Reposting from a friend and for the deplorables who need to pivot the conversation from fact to statues and "other racists":

There IS NO moral equivalence to Nazis and white supremacy- period. We could all use some facts right now! In case anyone is confused, we think this is helpful!
Written by Professor Anne Rubinstein PhD. She is an actual historian, so I trust her to know what she is talking about.
OK, folks, let's review:
+ Nazis are bad.
+ People in the United State who parade around with torches and dress up like Nazis and chant Nazi slogans are Nazi wannabes, but we can accurately call them Nazis.
+ The Klu Klux Klan is bad, and people who belong to the KKK are bad.
+ People who parade around with torches and chant racist slogans and gang up to beat Black people might or might not be card-carrying Klan members, but it doesn't matter: they are KKK.
+ The Civil War is over. The good guys won.
+ The Civil War was a war about slavery. The Confederate states betrayed the United States, and fought a war against the United States, because they wanted to force states in which slavery was illegal to make slavery legal there.
+ People who celebrate the Confederacy are celebrating war against the United States; they are celebrating slavery; they are celebrating the ideology of white supremacy. No matter what fairy tales they tell themselves, that's what nostalgia for the Old South is.
+ The majority of statues celebrating the losing side of the Civil War were erected fifty years or a hundred years after the Civil War. They memorialize the times that produced them: the racist backlash of the 1920s and the racist backlash of the 1950s-1960s. They might as well be monuments to Huey Long and Strom Thurmond. In fact, that would be more honest. amazing prom dresses
+ People pull down monuments all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Iconoclasm is almost as common as putting up memorials. If it wasn't, every square inch of habitable land in the world would be covered in gravestones and plaques. There is nothing unusual about taking down a statue.
+ The majority of stuff made in the past - cloth and paper, metal and stone and wood, even plastic - does not survive into the present. This is as true of artworks as it is of historical documents.
+ If we decide collectively to remove statues, that is not an attack on people, not even on people who really like those statues. It is an attack on the statues.
+ The past belongs to everyone, and is always up for debate. But the historical facts on which debate rests are immutable. There is no point in making an argument based in how you wish things were.
+ Robert E. Lee led a war against the United States; his side lost; much later, he was remembered, correctly, as a great hero of the struggle of white people to avoid extending the same rights to black people that they already had; now that statue is coming down. If you think that statue should remain in place, you have to start from those facts.