In the immediate aftermath of the Unite The Right antifa riot, President Donald Trump (who appears to be the only person who actually watched the videos from Charlottesville) warned that the removal of statues of Confederate leaders would ultimately lead to the destruction of our Founders.
The Main Stream Media mocked him for this:
The Washington Monument towers over the nation’s capital, jutting more than 500 feet into the sky.
Its sleek and steely structure represents the resolute character of America’s first president, whose unwavering leadership was crucial to the country’s founding.
Over 100 miles away, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a statue of George Washington’s great-grandson-in-law — Confederate General Robert E. Lee — sits in a public park, also memorializing a resolute army commander.
Last weekend’s violence-plagued white nationalist march to protest the planned removal of the Lee statue has sparked a renewed national debate over Confederate monuments. And it’s also been joined by dire warnings, from no less than the president of the United States, about the potential erasure of iconic memorials to the country’s Founding Fathers.
President Donald Trump has decried calls to remove the “beautiful” Lee statue, and others honoring the Confederacy, claiming that the nation’s “history and culture is being ripped apart” and asking where it might end.
Is the president right about the impending threat to the founders? Historians who spoke to NBC News said such fears are slightly misplaced and that Trump is championing a murky interpretation of history.
“The president can raise the slippery slope, but it’s a false slippery slope,” said Kevin Levin, a Boston-based historian who specializes in American Civil War history.
All three agreed that the main distinction is how men like Washington served their country compared to men like Lee.
“One man worked to build a nation and one man worked to tear it apart,” Dunbar said. “I don’t know any other nation that has public recognition of traitors.”
Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t 'Next,' But It’s Complicated, Historians Say, by Dartunorro Clark, NBC News, August 18, 2021]
First, Jefferson was so great a man that his statue is worth more than the actually existing New York City Council. So it’s a kind of strange victory. I hope we can provide the statue a good home.
Second, Thomas Jefferson arguably enabled the long process that is ending in his dishonor. He opposed primogeniture, the very system that enabled his lifestyle and accomplishments. He bought in entirely to the Enlightenment myth about rationality and progress. He wrote the words "all men are created equal," a self-evident lie. It’s true that he didn’t mean these words in the same way that they are understood today [The Declaration of Independence Is for Whites, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, July 10, 2018].
Nonetheless, ideas are taken to their logical conclusion. We would all be spared a great deal of trouble if Jefferson had just stock with the defense of "life, liberty, and property."
The bigger pattern is that, once again, Donald Trump saw more clearly than the "experts" where this was going. At some level, he understood that you can’t build a country on self-hatred. We are told that we must be on guard for right-wing "insurrectionists" who are threatening "Our Democracy." At the same time, our rulers lecture us on the evils of the Founding and muse that the world would be better off if Europeans never came to the New World.
The historic American nation is being replaced and dispossessed. This isn’t a natural process. It isn’t inevitable. It’s being done on purpose by those who hate us. Those who believe that there is a limit to this process of entropy will keep being proven wrong. It didn’t stop with Confederate generals, it won’t stop with the Founders, and it won’t stop with Teddy Roosevelt. It won’t stop until we are just another failed Third World country.
What will stop it? American resistance. The country is ours, we built it, we sustain it, we define who is and isn’t American. Until we can say this openly, the process of destruction will simply get worse … and Conservatism Inc. will continue to simply be a phony opposition.
