My latest in PJ Media:
Trump told us this would happen, and now it has: On Monday, the New York City Public Design Commission voted to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the City Council chambers at New York’s City Hall. The statue is 188 years old. The vote was unanimous.
According to WABC, the statue will likely now become part of a woke recasting of American history with Jefferson in a villain’s role. The Jefferson statue “was expected to go on ‘long term loan’ to the New-York Historical Society by the end of the year, where it would be included in educational exhibits with the proper historical context that likely will include discussion of Jefferson’s slave ownership.”
There was no mention of whether or not these discussions would include any mention of Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence or of the anti-slavery statements he included in its first draft, or of the fact that he referred to slavery as a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot.”
Back in August 2017, Trump predicted that this day would come. At the same time that he was speaking about the infamous Charlottesville rally in remarks that would be twisted and willfully misrepresented by Joe Biden and others to claim that Trump was justifying white supremacist violence, Trump spoke about the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue there. “Many of those people,” he said, “were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down.” The New York Times added: “George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the president noted, were also slave owners. ‘I wonder, is it George Washington next week?’ Mr. Trump said. ‘And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?’”
The Times brought in academic historians to scoff at Trump’s warning. Yale history professor John Fabian Witt, said the Times, “called Mr. Trump’s warning of a slippery slope a ‘red herring.’ There have been, after all, no calls to tear down the Washington Monument.”
Right. That didn’t come until September 2020.
The Times also invoked Annette Gordon-Reed, “a professor of history and law at Harvard who is credited with breaking down the wall of resistance among historians to the idea that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings.” Gordon-Reed “said that the answer to Mr. Trump’s hypothetical question about whether getting rid of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson also meant junking Washington and Jefferson was a simple ‘no.’”
So now the New York City Public Design Commission has proven that John Fabian Witt and Annette Gordon-Reed, and all the others who mocked Trump for suggesting that Washington and Jefferson would be next, were wrong and that Trump was right all along. The war against the statues was never about ending the honoring of Confederates. It was always about destroying the will to national unity that led to those statues being erected in the first place.
There is more. Read the rest here.
wpm says
NYC in downtown Brooklyn park has put up a giant statue of George Floyd Head ,that is the person the city leaders want your children to look up to to try to be like when they grow up. A failed drug addict ,who was violent never held a good job in his life, who committed violent armed felonies and who OD while resisting arrest.
jim says
Typical of the left to honor criminals and despise democrats and free speech.
Joeyn says
The Democrats arel the left. They do not despise them since they are them.
gravenimage says
Very depressing.
Kesselman says
Donald Trump was right on this and in so many other predictions and statements. About woke and other idiocies you can’t be too far out. It’s the Democrats who are far out.
There’s a communist revolution going on!
11B40 says
Greetings:
“You shall make amends to your children for being the children of your fathers.”
Zarathustra
Westman says
Wokeness is a substitue religion that has no inspired destination (eschatology). It is destroying the hero “myths” that lie within the foundations of any philosophy that was created to serve the cohesiveness and betterment of a society.
Wokeness feeds on whatever questionable element it can find or manufacture to nullify the achievements of its perceived enemies and of those which engender its jealousy.
Nor does wokeness have bounds upon its actions. We have observed “antifa” destruction, law-breaking violent mobs in the streets, and the vandalism and destruction of statues.
These are not signs of reform, rather, they are the signs of experiential ignorance posing as wisdom; much like a teenager, with radical permissive parents, who acts upon his emotions, understanding very little. The educational institutions, media, and even some religions are responsible for poisoning the minds of youth and encouraging activism without any idea of how society’s stability will be retained.
Wokeness, an immature tantrum, is creating oppression that threatens the existence of democracy, something the liberal parties, as helpful rubes, are unable realize until it’s too late to save their own freedom. It happened in Russia, Cuba, China, Venezuela, Iran, etc. It can happen wherever you are now.
Joeyn says
The left calls good evil and evil good. God save the USA and the world from the godless left.
Wellington says
Yes, Trump was correct. Amazing how much Trump has been correct about.
On a more expansive note, the removal of this statue needs to be seen in the context of critical theory as developed by the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School founded in Weimar Germany in 1923. Since the workers of the world were, per Frankfurt School thinking, too stupid to realize how wonderful Marxism is, and in particular how very important the Marxist principle of dialectical materialism is (N.B. dialectical materialism is a lot of Teutonic hogwash stemming from Hegel’s dialectical idealism, also hogwash), therefore it was posited by Frankfurt School intellectuals (and God save us from the intellectuals in general) that everything in society must be criticized to the point of utter destruction—marriage, traditions of all kinds, the past itself, conventional education, religion, concepts of gender and race, et al. Hence the term “critical theory” with critical race theory which has as its intention the utter demonization of the Caucasoid race being merely one example of overall critical theory.
Yes, this is what is going on in our time in the West (N.B., after Hitler came to power, many of the Frankfurt School took their sorry asses to America, enjoying America’s many advantages while wanting its destruction). It is all pernicious nonsense but it has taken hold mightily here in America and elsewhere and I can assure everyone that no good will come from it, only harm, resentment, destruction and many other negatives.
Mankind occasionally gets things right. Most of the time mankind is a screw-up. An excellent example of the worst of mankind is critical theory. The removal of a Thomas Jefferson statue is merely one of thousands of malicious consequences of the rot which is critical theory developed by a bunch of discontented intellectuals (examples being Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm) who parasitically fed off of the most productive civilization in history in order to destroy it. Kinda’ like the way Islam operates.
gravenimage says
+1
Walter Sieruk says
Maybe the leftist with their stealth jihadist friends with their hate for Thomas Jefferson use the subject of slavery as an excuse to be so much against them.
