Speak softly and carry a big trigger warning.

A beloved statue of former US President Theodore Roosevelt that was removed from the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History has been banished to the North Dakota Badlands.

However, New York City’s woke overclass still demands control over how it is to be presented, even though it is no longer in the state.

The statue was removed in 2020 at the height of the George Floyd riots, when it was branded racist due to its of its depiction of Roosevelt on horseback accompanied by an American Indian and African man on foot.

Race activists blasted the statue’s “hierarchical” composition with Roosevelt as the towering, central figure between two non-white companions, completely missing the sculptor’s original intent.

Now, as part of a long-term loan agreement with the newly-opened Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, ND, the statue’s new home is required to “establish an Advisory Council composed of representatives of the Indigenous Tribal and Black communities” in order to “guide the recontextualization of the statue,” a representative for the New York City Parks Department confirmed to The Post.

The library has yet to confirm what this will look like, but some see New York’s finger wag from 1,700 miles away as a kind of cultural colonialism.

“It’s superimposing Lower East Side values on North Dakota and the Midwest. Liberals are control freaks. They want the whole country to think like they do. Whereas North Dakota does not care in the least how Manhattan thinks,” Mike Gonzalez, author of “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution,” told The Post.

“North Dakota doesn’t even know what street Manhattan is on, to paraphrase Al Capone.”

The statue was one part of a larger sculptural array installed in 1940 to memorialize Roosevelt, the 26th president and former New York governor. This followed a 1936 dedication that made the American Museum of Natural History itself the official New York state memorial to Roosevelt, whose conservation ethos continues to serve as the institution’s guiding principle today.

“To not have his statue at the center of it is equivalent to removing Lincoln from the Lincoln Memorial. We wouldn’t imagine that, just as we shouldn’t imagine what is the Roosevelt Memorial without Roosevelt,” culture critic James Panero, executive editor of The New Criterion art and literary magazine, told The Post.

“There should be a trigger warning that its removal from New York City was a scandal and that its return to where it belongs in front of the Museum of Natural History should be a priority for the federal government,” he added.

The statue is considered a masterpiece of prominent American sculptor James Earle Fraser who grew up on the frontier plains and became famous for his “sensitive,” counter-stereotypical depictions of Native Americans, according to Panero.

Fraser designed both the Indian Head / Buffalo tail nickel and the iconic “End of the Trail” statue of a windswept, weary Native man on horseback carrying a spear, which stands in Waupun, Wis.

Art historians point out the composition of Fraser’s statue of Roosevelt was directly inspired by a much older work, Italian sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio’s 1495 masterpiece the “Equestrian Statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni,” and that the two figures do not represent specific individuals, but the continents of Africa and America, where Roosevelt traveled extensively and learned about conservation.

Statue defenders said activists fabricated a racist motive behind the artwork, citing Fraser’s own words from 1940 when he wrote: “The two figures at [Roosevelt’s] side are guides symbolizing the continents of Africa and America and, if you choose, may stand for Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races.”

“Unlike these armchair observers of today who are stuck in their basements or university libraries complaining about things, Roosevelt and Fraser were actually out there. And Fraser was incredibly sensitive to the plight of the Native American. His whole record of work reflects that,” added Panero.

Defenders also pointed to pioneering efforts in racial equality by Roosevelt  — who popularized the phrase “speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far,” describing his foreign policy approach.

He ended public school segregation when he was governor of New York and, as president, broke barriers by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House and appointed black Americans to high-ranking federal positions — all of whom were purged four years later by Democrat President Woodrow Wilson.

But those arguments fell on deaf ears after the Floyd riots. With support from Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio and left wing members of the Roosevelt family, the museum’s board voted to remove the statue.

That’s when the library stepped in and offered to take it off New York’s hands, setting off months of planning to execute the statue’s extraction from the Big Apple.

Under the cover of a frigid, January night — chosen for when marauding gangs of protestors would be less active — the 16-foot-tall, 168,000-pound granite and bronze tribute was loaded onto a truck and squeezed through the Holland Tunnel before it embarked on a transcontinental road trip requiring permits from 17 states, Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library CEO Ed O’Keefe told The Post.

“We got it out of New York City by a tenth of an inch, maybe less. It barely cleared the tunnel. It was very, very tight,” he said.

Moving the statue cost $2 million, paid for by the library. Today, it sits shrouded in an undisclosed, protected facility in Dickinson, North Dakota, awaiting its yet-to-be-determined home somewhere on the 93-acre library grounds.

Library officials who spoke to The Post refused to divulge the statue’s exact location —visibly distressed that malcontents might find it.

During a recent tour of the library O’Keefe said the statue will likely end up tucked away deep in the North Dakota Badlands, along the trails surrounding the library.

New York’s rules, including mandated language around the display, are entirely constitutional, First Amendment lawyer Eugene Volokh told The Post.

“In Eastern Europe, there have been questions about what to do with old communist monuments and the like. But as a constitutional matter, there’s just no First Amendment constraint on what the city does here,” the Stanford University prof said.

“It’s [New York City’s] property and the city gets to decide, essentially, how and what it’s used to communicate. Legally, New York can say: you have to display this statue in a way that conveys a message that New York approves of.”

Still, some would prefer to see the statue come home and placed back where it was intended.

“We were just at a moment in our culture that the sensible voices weren’t being heard. But I think we’re in a different place now, and it’s time to revisit those terrible mistakes that were made,” said Panero.

“To think of that statue rusting out in the badlands, to me, is heartbreaking. And it’s heartbreaking to anyone who cares about American art.”