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The Complicated History of the Albert Pike Memorial

The Albert Pike Memorial, torn down by BLM rioters, is being put back up by the Trump administration.

I don’t know that Pike has many cheerleaders left in our era. Even among supporters of the Confederacy.

He was a racist and an anti-Catholic bigot.

Despite being described as a Confederate general, he was a shyster lawyer who specialized in representing Indian tribes and then parlayed that into incompetently ‘commanding’ Indian allied forces on the Confederate side which performed poorly against the Union’s Indian allied forces. There were claims of scalpings on both sides.

The Pike Memorial was put up by Masons to honor him for reasons of complicated internal Freemasonry politics that frankly no one today is likely to care about.

I doubt anyone cares much about Pike today, but there is a principle that memorials are put up legally and cannot just be vandalized and torn down by radicals. That principle is the only conceivable reason the Pike Memorial should be going up.

It’s not about honoring Pike, it is about honoring the rule of law.

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