He was down in the trenches working with at-risk youth. Update to this previous story.
Only a few weeks ago, Nicholas Dean was a highly-regarded principal of a New Orleans school designed for at-risk students with nowhere else to go. He had once earned a glowing profile from NPR for his work.
Now Dean is out of a job after he became the focus of left-wing outrage when he attended a demonstration in front of New Orleans’ Confederate monuments in early May.
Dean was accused by local left-wing activists of wearing “white supremacist symbols” at the protest while giving an interview in support of the statues.
The educator told The Daily Caller he attended the protest to defend pro-Confederate demonstrators from attack by left-wing antifa. “I went to the monument protest on May 7th because a week earlier, on May 1st, a group of about a dozen monument supporters were swarmed and attacked by antifa at the Jefferson Davis monument,” Dean told TheDC.
“The antifa showed up in a military style vehicle, threw bottles at people, maced a woman in a wheelchair and punched the monument supporters. The police stood down while they were attacked. I went to stand for free speech and to oppose the Marxists by standing my ground,” he added.
At the May 7 demonstration, Dean said he “wore a helmet in case somebody threw bottles, and goggles in case somebody sprayed mace.”
The now-dismissed principal also wore rings displaying a Maltese crusader cross and a skull, along with a shield bearing the Spartan lambda symbol and the words “Come” and “Take.” These are the regalia leftists considered to be white supremacist.
These symbols, however, are popular with many conservatives in America. Gun rights enthusiasts, in particular, are fond of the Spartan declaration, which is typically spelled out in full as “Come and Take It.”
A representative for the Anti-Defamation League told The New Orleans Advocate that the symbols were not enough to prove that the person displaying them is some kind of right-wing extremist.
Dean also talked with a podcast about why he was protesting in favor of the monuments. He also said the removal of the statues would do nothing to alleviate New Orleans’ crime problem that primarily hurts black residents, and that the removal is the work of a “black nationalist” group bent on erasing history.