As the wacko Evangelical guy across the street from our Defend Teddy Roosevelt rally Sunday afternoon loudspeakered: "It ain't the color of your skin, it's the color of your sin," a clever assonance-rich meme that sounds good and means not that much, except to say that in his considered religious consideration, we were "worshiping a graven image" (!) and had better repent.

Something finally roused the conservatives from their pandemic poufs and couches.  The media were there, certainly, interviewing such firebrands as Gavin Wax, whose N.Y. Young Republicans blast emails saying they spearheaded the rally.  Ages were everything from teenagers to hoary-headed, bushy-bearded elders.  All ethnicities were represented.

Thanks to social media and  high-temperature-stoked choler, hundreds showed up on the hottest day, at the hottest hour, without a cloverleaf of shade, in front of the revered (until now) American Museum of Natural History, whose high-salaried pooh-bahs had decided, without permission or notification of the city — on whose land the museum has long stood — to remove the equestrian statue of our most popular president, who died 21 years before the statue made its iconic appearance on the noble plinth greeting millions from all corners of the world.

The president of the AMNH, Ellen Futter, has become as toxic as a thrice-used face mask.

The rally I witnessed was full of bonhomie and clever T-shirts, energized people full of impatience with the mealy-mouthed "leaders" who avert their beclouded gaze from looting, vandalism, arson, and unsanctioned removal of time-honored statuary. 

Men and women carried bouquets.  On their way to a romantic tryst?  They answered that they were for the statue itself, since Teddy R was a huge environmentalist and appreciated nature.

Handmade signs proliferated.  How can we know our future if we erase our past?  Save our heritage.  Defend America, or leave.  One T showed the visage of Teddy in black and white, wearing a flag face mask.  Quite a few wore hats or T-shirts advocating the freeing or pardoning of Roger Stone.  Another fetching cotton showed Trump with U.S. flags reflected in his sunglasses and a thumb up, reading, "TWO TERMS."

One especially welcomed sign read: Keep Teddy. Fire De Blasio!  (Even Democrats can give that a high five.)

Full-sized flags, even the flag of the N.Y. Police, with blue inserted for the red stripes, were waved aloft.

There were friendly police, too, ringing our enclosure, not cowering  from iced bottles or projectiles thrown routinely by the broken rabble of initials and sophistic nonsense and distortion.  We thanked all the police, as they moved back and forth to protect us.

One benighted woman of middling appearance kept her middle fingers up against our speakers — at least until her arms tired and she clutched both hands under her armpits.

Having traveled outside the confines of bamboozled and hate-infested NYC, I know that the flags are still waving for conservative sentiment, though muted by overt threats from ignorant BLM and the gender separatists.  They pretend to want "acceptance," but they want dominance, and that runs counter to being a part of the polity.  They are a tiny fraction of the populace, no more than 6%, but they loom large because the larger population has let them Mau-Mau us from our asserted convictions.

These blood-demanders are little more than ambient Al Charlatans, demanding their corporate "protection" money.  They are profoundly anti-gay, even more profoundly anti-Semitic.

Tempting as it is, therefore, to cry Woe, Woe, it's premature and in fact counterintuitive.  The president is scrappy, yes — for which we thank heaven, since without that obstinacy and bellicosity in the face of violent lies and atrocious charges,  he'd long ago have yielded to a coronary and left the field to modest but dignified Pence.

As I reclaimed my bike, the Evangelist and his three minions, with their up-ticket public address gear, were handing out bright yellow pamphlets advising us to follow Jesus.