If you’re too young to remember the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or even to realize why it mattered, Washington, D.C., may offer you something that also has symbolic value in the fight for freedom. Black Lives Matter Plaza is being torn up in the nation’s capital.
Just like the wall that separated free, capitalist West Berlin from communist East Berlin and East Germany had been a symbol of Marxist tyranny (communist authorities erected it to prevent escapes to the west and placed guards there to shoot dead those who tried), the plaza was a symbol of the hysteria that gripped many Americans after the BLM riots in 2020.
Mayor Muriel Bowser erected the plaza in 2020, starting at the intersection of 16th and H streets, within sight of the White House, occupied by President Donald Trump in his first term. Workers painted the words “Black Lives Matter” on the mural, and Bowser named the place Black Lives Matter Plaza in a show of defiance.
Rebellious no longer, the same mayor ordered workers to take jackhammers to the letters this week, and the area will soon be renamed. Reports said that denizens of the typically liberal city witnessing the dismantling started taking chunks of the pavement.
In all-caps yellow letters, the mural stood 48 feet tall and stretched over two city blocks.
“To walk away with a piece of that, it means it’s not gone,” Starlette Thomas told the Associated Press. “It’s more than brick and mortar … I needed to be here today. I can’t just walk away.”
Many people, too, kept pieces of the Berlin Wall when protesters started to take pickaxes, jackhammers, and other blunt instruments to the symbol of Marxist totalitarianism starting in November 1989. They celebrated freedom in doing that, the opposite of what Thomas and others taking pieces of the pavement were doing.
AP quoted Megan Bailiff, the CEO of Equus Spring, the company that erected the mural, as saying destroying the mural was “historically obscene.” It was, she added, “more significant at this very moment than it ever has been in this country.”
The reason for Bowser to stand down and have BLM Plaza destroyed, work which began Monday and is supposed to take about six weeks, is that Republicans, back in charge of the White House and both chambers of Congress, began pressuring Bowser to get rid of the eyesore.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) introduced HR-1774, which threatened to stop federal funding for the city unless it removed the mural and renamed the area “Liberty Plaza,” according to the Spectator.
Additionally, two other members of Congress, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Andy Ogles (R-TN), have introduced a bill taking away the city’s home rule and presumably returning governing power to Congress.
The aptly named “Bringing Oversight to Washington and Safety to Every Resident” Act was introduced last month and does not say who would run D.C. It did not mention BLM Plaza but other signs of dysfunction: federal bribery charges against a council member, high crime in the dangerous capital, and allowing noncitizens to vote.
All this may have been enough to give Bowser pause and reconsider. On March 4, she posted on X a statement that read, “The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference.”
But the symbolism of the destruction of BLM Plaza is too potent to miss. It signals the decline, if not disappearance, of the talismanic power once held by the organization founded by Marxists openly advocating the dismantling of American society as it exists. It illustrates the ideological wilderness the Left now finds itself in and the power that Trump now wields.
Trump was, after all, living in the White House when Bowser ordered the mural constructed. He is now back, and Bowser is bowing to his party.
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More apropos was conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, who, too, visited the site and later posted on X a video of him walking around celebrating “The end of this mass race hysteria happening in our country … Make America great again, get rid of Black Lives Matter Plaza.”
Kirk: “The removal of the yellow paint from the BLM mural in DC is visual proof that the domestic color revolution has failed.”
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.