Trump Was Right, The Woke Mob Is Coming For The Washington Monument
https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/04/trump-was-right-the-mob-is-coming-for-the-washington-monument/
Remember a few years ago, when the left scoffed at President Donald Trump for suggesting that mobs tearing down Confederate statues wouldn’t stop there?
“This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself: ‘Where does it stop?’”
NPR even did a “fact check” to prove Trump was nuts for saying that. Others blasted the president for comparing the nation’s founders to slave-loving traitors, suggesting that it was another example of Trump’s racism.
Well, a working group appointed by Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser released a report this week that called for removing or relocating (or “contextualizing”) the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial because Washington and Jefferson have been deemed “persons of concern.”
The DC FACES report says the two founders fall into a broader group of historical figures who’ve now been found guilty of “participation in slavery, systemic racism, mistreatment of, or actions that suppressed equality for, persons of color, women and LGBTQ communities.”
The report also calls for toppling statues and scrubbing the names of Ben Franklin, George Mason, Andrew Jackson, Alexander Graham Bell, Francis Scott Key, and many others from D.C. buildings and parks. (The complete list of undesirables is below.)
In their place, the report says, should be names that “include more women, people of color and LGBTQ Washingtonians.”
After she got the report, Bowser tweeted that “I look forward to reviewing and advancing their recommendations.”
Strangely, the working group was silent on the monument to FDR, even though he rounded up and interred 120,000 Americans during World War II for the crime of having Japanese ancestors. He was also named one of the 11 most racist presidents in the nation’s history by the Huffington Post.
Nor does the late Sen. Robert Byrd make the list of “persons of concern.” Byrd, you might recall, was an “exalted cyclops” in the KKK and filibustered the Civil Rights Act. There’s a statue of Byrd in the U.S. Capitol.
The group also managed to miss Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger – a vile racist who in 1939 described her abortion mission as an effort to “exterminate the Negro population.” There’s a bronze bust of Sanger in the Smithsonian.
One wonders, too, how JFK isn’t a “person of concern,” given his flagrant mistreatment of women.
But then again, this isn’t about racism or sexism. This is about advancing a radical leftist agenda that aims to rewrite our nation’s history, banish anyone from the public who isn’t leftist enough, and bully everyone else into silence. Anyone who’s helped advance the left’s agenda gets a pass for their sins, even if they happened only decades – not hundreds of years – ago.
When a fury erupted over the DC FACES report, Bowser retreated a bit from her initial enthusiasm, saying she wants the group to “clarify and refine their recommendations … so no one attempts to confuse the Working Group’s focus on contextualizing, not removing, important monuments and memorials in D.C.”
And, in a weird bit of irony, the DC FACES group responded by removing the page from its report that called on the federal government to “remove, relocate, or contextualize” the monuments to Washington and Jefferson.
We had downloaded an original version of the report before the group managed to airbrush that page out, and you can read it here.
As a reader service, here’s the complete list of “persons of concern” whose names the DC FACES working group thinks should not be allowed to appear anywhere in the nation’s capital. (Names targeted for multiple removals are indicated in parentheses.)
- Henry Addison
- James D. Barry (2)
- Alexander Graham Bell
- William Benning (3)
- James Birney
- Francis Preston Blair, Jr
- Robert Brent (3)
- Jehiel Brooks (2)
- Arthur Capper
- Daniel Carroll
- Christopher Columbus
- Charles William Eliot
- Matthew Gault Emery (3)
- Henry Foxall
- Benjamin Franklin (2)
- James Greenleaf (2)
- William Henry Harrison
- Anthony T. Hyde
- Andrew Jackson (2)
- Thomas Jefferson (4)
- Francis Scott Key (2)
- George Mason
- Guy Mason
- John Walker Maury
- James Monroe (2)
- Francis Griffith Newlands
- Albert Pike
- William Winston Seaton
- Melvin Sharpe
- Benjamin Stoddert (4)
- Zachary Taylor
- Strong John Thomson
- John Tyler (2)
- Abel P. Upshur
- John Peter Van Ness
- George Washington
- Joseph Rodman West
- Woodrow Wilson (2)
Trump was right to wonder where the cancel culture stops. Now we know that it doesn’t. But will any of the fact-checkers who mocked Trump three years ago admit that they were wrong?
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