The headline is misleading. As far as we can tell from the article, there weren't any counter protesters or white nationalists at the park. The militia members addressed their comments to people who were not there.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf announced on Wednesday that it is deploying Rapid Deployment Teams (RDT) across the country to protect federal monuments from “violent anarchists and rioters” during the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
A statue of famed black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was destroyed at Maplewood Park in Rochester, New York, over the weekend, which comes on the anniversary of a notable speech that Douglass delivered at an Independence Day event in the city in 1852.
Ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that would create a new national park to display statues and monuments dedicated to “American Heroes,” including those that have been torn down by protesters in the past month.
The American Constitutional Rights Union today launched an initiative to demand that our political leaders pledge to protect our historical monuments from vandals and criminals. These public monuments belong to all Americans and are not to be torn down by rampaging mobs and power-hungry bureaucrats.
Now the mob takes the role of John Wilkes Booth in removing perhaps the greatest of all Lincoln sculptures, the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, located in northeast Washington, D.C. The preeminent Lincoln scholar of our or any other time, Harry V. Jaffa, said many times that this sculpture, originally referred to as the Freedman’s Memorial, rivaled Daniel French’s Lincoln Memorial creation. The statue was dedicated to honor Lincoln on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Rioters in Portland, Oregon, destroyed the historic 120-year-old “Thompson Elk Fountain” on Wednesday night near a federal courthouse. The rioters “ripped off wood boards protecting the building’s windows to use for firewood and barricades,” Fox News reported. “Protesters threw water bottles and other projectiles as police fired pepper balls and at least one flash-bang at protesters in front of the courthouse.”
The statue of Christopher Columbus that sat on the Broad Street side of Columbus City Hall has been removed after Mayor Andrew Ginther called for it to come down.
Source: Christopher Columbus statue removed from outside Columbus city hall | 10tv.com
On Wednesday, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) released a powerful new ad warning about vandals and rioters destroying a key monument in American culture — the presidents on Mount Rushmore. While the vandals are not likely to actually deface Mount Rushmore anytime soon, their iconoclastic movement has already targeted each of the four presidents on the monument — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
To the protesters who tore down his statue in Los Angeles this month, the priest, friar and saint Junípero Serra represents “hate, bigotry and colonization,” as one activist put it. Nothing would have made Serra sadder, for the real man was a profound lover of all people and especially of the indigenous peoples he came to serve.
