The Mob Now Guards the Marble
Editor's Note
Every regime reveals what it loves. Ours no longer loves the heroes who built it, but the decorators who managed its decline. The same people who once cheered the toppling of Washington and Lee now cry over the scuffed wallpaper in Jackie Kennedy’s old office, mistaking decay for dignity. What we are witnessing is a defense of hierarchy — an attempt by the ruling class to consecrate its own relics while erasing the symbols of those who made the country worth inheriting.
In this essay, Peachy Keenan exposes the Left’s selective reverence for “history,” showing how their newfound passion for preservation emerges only when their own myth is threatened. The vandals of one decade have become the curators of the next, desperate to guard the ruins of a regime that no longer believes in beauty, greatness, or the nation itself.
Remember when our culture got all up in arms about a bunch of statues? From 2020 onward, we watched as historic works of art and buildings alike were defaced, spat on, toppled illegally, removed by crane, bulldozed, and melted down.
The main targets of these outbursts, of course, were the Confederate monuments in public squares — at least 160 monuments and symbols were removed or renamed in 2020 alone. Charlottesville’s famous bronze statue of General Robert E. Lee and his horse, Traveler, was removed in 2021 and sent to a local heritage center to be melted down and “repurposed.” One can only imagine the artistic travesty they’re planning.
A federal commission identified more than 800 Confederate symbols on U.S. military property that had to be removed or changed, including road names, flags, and busts. Ten military bases were renamed. At the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul, protesters knocked over a nearly 90-year-old statue of Christopher Columbus; in Boston, leftists decapitated the city’s Columbus statue.
In California, state officials removed a statue of Columbus and Queen Isabella that had stood outside the Capitol since 1883. Statues of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Francis Scott Key were also vandalized or removed. Even schools weren’t immune to tear-down fever — several Columbus Elementary Schools across the country have been renamed in the past few years. The Left cheered this wanton destruction of history, good and bad.
Now President Trump’s decision to finally build a much-needed ballroom at the White House has turned the same people who wanted history books rewritten into pearl-clutching preservationists.
Give me a break.
They’re foaming at the mouth because a musty office space in which Jackie Kennedy once dictated thank-you notes — and where Jill Biden plotted to undermine Kamala Harris — is getting a facelift.
Here’s the thing: Presidents have been altering and expanding the White House since the dawn of the modern presidency. Theodore Roosevelt gutted the Victorian interior and built the West Wing. FDR installed an indoor pool.
Truman literally stripped the entire mansion to the studs and rebuilt it from the inside out. Obama redecorated the Oval Office and swapped out Churchill’s bust for Martin Luther King Jr.’s. No one accused them of taking a wrecking ball to history. The only difference this time is who’s holding the hammer. When Trump does something routine and sensible, the media act like he’s torching Monticello.
There’s something revealing about what kind of “history” they want preserved. The same crowd that cheered the melting of Robert E. Lee now weeps for the plaster molding of a 1960s office. It isn’t history they love — it’s nostalgia for an old ruling-class aesthetic. They mourn not the country’s founders, but the myth of Camelot, when the right people — their people — ran the show. So when Trump commissions a new ballroom, they see not a construction project but an uprising against their monopoly on taste and meaning.
They’re acting as though he razed the entire White House to the ground. Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton accused Trump of having a “disregard for history” and taking a “wrecking ball to our heritage.” Her mother, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who famously refused to put her office in the remote East Wing and ensconced herself in the West Wing) posted that “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.” Democrat Hakeem Jeffries claimed, preposterously, that Trump wants to “build a ballroom where he can be celebrated as if he were a king.” Um, excuse me, Hakeem: He has Mar-a-Lago for that.
Obviously, it’s a good idea to stop holding large White House events in tents that sniper bullets can easily pierce. Do they want Donald Trump exposed at the next State Dinner and protected by a thin sheet of plastic tenting?
Why yes, they do.
These are the very same people who will take to the streets to defend their right to burn Ole’ Glory. They are delighted to see the heritage population of America swiftly replaced by new arrivals from the Third World who hate this country and will never assimilate. But, overnight, the White House is a scared temple of American history that must not be touched. They care more about an old building than the actual people of the nation — who are being uprooted and displaced by waves of illegal immigrants, fake refugees, and scam asylum seekers.
These folks have dedicated their entire careers to desecrating this country and everything it stands for. So they can spare me their faux outrage at the addition of a spectacular and lavish event space worthy of the nation’s capital — one that, unlike their protests and “art projects,” actually builds something beautiful.