The perpetually frothing and indignant right have uncovered a fiendish plot to abolish history, or at bare minimum force it to get gay married.

Stan Grant’s demand that the statue of Captain Cook in central Sydney be torn down sparked a flurry of outrage.

“TALIBAN LEFT: PC vandals’ bid to tear down our history”, squawked the front page of the Daily Telegraph. Liberal Upper House MP Peter Phelps said: “Attempts to rewrite our public history for the sake of political correctness – which is what these activist want to do – is little better than Stalin erasing his political opponent from photographs”.

Andrew Bolt weighed in next, arguing, “Blanking out history is a true sign of the totalitarian”. Like Phelps, he was reminded of Stalin’s pioneering Photoshop work. But, being a dog with a bone, Bolt had further examples:

“The French revolutionaries behind the great Terror did it by destroying monasteries and restarting the calendar as if history started with them. Mao did it by declaring war on the “Four Olds” – including old culture – and tearing down reminders of China’s past, from the old walls of Beijing to the cemetery of Confucius.”

Warren Mundine, the friend in every “some of my best friends are black” story, told the Tele, “All this nonsense about changing things – we cannot look back at history with our modern minds, otherwise we would have to tear down the pyramids because they were built by slaves”.

The right – such students of history!

There was one minor problem with all this excitement: Stan Grant didn’t demand that any statues be pulled down. In fact, he specifically said of the Cook statue, “I accept that it remains; Cook is part of the story of this nation”. All he really wanted, he said, was that we “no longer maintain the fiction that he ‘discovered’ this country. It dishonours the people who reached this continent 60,000 years before Cook”.

Whoops.

Still, it seems a shame for the right to get so worked up over nothing. So Red Flag will happily fill in for their imaginary Stan Grant, and state for the record that we want every rotten, racist monument to the barbaric history of white Australia ripped out of the ground and thrown into the sea.