This Yale professor thinks patriotism is some kind of hate crime



Timothy Snyder has built a career trying to convince Americans that Donald Trump is a latter-day Adolf Hitler — a fascist demagogue hell-bent on dismantling America’s institutions to seize power. Last week, the Yale historian and author of the bestselling resistance pamphlet “On Tyranny,” briefly changed course. Now, apparently, Trump is Jefferson Davis.

In a recent Substack post, Snyder claimed Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg amounted to a call for civil war. He argued that the president’s praise for the military and his rejection of the left’s historical revisionism signaled not patriotism but treason — and the rise of a “paramilitary” regime.

Trump doesn’t want a second civil war. He wants the first one to mean something.

No, seriously. That’s what he thinks.

Renaming Fort Bragg

Trump’s first alleged Confederate offense, Snyder said, was to reinstate the military base’s original name: Fort Bragg. The Biden administration had renamed it Fort Liberty, repudiating General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate ties. Trump reversed the change.

The Biden administration had renamed the base Fort Liberty, citing General Braxton Bragg’s service to the Confederacy. Trump reversed the change. But he didn’t do it to honor a Confederate general. He did it to honor World War II paratrooper Roland L. Bragg, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained.

Snyder wasn’t buying it. He accused the administration of fabricating a “dishonest pretense” that glorifies “oathbreakers and traitors.”

That charge hits close to home.

My grandfather Martin Spohn was a German Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Berlin in 1936. He proudly served in the U.S. Army. He trained with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Bragg before deploying to Normandy. Like thousands of others, he saw the base not as a Confederate monument but as a launchpad for defeating actual fascism.

Restoring the name Fort Bragg doesn’t rewrite history. It honors the Americans who made history — men who trained there to liberate Europe from tyranny.

That’s not fascism. That’s victory over it.

Deploying the National Guard

For Snyder, though, Trump’s real crime was calling up the National Guard to restore order in riot-torn Los Angeles. That, he claimed, puts Trump in the same category as Robert E. Lee.

According to Snyder, the president is “preparing American soldiers to see themselves as heroes when they undertake operations inside the United States against unarmed people, including their fellow citizens.”

Let’s set aside the hysteria.

Trump didn’t glorify the Confederacy. He called for law and order in the face of spiraling violence. He pushed back against the left’s crusade to erase American history — not to rewrite it but to preserve its complexity.

He didn’t tell soldiers to defy the Constitution. He reminded them of their oath: to defend the nation, not serve the ideological demands of woke officials.

Snyder’s claims are as reckless as they are false.

He smears anyone who supports border enforcement or takes pride in military service as a threat to democracy. Want secure borders? You’re a fascist. Call out the collapse of Democrat-run cities? You’re a Confederate.

This isn’t analysis. It’s slander masquerading as scholarship.

The real division

But this debate isn’t really about Trump. It’s about power.

The left has spent years reshaping the military into a political project — prioritizing diversity seminars over combat readiness, purging dissenters, and enforcing ideological loyalty. When Trump pushes back, it’s not authoritarianism. It’s restoration.

The left wants a military that fights climate change, checks pronouns, and marches for “equity.” Trump wants a military that defends the nation. That’s the real divide.

Over and over, Snyder accuses Trump of “trivializing” the military by invoking its heroism while discussing immigration enforcement. But what trivializes military service more — linking it to national defense or turning soldiers into props for progressive social experiments?

RELATED: The real tyranny? Institutional groupthink disguised as truth

Photo by Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

And Trump isn’t breaking precedent by deploying the National Guard when local leaders fail. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson used federal troops during desegregation. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect civil rights marchers. The Guard responded during the 1967 Detroit riots, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the Black Lives Matter and Antifa upheavals of 2020.

Trump acted within his authority — and fulfilled his duty — to restore order when Democrat-run cities descended into chaos.

A House divided?

Snyder’s rhetoric about “protecting democracy” rings hollow. Trump won the 2024 election decisively. Voters across party lines gave him a clear mandate: Secure the border and remove violent criminals. Pew Research found that 97% of Americans support more vigorous enforcement of immigration laws.

Yet Snyder, who constantly warns of creeping authoritarianism, closed his post by urging fellow academics to join No Kings protests.

Nobody appointed Timothy Snyder king, either.

