down statues across the country, arguing that the best way to make progress is to first look back at history.
“In America, we may have flaws,” Scott told Fox News.
“We may have challenges, but we get it together, and we come together to overcome those challenges,” he said. “And that’s why I think, oftentimes, preserving the history, as ugly as it may have been, can be a sign and a symbol of how good it can be.”
The real solution is to build more statues, he added, not tear down the existing ones. Men like Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver deserve recognition, too, Scott said, and dedicating our energy to their memory would be a “positive step.”
Instead what we have right now is the destruction of history “for the sake of anarchy,” he said.
Like many other conservatives, Scott expressed a willingness to rename military bases named after Confederate soldiers, many of which were named as a conciliatory effort after the Civil War. But that must be done in a democratic fashion, not by mobs armed with ropes, he said.
“I think we could have a robust debate about how to deal with the renaming of some military bases,” he continued. “There’s some things that we can have a serious debate about. But this desire to purge all of history because it was ugly or negative really does not serve the American people well.”
The mobs of protesters began by targeting Confederate figures, but then moved on to abolitionists, Founding Fathers, and religious figures. There is no standard anymore, Scott said.
This “is not how we make progress in this country. It never has been, and it never will be because we are the United States of America,” he said.