Claudia Tenney is the Republican and Conservative candidate for New York’s 22nd Congressional district and an attorney representing Oneida tribal leader Melvin Phillips.

The iconoclasts are back. Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Francis Scott Key and dozens more must be canceled — centuries after they died. A strange hubris has descended on a segment of our American society ― that they are the ultimate arbiter of truth, righteousness and justice. All those who fall short of their recently discovered but unquestionably pure virtues must be stricken down.

Now petitions and counter-petitions are circulating to tear down statues of Christopher Columbus in Syracuse and in my own home city of Utica. Absurdly, the Utica petition faults the explorer for causing the massacre of 100 million natives, and in Syracuse the statue is called “a symbol of Indigenous genocide and erasure.”