If he respected democratic institutions, he’d spend less time fearmongering — and more time listening to the Americans, including many in uniform, who are tired of being demonized for loving their country. They’re tired of being called bigots for wanting secure borders. They’re tired of watching history weaponized to silence dissent.

Snyder invokes Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to condemn Trump. But it was Lincoln who paraphrased scripture when he said, “A house divided cannot stand.”

Americans united behind Trump in 2024. Snyder’s effort to cast half the country as fascists or Confederates embodies the division Lincoln warned against.

Here’s the truth: Trump doesn’t want a second civil war. He wants the first one to mean something.

He wants a Union preserved in more than name — a Union defined by secure borders, equal justice, and unapologetic national pride.

If that scares Timothy Snyder, maybe the problem isn’t Trump.

Perhaps, the problem lies in the man staring back at him in the mirror.

Liberal media highlights Hegseth's desire to restore former military base names ahead of hearing



Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to run the Pentagon, has signaled a desire to restore the historic names of the U.S. military bases renamed by the Biden administration.

On the eve of his confirmation hearing, CNN and other liberal publications dredged up the decorated Army veteran's past remarks on the matter — a hint that his aversion to revisionism might similarly be a sticking point for their fellow travelers in the U.S. Senate.

Leftists and others resentful of the West kicked off a sweeping campaign in 2020 to erase and rewrite American history. This public-private campaign involved digging up graves, toppling statues, renaming animals, melting down busts, knocking out church windows, and killing off iconic brands.

The Democrat-controlled 116th Congress made sure in its National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021 that the Pentagon would similarly engage in iconoclasm and revisionism. Section 370 of the NDAA required the removal of virtually all military assets even remotely linked to the Confederacy by Jan. 1, 2024.

Evidently the lawmakers were unswayed by public sentiment. A June 2020 ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 56% of Americans opposed changing the names of military bases named after Confederates.

President-elect Donald Trump vetoed the bill, taking issue both with Section 370 and with a provision that made it difficult for a president to reduce the number of American military personnel deployed in Africa, Europe, and South Korea.

Trump noted at the time:

Over the course of United States history, these locations have taken on significance to the American story and those who have helped write it that far transcends their namesakes. My Administration respects the legacy of the millions of American servicemen and women who have served with honor at these military bases, and who, from these locations, have fought, bled, and died for their country. From these facilities, we have won two World Wars. I have been clear in my opposition to politically motivated attempts like this to wash away history and to dishonor the immense progress our country has fought for in realizing our founding principles.

The House and Senate each successfully voted to override Trump's veto before he left office. Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), John Kennedy (R-La.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and former Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) appear to have been the only Republican senators who voted against overriding the president's veto.

'We should change it back because legacy matters. My uncle served at Bragg. I served at Bragg. It breaks a generational link.'

While other elements of the Biden administration were busy renaming mountains, lakes, and valleys, the Pentagon busied itself with renaming military installations as well as with toppling the Jewish American-designed Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

By October 2023, the Army had reportedly renamed nine installations. Georgia's Fort Benning became Fort Moore; North Carolina's Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty; Virginia's Fort A.P. Hill became Fort Walker; Texas' Fort Hood became Fort Cavazos; Virginia's Fort Lee became Fort Gregg-Adams; Virginia's Fort Pickett became Fort Barfoot; Louisiana's Fort Polk became Fort Johnson; Alabama's Fort Rucker became Fort Novosel; and Georgia's Fort Gordon became Fort Eisenhower.

CNN noted that Hegseth has both advocated restoring the former names of military bases and called the revisionist campaign "a sham," "garbage," and "crap."

The Army veteran apparently did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

"We should change it back, by the way," Hegseth told "The Everyday Warrior Podcast with Mike Sarraille" in June. "We should change it back. We should change it back. We should change it back because legacy matters. My uncle served at Bragg. I served at Bragg. It breaks a generational link."

"I emailed my company commander from my infantry training, which was at Fort Benning, which is no longer Fort Benning," Hegseth said in a June interview with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. "It's Fort Moore. And Hal Moore's a great guy. But, like, there's also a generational link that breaks when you rename Benning and Bragg. Like, where'd you serve? Bragg. Where'd you serve? Benning. Where'd you serve now? Liberty. Like, it's just, it's garbage. It's all, it's just, let's just crap all over it."

Hegseth has reportedly also been critical of political opportunists who went decades without complaining about base names, only to join the ranks of the staunchest advocates for revisionism.

