Thomas Jefferson: downright anti-American

 

Robert Spencer is the proprietor of Jihad Watch, a website that specializes in the histories and ideologies of Islam and jihad.  However, in his recent column for PJ Media, he reports on the politicization (i.e., going “woke”) of Thomas Jefferson’s legendary Virginia home, Monticello.  Mr. Spencer begins:

“Who controls the past controls the future,” writes George Orwell in 1984. “Who controls the present controls the past.” Were he with us today, Orwell would be getting tired of being right all the time, but he has just been proven right again: Thomas Jefferson’s famed mansion Monticello has been turned into a fount of woke propaganda that denigrates Jefferson and treats unsuspecting visitors to an over-the-top orgy of victimhood and white guilt regarding slavery. The Left hates America and wants very much for you to hate it, too.

. . .

Not surprisingly, “The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is run by a roster of big-money Dem donors and former Democratic officials.” Monticello’s descent “has largely been funded by left-leaning philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who donated $20 million toward that effort in 2015. Rubenstein is “on the boards of the globalist World Economic Forum, China’s Tsinghua University, and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others.” Now it’s beginning to become clear why all this is happening.

The endgame is not just to make Americans despise Thomas Jefferson, but to make the average American ashamed of being American. That’s what this has been about from first to last. . . .

What’s more, the reason why the Left hates him with such burning intensity is not that he was a slave owner. Leftists love Fidel Castro, who enslaved an entire nation. They love all manner of authoritarians, totalitarians, and mass murderers. They’ve never minded the eggs that have to be broken to make their socialist omelets.

No, the real reason why the Left hates Thomas Jefferson is for all the things for which he should rightly be celebrated: Because he fought against tyranny. Because he helped create a free republic. Because he placed statements in those founding documents that would ultimately lead multitudes of the citizens of the new nation to believe that slavery was wrong and immoral and give their lives to bring about its abolition.

Jefferson is just the sort of man whom the fascist thugs of Antifa, busy smearing ACAB on the sides of buildings and hurling obscenities at police in pursuit of their vision of socialist utopia, and their moneyed backers would despise and fear. They want a docile American populace, frightened into submission to their authoritarian vision. The example of Thomas Jefferson could inspire Americans instead to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to preserve our hard-won freedoms. Can’t have that. Jefferson’s name must be made anathema to Americans.

Howard Zinn would be proud (see here).  Read the full article here.

# # #

Never Talk About Marxism - but it's in the schools

At andmagazine.substack, Sam Faddis describes the decline and fall of the American education system.  If you have kids or grandkids in school, this will be of interest (read: reason for alarm):

. . . Apparently, Marxists, at least in modern-day America, have the same rule. The first rule about Marxism is you don’t talk about Marxism.

Americans hate Marxism. They understand it is a failed ideology that has killed hundreds of millions of people and laid waste to entire nations. They do not want it here. So, even as the revolutionaries spread their doctrine and feed it to your children they color it as something else.

. . .

Our schools are under the control of an educational establishment completely infiltrated by Marxists who detest this nation and everything it stands for. They are not attempting to teach your children to read, write or do arithmetic. They are training them as revolutionaries for the express purpose of destroying this nation from within.

That is the obvious truth. And, yet, somehow, it cannot be said. The first rule of Marxism is as we know – you can’t talk about Marxism.

Read the full article here. Do you know what is being taught in your neighborhood schools?

# # #

Tomorrow is Columbus Day

Tomorrow is Columbus Day. Or is it? The other day, The Daily Signal reported:

On Tuesday, the Washington D.C. City Council approved a measure to abolish the celebration of “Columbus Day,” set to take place on Oct. 14. The holiday will be replaced by “Indigenous People’s Day.” The legislation was fast-tracked by the calling of an emergency session.

The District of Columbia was named after Christopher Columbus and bears numerous monuments and tributes to his legacy, including a large statue in front of Union Station, a famous train hub in the heart of the city. 

The report quotes an article by Jarrett Stepman, author of the new book “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Some highlights:

It is unfortunate to see what was once a uniting figure—who represented American courage, optimism, and even immigrants—is suddenly in the cross-hairs for destruction. We owe it to Columbus and ourselves to be more respectful of the man who made the existence of our country possible.

A few historians and activists began to attack Columbus’ legacy in the late 20th century. They concocted a new narrative of Columbus as a rapacious pillager and a genocidal maniac.

Far-left historian Howard Zinn, in particular, had a huge impact on changing the minds of a generation of Americans about the Columbus legacy. Zinn not only maligned Columbus, but attacked the larger migration from the Old World to the new that he ushered in.

It wasn’t just Columbus who was a monster, according to Zinn, it was the driving ethos of the civilization that ultimately developed in the wake of his discovery: the United States.

“Behind the English invasion of North America,” Zinn wrote, “behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private profit.”

So many errors in that sentence. Among them: The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which influenced the Declaration of Independence, specified the right to life, liberty, and “the means of acquiring and possessing [private] property” – not private profit. And as the profit motive relates to Columbus:

The truth is that Columbus set out for the New World thinking he would spread Christianity to regions where it didn’t exist. While Columbus, and certainly his Spanish benefactors, had an interest in the goods and gold he could return from what they thought would be Asia, the explorer’s primary motivation was religious.

Read the rest here. And Happy Columbus Day!

# # #

Land of Hope: book review

Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story 

by Wilfred M. McClay

Philip Tervian’s review at Commentary concludes:

. . . [McClay] begins at the beginning—the archaeological evidence of our aboriginal inhabitants—and like most American histories, McClay’s tends to pass a little quickly over the first century-and-a-half of European settlement. But this is a minor complaint. His description of America on the eve of revolution is perceptive and succinct, and capacious as well. The reader never doubts the author’s perspective on the colonists’ revolt, or British government in America, but he tells the story with illuminating clarity and, above all, fair-mindedness. The answer to ignorance is not indoctrination but knowledge.

This virtue in the writing of history is not necessarily self-evident. The American Revolution, like any such episode, was a complicated matter, reaching back in history and forward in effect; and both sides—one is tempted to say all sides—were benighted and heroic, generous and arbitrary, products of their various places and time. George Washington was not without his flaws, and the Loyalists were not without their reasons. McClay sets all this out in crisp detail, balancing his judgment in conjunction with the evidence, flattering his readers to draw their own conclusions.

Which is what distinguishes this from other history texts. The present sits not in judgment but inquiry. And to the extent that we can understand people and events in circumstances far removed from our own experience, the past is revealed in Land of Hope to the present, without prejudice. The dramas and their actors—the drafting of the Constitution, Andrew Jackson, westward expansion, John C. Calhoun, the Mexican War, Samuel Gompers, women’s suffrage, Woodrow Wilson, the Great Crash, Ronald Reagan—are given the chance to speak for themselves in explaining themselves to modern sensibilities.

This is especially useful in contending with subjects—slavery and its relative significance in national life, the Civil War and its aftermath, the condition of African Americans in their own country—that routinely disrupt the historical profession, and are just as routinely distorted by ideology. This is no small matter, and no small achievement. McClay’s skill in furnishing context to emotion, in introducing modern presumption to past evidence, puts the history of the American republic in a new light by revealing its inward and outward complexity. This makes Land of Hope important, compelling, essential reading.

“Nothing about America better defines its distinctive character than the ubiquity of hope,” he writes, “a sense that the way things are initially given to us cannot be the final word about them, that we can never settle for that.” I hope he’s right.

Land of Hope sounds like a must-read. Full review is here. Amazon listing is here.

# # #