Melt!

The American right are having a meltdown over a literal meltdown. The statue of the guy that, lest we forget, lost the American Civil War which provoked that Unite the Right rally in 2017, is now an ex-statue:

While the statue was finally removed from public display in 2021 there were still several ongoing lawsuits attempting to protect and restore it to its previous location, which meant rather than disposing of it, the council was forced to put it in storage until all the legal matters were resolved. With the final case resolved on September 26 of this year, the council was finally free to proceed with the plans unanimously voted for in 2021: sending the statue to be melted down, and its brass repurposed for more useful things going forward.
The plan was proposed and overseen by the local non-profit, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. The group reportedly intends to take the brass that used to make up the visage of defeated, pro-slavery, Confederate leader/traitor Robert E. Lee and make it into a new public art project, to be installed on August 12, 2027. That’s just in time for the ten-year anniversary of what’s come to be known as the Summer of Hate for the alt-right, neo-Nazi violence that terrorized the Charlottesville community, taking the life of counter-protester Heather Heyer and injuring several more.
The foundry used to recycle the statue into something more fitting is being kept anonymous in order to protect the workers from any kind of violent reprisals, a legitimate concern after the escalating open white supremacist violence of the last decade.

Whoever the fuck Reed Cooley is, he’s clearly pissed that “they” chose to destroy and re-purpose this statue rather than just hide it in a museum. It’s hysterical in and of itself, but the second sentence in particular is what makes it hilarious. After all, not only is there no point in hanging drawing and quartering “your” forefathers at this point, the war ended nearly 160 years ago so there’s probably not much left of them to do that, but… they never even did that to Robert E. Fucking Lee when the war ended. He was stripped of his citizenship, which was returned in Andrew Johnson’s 1868 amnesty, and he lost some property, for which the family was compensated a couple of decades later,  but was otherwise allowed to go on living and do so with comparative honour until his death five years later from natural causes. Never even went to jail. Hanged drawn & quartered my arse, REED.