Stating in 2020 that "there is no place in our armed forces for manifestations or symbols of racism, bias, or discrimination," Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended a commission to "take a hard look at the bases, the statues, the names, all of this stuff" for possible changes.

"Why wasn't he screaming about the racist base?" Hegseth told "The Everyday Warrior Podcast," likely referring to the time Milley spent directing the U.S. Army Forces Command from what was then Fort Bragg. "Oh my goodness. How in the world am I gonna send troopers through basic training at a racist base? It must be changed. It's a sham. He showed up and he did it as a sham to kowtow to all the chattering class in Washington, D.C., and he should be called out for it."

Hegseth has also criticized the leftist preference for dwelling singularly on the sins of the past and ignoring American greatness.

"It's that view that America is defined by its sins of the past," Hegseth told Israeli podcaster Yair Netanyahu in 2021. "That the only lens through which you should view America is it was stolen from Indians — from Native Americans and built on the backs of slaves. Therefore, anyone who was a slave owner, anyone who was a part of, you know, didn’t go far enough in their time should be canceled."

According to Hegseth's opening statement obtained by Axios, the Army veteran plans to tell the Senate Armed Services Committee that "it's time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm. A change agent. Someone with no vested interest in certain companies or specific programs or approved narratives."

Hegseth noted in his prepared remarks that his top priorities are to "restore the warrior ethos to the Pentagon," "rebuild our military," and "re-establish deterrence."

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In reversal of broader trend, Virginia school board votes to restore schools' Confederate names



There has been a concerted effort in recent years to sever ties with the nation's past. Iconoclasts and revisionists have toppled hundreds of statues, renamed species, melted down busts, removed church windows, dug up graves, changed place names, and gone so far — as the Biden administration did last year — as to remove the Jewish American-designed Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

A school board in Virginia bucked the trend early Friday morning.

Two schools in the Shenandoah County Public Schools district were renamed in 2021 following a school board vote the previous year. Stonewall Jackson High School, named after Confederate infantry Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, became Mountain View High School. Ashby-Lee Elementary School, named after Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and rebel cavalry commander Turner Ashby, became Honey Run Elementary School. The Confederates' associations with slavery were reportedly a key factor in the decision to make the changes.

Axios reported that the Coalition for Better Schools, a local conservative group, continued pushing to change the names back after an unsuccessful attempt in 2022. The group claimed in a April 3 letter to the members of the SCPS board that the group understood "that the decision to rename these schools was made in response to discussions surrounding Confederate symbols" but that "revisiting this decision is essential to honor our community's heritage and respect the wishes of the majority."

After an SCPS School Board meeting Thursday night, which ran for roughly six hours and involved extensive commentary from the public, the board voted 5-1 to overturn the 2020 decision.

Opponents to the restorations suggested the changes would put a gloss on historical racism.

"If you vote to restore the name Stonewall Jackson in 2024, you will be resurrecting an act in 1959 that is forever rooted in mass resistance and Jim Crow segregation," said one resident.

Kyle Gutshall, the lone member who voted against the motion, suggested there was no clear justification for the restoration, reported WLOX-TV.

"We've talked about the right way, the wrong way to do it," said Guthall. "Things like this really come down to perspective and how you view things."

Some supporters suggested that even an imperfect history is worth remembering.

"People in the Shenandoah Valley say that only the Confederates are the ones who did nasty things or did nasty things to black people," said Dennis Barlow, the school board chair. "You just stopped reading your history and you're not being realistic. War's hell."

The motion that ultimately passed early Friday morning requires that the restoration be implemented using funds privately donated exclusively "and not be borne by the school system or government tax funds.

Robert Watson, an assistant professor of history at Hampton University, suggested to USA Today ahead of the vote that the district may be the first in the nation to reverse course on Confederate school name changes.

"If it does get traction in the Shenandoah Valley, it probably will get some traction [in] other places," said Watson.

A US school board in Shenandoah County, Virginia, voted in favor of restoring previously removed Confederate names to two schools, becoming the first community in the nation to reinstate such names
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Pentagon gets its way: Reconciliation Memorial will be removed after judge lifts injunction



Iconoclasts in the previous Democrat-controlled 116th Congress and the Biden Department of Defense are getting exactly what they wanted: the toppling of the Jewish American-designed Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

While Judge Rossie David Alston Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia temporarily halted the plan to dismantle the 109-year-old monument, he reversed course Tuesday, giving the go-ahead for the Christmastime toppling.

