History is messy. It’s full of triumphs, failures, contradictions, and uncomfortable truths. But the woke crusade to tear down America’s monuments isn’t about grappling with that complexity — it’s about erasing it altogether.

For years now, activists have targeted statues and memorials that don’t pass their ideological purity test. Confederate generals were the first to fall. Then it was the Founding Fathers, judged by today’s moral standards instead of their own era. Now, any historical figure who fails to line up with the progressive catechism is fair game. It’s a slippery slope, and 2025 proves we’re still sliding.

The most recent controversy? The Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. Built in 1914, it wasn’t designed to glorify the Confederacy — it was built to honor unity after the bloodiest war in our history. Its message was simple: Americans can fight, bleed, and still remain one nation. But for today’s critics, nuance doesn’t matter. If a Confederate soldier is depicted, down it must come.

This attitude reflects a deeper cultural sickness. Monuments aren’t endorsements of every decision a person ever made. They’re reminders — of who we were, how far we’ve come, and what we had to endure to get here. Tear them down, and you don’t change the past. You just rob future generations of the chance to learn from it.

Erasing statues is the easy part. Wrestling with history is hard. It means teaching schoolchildren that Washington owned slaves and laid the foundations of the most free nation on Earth. It means admitting Lincoln saved the Union and suspended habeas corpus. It means acknowledging that people are complicated — like we all are.

The woke approach flattens all that complexity into a bumper sticker: “Problematic, therefore erased.” And once the bulldozers and wrecking balls are finished, what’s left? Empty plazas. Blank spaces. Silence where there should be conversation.

A confident nation doesn’t fear its own history. A confident nation points to the bad and says, “Never again,” while pointing to the good and saying, “Do more of this.” What the Left is trying to do is build a nation of amnesia — one that forgets its roots, erases its heroes, and trains its children to believe America was built on nothing but sin.

Conservatives reject that narrative. We believe America’s monuments, for better or worse, tell our story. And a nation that destroys its story destroys itself.