Trump’s Monument Executive Order Puts Federal Grants On Hold For Local Governments That Fail ‘to protect public monuments

From DAILYCALLER.COM

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday evening that seeks to protect federal monuments and properties by conditioning federal funding for state and local governments on compliance.

The order frames the recent moves by protesters across the country to topple various statues and monuments as “criminal acts,” organized by “agitators who have traveled across State lines to promote their own violent agenda.”

“In the last week, vandals toppled a statue of President Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco,” the order reads. “To them, it made no difference that President Grant led the Union Army to victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War, enforced Reconstruction, fought the Ku Klux Klan, and advocated for the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed freed slaves the right to vote. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the names of 507 veterans memorialized on a World War II monument were painted over with a symbol of communism.”

Earlier this month, in Boston, a memorial commemorating an African-American regiment that fought in the Civil War was defaced with graffiti. In Madison, Wisconsin, rioters knocked over the statue of an abolitionist immigrant who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Christian figures are now in the crosshairs, too. Recently, an influential activist for one movement that has been prominent in setting the agenda for demonstrations in recent weeks declared that many existing religious depictions of Jesus and the Holy Family should be purged from our places of worship.

The text directs Attorney General Bill Barr and the Justice Department to prosecute any individual or group who “destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates” both secular and religious monuments or statues. Barr is also directed to prosecute “any person or any entity that participates in efforts to incite violence or other illegal activity in connection with the riots and acts of vandalism.”

Finally, the order indicates that all “state and local governments that have failed to protect public monuments, memorials, and statues from destruction or vandalism” will not receive funding from federal grants and orders executive branch agency heads to make sure all federally-funded programs are compliant with the order.

... (Read more)

Tweets mentioned:

https://twitter.com/RichieMcGinniss/status/1275219247107649539

Submitted 1391 days ago