What's the background?

The group Defend Arlington, affiliated with Save Southern Heritage Florida, unsuccessfully sued in the District of Columbia last month accusing the Army, which oversees the cemetery, of violating regulations in an effort to rush the process and get the monument down by January.

There is an apparent need to expedite the process, given the deadline set for the Pentagon by the Democrat-controlled 116th Congress in its National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021. Per section 370 of the NDAA, virtually all military assets even remotely linked to the Confederacy are to be removed by Jan. 1, 2024.

After the D.C. federal court dismissed the heritage group's lawsuit, Defend Arlington tried once more in Virginia.

Contrary to claims made by the cemetery, their lawsuit alleged, "The removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at ANC as a grave marker and impede the Memorial's eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places."

Judge Alston granted the plaintiffs a temporary restraining order, expressing concern over the possibility that neighboring grave sites might be disturbed. He hedged by stating, "Should the representations in this case be untrue or exaggerated the Court may take appropriate sanctions."

The cemetery indicated Monday that the Army had begun "disassembly of the monument atop the Confederate Memorial prior to the court issuing the temporary restraining order," but would comply with the order and halt further work.

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A vacant plinth for Christmas

Prior to Tuesday's hearing, Alston toured the cemetery and inspected the site, reported the Associated Press.

"I saw no desecration of any graves," said Alston. "The grass wasn't even disturbed."

The Trump-nominated judge subsequently issued an 18-page ruling Tuesday evening lifting the restraining order. Alston indicated the plaintiff's allegations about the removal efforts, specifically the suggestion that graves were being disturbed, "were, at best, ill-informed and, at worse, inaccurate."

During the hearing, Alston also questioned Defend Arlington lawyers' claims about the nature of the monument, stating "a slave running after his 'massa' as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?" reported Politico.

John Rowley, a lawyer for Defend Arlington, said in a statement obtained by the New York Times, "While we respect the Court’s decision, we continue to believe the evidence shows that in its haste to remove the Reconciliation Memorial, the DoD failed to conduct the reviews mandated by law regarding historic preservation and environmental impacts."

Kerry L. Meeker, a spokeswoman for the cemetery, told the Times in a statement that the iconoclasm would resume immediately and would be completed by Friday.

"While the work is performed, surrounding graves, headstones and the landscape will be carefully protected by a dedicated team, preserving the sanctity of all those laid to rest," said Meeker.

The monument, designed by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of Virginia Military Institute, will be thrown into storage "until the final disposition has been determined."

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) previously indicated he intends to move the memorial to the New Market Battlefield State Historic Park in the Shenandoah Valley.

The Reconciliation Monument was approved in 1906 by Secretary of War William Taft; commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910; designed by Ezekiel; and unveiled in Section 16 of the cemetery by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914.

Both those supportive of and those opposed to the monument's original construction understood it to be signal reconciliation in the aftermath of the Civil War.

The monument, at least as it stood Tuesday, consists of a bronze female figure crowned with olive leaves atop a 32-foot pedestal. The female figure holds a laurel wreath, a pruning hook, and a plow. At her feet is a biblical inscription that reads, "They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks."

Defend Arlington noted in a Meta post, "We are disappointed that American's [sic] had another breach in upholding the rule of law today. Hon. Rossie David Alston, Jr. visited Arlington National Cemetery ex-parte. We expect the crane is moving over the top of Ezekiel's grave this moment."

Controlling the past

If the past three years provide any indication, the removal of the Reconciliation Monument will not placate the left's desire to erase and revise history.

Since the ruinous 2020 BLM riots kicked off, statues of former U.S. presidents including George Washington, Ulysses Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt have been torn down by leftists, both the kind empowered by politicians and the kind empowered by voters.

Statues of Christopher Columbus were officially removed, toppled, or vandalized nationwide, as were hundreds of other statues commemorating consequential historic figures. Apolitical statues such as theWorld War I memorial in Birmingham, Alabama, and the statue of Polish hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko were afforded no exemption.

There appear to be incentives for iconoclasts to stay the course. For instance, vandals who destroyed the Sacramento statue of a historic Catholic missionary were rewarded last month with a substitute palatable to those antipathetic to the region's Christian heritage.

Efforts to sever the present from the past have gone far beyond statues.

Blaze News recently reported that the American Ornithological Society announced on Nov. 1 that it will begin changing the names of 70-80 birds currently named after people next year.

