It’s understandable why Bari Weiss began her column with a swipe at renowned prude and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. First, he deserves whatever ridicule he gets. Second, it’s a reminder that such ridiculous and disgraceful conduct isn’t only the province of one team. But third, even Ashcroft wasn’t censorious enough to destroy history to create his “safe space.”

Still, the analogy fell flat. Ashcroft was vindicating his personal, sexually-twisted fantasies, even if he adopted the idiot’s rallying cry that he was doing it for the children. The San Francisco school board is doing it for social justice. The Taliban destroying the Buddhas of Bamyan would have been more apropos.

Victor Arnautoff, the Russian immigrant who made the paintings in question, was perhaps the most important muralist in the Bay Area during the Depression. Thanks to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, he had the opportunity to make some enduring public artworks. Among them is “City Life” in Coit Tower, in which the artist painted himself standing in front of a newspaper rack conspicuously missing the mainstream San Francisco Chronicle and packed with publications like The Daily Worker.

Whether Arnautoff, given his strong political use of art, was the best choice of muralists for a newly-constructed high school is a fair question, but the question was answered when he was selected years ago. And so he painted, created, a work of art that wasn’t merely artistic, but was an unusual, maybe even radical, message for its time. It was provocative. It was meant to be.

This is why his freshly banned work, “Life of Washington,” does not show the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.

One possibility is that the school board today could celebrate this work as a reflection of today’s presentist view of history, showing its wrongs as well as its rights. In fact, it could easily be imagined that the school board would commission this very mural today as a paean to the ugly reality of American history. But since it was already there, the board couldn’t signal its virtue by having it created, so it was left to virtue signal by destroying it.

One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said before the vote on Tuesday that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.”

There is a certain beauty in this utterly nonsensical excuse of students “feeling unsafe.” It can be used to justify anything, there being no limit to its applicability beyond the mangling of rhetoric to raise it, and it can’t be rationally disputed because there’s nothing rational about it. There is no image, no word, no concept, no vegetable, that can’t be accused of making someone feel unsafe.

There’s no groundswell of outrage by students against the murals, though I’m sure the school board could muster at least one ally to claim traumatization. The next level rationalization is that no student, not even one, should feel unsafe in school. Everyone must eat white bread if even one student suffers PTSD from the sight of pumpernickel.

The retort has been misguided. It’s not about calling the woke “snowflakes,” because they’re not. They aren’t traumatized. They don’t feel unsafe. No one suffers PTSD from this mural and needs to be rushed to a puppy room. What they know is that they’re supposed to feel this way, even though no one does, and their allies know they must join in, if not lead, this fight to use their privilege to serve the most vulnerable, most marginalized, most oppressed.

Then the reaction goes to the absurd amount of money earmarked for eradicating art. Of course it’s ridiculous to spend $600,000 to paint over this mural. A coat of primer, two coats of whitewash, and it’s gone. Maybe $10,000 tops. But the amount of money squandered is a sideshow. How can one place a value on the safety of children? How can one expect school board members to have an appreciation of painting costs when they can tap the bottomless pockets of woke taxpayers. Did I mention it was for the children?

But if there was any legitimacy to the tears, it was belied by the goal of destroying art and history protecting students from their fantasy fears.

Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”

It’s not good enough for a serious ally of social justice to merely pander to the transitory insanity of the weakest, most irrational, most completely full of shit cries of pain. If that was all this was about, the murals could be covered up so no student’s eye swelled with tears at the sight of history. No, it must be destroyed, “regardless of cost,” so that some future return to sanity won’t cause some future school board to undo the “reparations” of this school board.

Mr. Sanchez, the board vice president, told me: “A grave mistake was made 80 years ago to paint a mural at a school without Native American or African-American input. For impressionable young people who attend school to have any representation that diminishes people, specifically students from communities that have already been diminished, it’s an aggressive thing. It’s hurtful and I don’t think our students need to bear that burden.”

Maybe it was a “grave mistake” made 80 years ago. But stringing together empty emotive adjectives doesn’t justify making a “grave mistake” today based on this (hopefully) transitory hysteria of social justice so that the privileged, like Sanchez, can destroy it to prove how deeply he cares about tears no one has ever seriously shed. It’s not that the students are snowflakes. It’s that Sanchez is the Taliban.