Before beginning a typically busy day, I usually watch some of “Fox and Friends”, and balance it out with the folks on CNN, and then Joe Scarborough on MSNBC. Joe and I were two of the 73 Republican freshmen first elected to Congress back in 1994, the year Republicans won the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Joe was a pretty conservative guy back in the day, but he’s changed his point of view since then – if not 180 degrees, pretty darn close.
Anyway, Monday on Fox they had a gentleman named Jeffrey Tucker who had toured Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, on the Fourth of July. It would be an understatement to say that Tucker was disappointed and upset by the visit. Why? Well, because in his opinion, Monticello has “gone woke, and displays and tour guides insult his (Thomas Jefferson’s) legacy. They were debunking his history, his reputation, putting him down, demoralizing everybody on my tour.” Tucker went on to say that the woke tour guides “diminished Jefferson’s accomplishments, claiming his reputation was wildly overblown.” Tucker concluded by saying that he thought “maybe Monticello would be protected from the disease of wokeism, but was sadly wrong.”
Look, I’m a big fan of Thomas Jefferson. (Even though Democrats try to claim him as their own – for example they celebrate Jefferson/Jackson dinners every year, just as Republicans celebrate Lincoln/Reagan dinners.) Jefferson was a founding father. He wrote the Declaration of Independence . He was George Washington’s Secretary of State. He was our third president, (after George Washington and John Adams.) And (like me) he attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg Virginia as did George Washington, James Monroe and John Tyler. (As a history major, I have to mention this kind of thing – can’t help myself.)
Of course Thomas Jefferson had his shortcomings. He was a slaveholder, and fathered children with a slave, Mary Hemings Bell. Should this be addressed during a tour of his home, Monticello? Absolutely. Slavery was a horrific, immoral, and barbaric stain on the history of this nation. Over half-a-million soldiers lost their lives in a civil war to end this “peculiar institution.”
But there are those in this country (the woke mob) who make it a practice to tear down the reputations of our founding fathers and leaders by insisting that their actions back then meet the standards of the 21st-century. And this is patently absurd.
The Father of our Nation, George Washington, is also a target of the woke crew. An op-ed recently published in the Washington Post for example argued that George Washington University should change its name because Washington was a slaveholder. (I guess if George Washington University has to change its name, the newspaper in which the op-ed appeared, the Washington Post, would have to change its name too!)
In Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s district, San Francisco, the school board there decided to change the names of schools named after Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Paul Revere. And Lincoln is the guy who literally freed the slaves with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, but that’s apparently not good enough for these woke fanatics.
Where does it end? Hard to say. After all, these are the same types of people who think we should defund the police, turn our streets over to the criminals, completely open our borders, allow taxpayer-paid abortions for any reason all the way up to the day of birth (and in some cases after), and take money from people who never owned slaves and give it to people who never were slaves (reparations.)
Hopefully, in the end, common sense will prevail. But unfortunately, I fear we’re a long way from that point.