"There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today," said AOS president Colleen Handel, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska.

Biden Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland similarly has been scrubbing place names across the country that include the Algonquin word for woman, as it had been deemed derogatory by activist groups.

Ezekial's erasure wasn't the first and will not be the last under the current administration.

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Pentagon to tear down Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery by week's end despite protest



The Department of Defense has dutifully taken part in an iconoclastic sweep of American history that has left graves dug up, statues toppled, animals renamed, busts melted down, and church windows removed.

Despite significant backlash, it appears no exception will ultimately be made for the Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. Workers will remove the 109-year-old monument this week, providing revisionists in the nation's capital with a gift of absence just in time for Christmas.

What's the background?

The Reconciliation Monument, also called the Confederate Memorial, was approved in 1906 by Secretary of War William Taft; commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910; designed by Jewish former Confederate soldier Moses Jacob Ezekiel; and unveiled in Section 16 of the cemetery by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914.

The monument consists of a bronze female figure crowned with olive leaves atop a 32-foot pedestal. The female figure holds a laurel wreath, a pruning hook, and a plow. At her feet is a biblical inscription that reads, "They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks."

Another inscription on the memorial states in Latin, "The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato."

Thirty-two figures of mythical gods, Southern soldiers, and civilians are depicted around the base, including two black characters — one holding a baby and the other a slave following his owner to war. The memorial also displays 14 shields representing the 11 Confederate states and the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

The memorial was intended as a monument to reconciliation in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Union army veteran President William McKinley, who supported legislation in 1900 to establish a Confederate section in Arlington Cemetery, proclaimed four days after men from former Confederate states ensured America's victory against Spanish forces, "In the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers. … Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we feel for each other. The old flag again waves over us in peace with new glories."

The American Conservative underscored that it was long understood to be a reconciliation monument, such that "some Confederate groups at the time opposed the statue and memorial precisely because they opposed the reconciliation that it symbolized. At the memorial’s dedication in 1914, President Wilson praised it as an 'emblem of a reunited people.'"

Arlington National Cemetery highlighted the monument's historic value, noting that it "offers an opportunity for visitors to reflect on the history and meanings of the Civil War, slavery, and the relationship between military service, citizenship and race in America. This memorial ... invites us to understand how politics and culture have historically shaped how Americans have buried and commemorated the dead."

Removal

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021, passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, required the removal of "all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate Sates of America (commonly referred to as the 'Confederacy') or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense."'

Congress established an eight-member commission in 2021 and tasked it with renaming military assets in accordance with this requirement. The deadline for such changes and removals is Jan. 1, 2024.

The commission addressed the Reconciliation Monument in its final report on Sept. 19, 2022, recommending that Arlington National Cemetery "remove the 32 life-sized bronze statues from the top of the monument but not remove the entire monument because doing so might damage graves under the structure."

Arlington National Cemetery indicated in March that it had begun preparations for the "careful removal and relocation" of the monument as required by Congress and demanded by Biden's Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Backlash

There has been significant bipartisan outcry in the face of this particular iconoclastic initiative.

Former U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), cognizant that the memorial was built "with the sole purpose of healing the wounds of the Civil War," stressed in an August opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that the statue's toppling would signify the desire of a "deteriorating society ... to erase the generosity of its past, in favor of bitterness and misunderstanding conjured by those who do not understand the history they seem bent on destroying."

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) was among over 40 Republicans who criticized the iconoclastic initiative, calling on Defense Secretary Austin in a Dec. 11 letter to suspend all removal activities related to the Reconciliation Monument until Congress finalized the appropriations process for fiscal year 2024.

Clyde noted that the memorial ought to be exempt from the removal requirement because it "does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates reconciliation and nation unity." Additionally, "the Naming Commission's authority explicitly prohibits the desecration of grave sites."

Christmastime iconoclasm

Arlington National Cemetery announced Saturday that the monument had been fenced off and would be removed by no later than Dec. 22. All but the granite pedestal will be taken away.

The cemetery further alleged that the removal is in compliance with both the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, and that no nearby graves or headstones would be damaged during the "deconstruction" process.

"During the deconstruction, the area around the Memorial will be protected to ensure no impact to the surrounding landscape and grave markers and to ensure the safety of visitors in and around the vicinity of the deconstruction," the cemetery indicated in a statement.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) plans to move the memorial to the New Market battlefield state historic park in Shenandoah Valley, reported the Military Times.