There could be an ulterior motive for at least the Muslims who have infiltrated the left to be their own reasons to hate Mr. Jefferson.
For he did stand and respect the use of reason and logic in life, those jihad-minded Muslim would detest him for that. This is because there are many aspects in Islam that totally disregard both logic.
As seen in that weird religious/Islamic teaching is found contained the Koran in 44:56. .55:56. 78:31 of suicide/homicide attacks. This bizarre and odd, irrational Koranic doctrine is not open, to the jihadist, to inquiry, questioning, logic or reason.
This blind unreasoning kind of “faith” in the Koran is a reminder that Thomas Jefferson had written. “Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck.”
Wellington says
I do hope, Walter, that you know that Thomas Jefferson thought the Trinity theological nonsense (in fact, the ship analogy you referenced by Jefferson was used by him to demonstrate how absurd the Trinity was—and Jefferson expanded upon this, to wit, he ridiculed the doctrine of the Trinity by averring that what it purports is “that three is one and somehow three is not one” and that this is absurdity par excellence.
And the idea of Jesus performing miracles being nothing, per Jefferson, but later accretions of parables turned into miracles and why Jefferson composed what is known as the Jefferson Bible, anticipating both Albert Schweitzer and Michael Grant in this regard. Yes, I do hope you know all this about Jefferson, who believed in a higher power but thought that Jesus as divine and performing miracles and rising from the dead ridiculous contentions.
Walter Sieruk says
To Wellington , thank you for replying to my posting. Yes, I”m aware of that sad fact of history. Mr Jefferson was a “Deist” meaning some one who believes that a supreme being created everything but after that , is only watching the actions of people and nations but never intervenes . So that supreme being can’t be the God of the Bible who ,sometimes ,does in intervenes in the affairs men ans nations. The very worst thing that Mr .Jefferson did in his life was butcher the Bible make making his own “Deist version” of it . That “Jefferson Bible” I did see on sale for didn’t by it because it was worthless and not even worth the money ofthe paper that it was printed on.
As things always are Thomas Jefferson , was an example of how someone can well understand such subjects as mathematics and architecture , farm science of of course government and politics yet be totally blind and not understand the subject of God and the Bible.
Nevertheless, I still admire him , just as I do Benjamin Franklin who was also a deist , despite of this and not because the spiritual blindness of those two Founding Fathers
As with Mr. Franklin so too with Mr Jefferson that some thing both of those men did write some common sense secular things that apply just and now and even more so in post 9/11 America.
For example, as for Americans knowing that in this year of 2021 that we need be aware of our surrounding and be on the lookout for things that seem no to to look quite right ,as in “What’s wrong with this picture?” Then if some looks wrong , then go and inform the police about it.
As Thomas Jefferson had written “Let the eye of vigilance never be closed.”
Wellington says
Thanks for your reply, Walter.
Well, Jefferson did assert that he thought Jesus the greatest ethical teacher ever but, yes, did not think Jesus was divine and that the miracles were put in afterwards (interesting that the withering of the fig tree is a miracle in Matthew and Mark but “only” a parable in Luke which Jefferson, Hume, Schweitzer, Grant and others thought pointed the way to every explanation of miracles in the Bible, i.e., that they all started out as parables but later were often times turned into miracles).
As for Jefferson being a Deist, perhaps. True Deism maintains that a higher power created the world and thereafter had nothing to do with it. I’m not certain this is how Jefferson thought. In fact, based on my readings and writings (including my Master’s paper for my MA in history) it is my conviction that Jefferson, Franklin too, thought that some kind of higher power was more involved in man’s destiny than a pure Deist would. This I know for certain and that is that Jefferson was of the conviction that the teleological argument for the existence of God was a logical and convincing one, even though Kant pointed out that all intellectual arguments for the existence of God, however clever, ultimately fail because existence is not necessarily a category of an idea.
Many of the Founding Fathers of America were conventional Christians, examples being Madison and Hamilton, but others were not of the conviction that Jesus was God personally present on Earth for some third of a century. No Founding Father was an atheist. Not one. All believed in some kind of Supreme Being. The most interesting question of all is what George Washington thought. We know like the other Founders he thought there was a higher power but whether he thought Jesus divine remains a mystery to this day since, apparently, he never publicly opined upon this “matter.”
gravenimage says
Trump Was Right: NYC Commission Votes to Remove Thomas Jefferson Statue From City Council
…………
Disgusting–but who can be surprised by this erasure of history?
wpm says
This is just the start ,in local news they said that about 600 statues in public buildings ,in court houses,
public schools, public parks will be reviewed to see if they should be removed. At the Museum of National History entrance there is a Statue of Teddy Roosevelt he help found the Museum. Besides being an American President, he also founded the national federal park system we have today. This statue will be remove because it has Teddy Roosevelt on horseback with two native Americans walking beside him? The woke crowd are upset because the Native Americans are not also on horseback??
Bikinis not Burkas says
Muhammad owned slaves, when is Muhammad going to be cancelled and any reference removed from Western Society?
gravenimage says
Damned good question.
And unlike Jefferson, he never advocated freedom or morally wrestled with the question of slavery.
OLD GUY says
Your supposed ti learn from your mistakes, without history mankind will just keep making the same mistakes over and over. So just what is the message that putting Floyds statue in the park representing? Are we so proud of his miserable life and success as a criminal that we are want to honor him infant of our future citizens. He’s not the image I would put forward for my Grandchildren, I’d lean a little more towards those who serve our citizens at the risk of their own lives rather than a junkie.
gravenimage says
+1