There have been many different opinions expressed here with regard to how quickly a politically innocuous statue would have been taken down, with different peop

There have been many different opinions expressed here with regard to how quickly a politically innocuous statue would have been taken down, with different people claiming "it just makes sense" that such a statue would/wouldn't be covered and removed as quickly. This is a nice illustration of why the human intestine has such limited epistemic utility: my gut and your gut will rarely agree and there's no way based on gut feel alone to decide which if either is correct in any given situation. So the right thing to do now is to put up a politically innocuous statue and see how long it lasts, or to find cases that are closer to this situation than graffiti, which is both commonplace and relatively less obtrusive, and less likely to be taken for an "official" statement of anything. I used to live beside a park where a local artist erected an extremely strange Transformer-like statue in a central location that took several weeks to be removed, but it wasn't in the US and it was in the poorer area of a small town, so there are too many differences to draw any useful conclusions from it.