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National Cathedral swaps out Civil War-themed stained glass for civil rights-themed windows



For nearly 65 years, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., had four Civil War-themed stained glass windows featuring Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. They were allegedly installed in hopes of ameliorating postwar tensions between North and South.

On Saturday, the nation's second-largest cathedral unveiled its civil rights-themed replacement windows, featuring faceless black protesters. They were ostensibly installed as a symbolic nod to ameliorating racial tensions.

The National Cathedral, official seat of the Episcopal Church, indicated in a statement that its four new windows "signify a new chapter in the Cathedral's historic legacy of art and architecture."

What's the background?

The neo-Gothic cathedral's original 4'x6' windows were donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, designed by Boston artist Wilbur H. Burnham, and installed in 1953. They depicted Jackson and Lee as pious Christians at various stages in their military and spiritual lives.

The engraved stone below the Jackson window noted that he "walked humbly before his creator," reported the Washington Post.

The stone below Lee's window stated that the prominent Episcopalian was "a Christian soldier without fear and without reproach."

The windows were reportedly installed to "foster reconciliation between parts of the nation that had been divided by the Civil War," according to the cathedral's former dean, Gary Hall.

NPR indicated that around 2015, the idea of removing Confederate symbols from the building was raised after the massacre of black Christians at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In 2016, Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, a member of the five-person task force assembled to consider the status of the windows, intimated their historical and provocative nature was not altogether cause for iconoclasm, but a talking point.

"Instead of simply taking the windows down and going on with business as usual, the Cathedral recognizes that, for now, they provide an opportunity for us to begin to write a new narrative on race and racial justice at the Cathedral and perhaps for our nation," said Douglas.

The subsequent death of a counter-protester at the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, expedited the removal of the windows.

At the time of their removal, Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean at the cathedral, said, "Confederate monuments, windows like ours — many of them have become symbols of racism and white supremacy, and they’ve become quite painful for brothers and sisters of this nation," reported the New York Times.

On Saturday, Hollerith said, "Simply put, these windows were offensive, and they were a barrier to the ministry of this cathedral, and they were antithetical to our call to be a House of Prayer for All People. They told a false narrative, extolling two individuals who fought to keep the institution of slavery alive in this country."

New windows

Smithsonian magazine reported that the bright new images, entitled "Now and Forever," were born of a collaboration between Kerry James Marshall and stained-glass fabricator Andrew Goldkuhle.

They depict black protesters holding signs that read "fairness," "not," "no," and "no foul play."

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Kerry James Marshall, a prolific race-focused artist from Birmingham, Alabama, designed the new windows for a symbolic fee of $18.65.

Marshall told the Washington Post in 2021 that this figure is significant because, "of course, 1865 is the end of the Civil War."

The windows will soon be accompanied by a poem by Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander, whose organization helped fund the windows' replacement. The poem, which will be engraved below the windows in the coming months, notes, "May this portal be where the light comes in."

Bible passages were read, speeches were given, and gospel music was played at the Saturday dedication. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reportedly also marked the occasion by reading excerpts from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Marshall indicated that the unveiling highlighted "one instance where a change of symbolism is meant to repair a breach of America’s creation promise of liberty and justice for all, and to reinforce those ideals and aspirations embodied in the Cathedral’s structure and its mission to remind us that we can be better, and do better, than we did yesterday, today."

"I am deeply humbled, incredibly grateful, for the opportunity and hope that the things the windows propose continue to be a catalyst for the kind of transformation that the Cathedral stands for, what this nation stands for … and what I hope we all will embody and stand for and bring forward ourselves," added Marshall.

The Art Newspaper reported that the ultimate fate of the original windows, presently being stored and conserved at the cathedral, has not yet been decided.

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Americans Call For Preserving Confederate Memorial After Pentagon Orders Removal

'Will not unite but only divide'

This Memorial Day, Remember The Courage And Forgiveness That Made America Great

When Americans sacrificed their lives in military service, it was not just to defend the United States but to uphold the natural rights associated with the nation’s founding.

Retired Rangers Warn Of ‘Whitewashing’ History After Pentagon Scrubs Confederate Names From Memorial

'About politics and the woke mission to erase history'

Projected Cost To Scrub Army Bases Of Confederate References Nearly Doubles As First Of Nine Bases Is Renamed

'Not anywhere close to what we need'