Cancel Culture Comes For Sir Francis Drake in Marin County

Cancel culture gives us another moment of historical irony as it comes for Sir Francis Drake in Marin County, California.

The ostensible justification for the riots throughout our land, at least at the start of all of the insanity, was to fight racism by tearing down statues of Confederates who had fought to preserve slavery.  The rioters are long past that at this point, and well into uncharted territory of idiocy, with the neo-Marxists tearing down statutes of Ulysses Grant, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Miguel Cervantes (former slave), Junipero Serra (saint),  54th Regiment (all black), and John Greenleaf Whittier (abolitionist) among others, all while attacking the symbols of European Christianity that . . . was responsible for the end of black chattel slavery.

The latest bit of nutbaggery comes out of Ms. BWR’s old stomping ground, Marin County, California.  Marin County has a historical tie to the famous British pirate, explorer admiral, and some-time slave trader, Sir Francis Drake.  According to Wiki, during his circumnavigation of the globe, “Francis Drake and the crew of the Golden Hind was [sic] thought to have landed on the Marin coast in 1579 claiming the land as Nova Albion.”  Drake’s legacy is recognized in Marin in the names of streets and businesses, as well as a particularly horrid statute shown at the top of this post.  Today, the county removed that statute “in response to planned demonstrations to tear [it] down . . .”

Francis Drake was a central figure in history.  He is best remembered as the man most responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Armada, sent by Catholic Spain to conquer Protestant England in 1588.  There was a significant chance that Spain, had they been able to land their massive ground force on England, would have conquered, drastically altering the course of history — including, likely, the history of black chattel slavery.  When Drake broke the back of the Spanish Armada, it set in motion a chain of events that saw British and American Christians start and lead an abolitionist movement to end slavery in the ensuing centuries.  Spain, along with Portugal, was a primary creator of the slave trade and the practice of slavery, both as to black and as to indigenous people.  Unfortunately for Spain, it was a nation left far weaker after its loss in 1588.  The Spanish never led the abolitionist movement, and in the end, were forced into it by Britain in the early 19th century.

Pulling down Francis Drake’s statue is not as ridiculous as pulling down Grant’s or Washington’s, but it still comes with a healthy dose of historic irony.  Either the irony is lost on many of the rioters now threatening the statue because they are ignorant of their own history (which actually seems likely for the vast majority of them), or they have an ulterior motive to delegitimize all of Western history over the last half Millenium, leaving a vacuum into which they will try to impose neo-Marxism.  Either way, the historical irony of it all is stomach-churning.