Round ‘Em Up: Liberals Arrested for Tearing Down Confederate Statue

A total of four protesters have been arrested in North Carolina for their participation in the tearing down of a hundred-year-old Confederate statue in Durham. Inspired by the backlash in Charlottesville, liberals set their sights on the statue of a Confederate soldier earlier in the week. Rather than limit their protest to mere chants, however, several of them took it upon themselves to tie a rope to the statue and bring it toppling to the ground. Apparently surprised that you can’t just destroy public property because your actions are part of some imagined “higher cause,” these liberals are now facing jail time for their anarchic actions.

Dante Strobino, 35; Ngoc Loan Tran, 24; Peter Gilbert, 39; and Takiyah Thompson, 22 have all been arrested and charged with destruction of public property in relation to the Monday protest. All of them are apparently affiliated with the Communist group the Workers World Party, many of whose representatives were also in Charlottesville last weekend causing trouble. The group organized the Durham rally in response to the violence that transpired on Saturday, but Durham Police say they took their activism too far when they brought down the North Carolina statue.

“I’m tired of white supremacy keeping its foot on my neck and the necks of people who look like me,” Thompson said at a press conference. “That statue glorifies the conditions that oppressed people live in, and it had to go.”

Both the protestors and Democrats in the North Carolina government have called on the Confederate statues to be removed, but there is a 2015 law on the books that protects them from this kind of reactionary action. That law forbids the removal of any public monuments without the full consent of state officials. And it certainly forbids their removal by Communist activists who have decided that they want to “be a part of something.”

Still, while the protesters could face felony charges for their involvement in the destruction, they may very well get their way in the end. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Tuesday that he was in favor of getting rid of any Confederate monuments still on state property, and he directed his cabinet to begin looking at the cost and logistics of moving them to museum grounds.

“We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery,” Cooper said. “These monuments should come down.”