The Patriot Post® · NYC Targets Its 'Racist' Monuments

Donald Trump was right. They are coming for Washington and Jefferson.

“This week it’s Robert E. Lee,” observed then-President Donald Trump at a news conference some six years ago. “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?’”

Indeed, where does it stop?

If rust never sleeps, neither do progressives. They don’t bathe, either, but we digress. The one thing about progressives is that they’re never done making “progress.” And as long as there are statues and monuments and works of art honoring great Americans who happen to be white and male, there’s progress to be made by defiling them, or by yanking them down, or by mothballing them.

So it goes in New York City, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, already has its share of problems, but whose city council nonetheless took time Tuesday to discuss how they might cancel the Founding Fathers and right past wrongs with boatloads of cash. As Fox News reports:

As New York City cripples under monumental budget cuts due to a migrant crisis straining public resources, its city council is planning to consider a series of measures that would, among other things, remove statues of major historical figures like George Washington and create a reparations task force. …

The council’s Cultural Affairs Committee [held] a public hearing on a measure to remove works of art on city property that “depict a person who owned enslaved persons or directly benefited economically from slavery, or who participated in systemic crimes against indigenous peoples or other crimes against humanity.”

As columnist Bob McManus brilliantly puts it: “When the New York City Council gets its way, and Manhattan’s Columbus Avenue becomes Indigenous Boulevard, no more 1-year-olds will die of fentanyl poisoning at drug-front day-care centers in The Bronx. Right? Because everybody knows that the most critical problem facing a city suffering rising crime, daunting budget projections and a federal border breakdown is that the nation’s founders were men of their times.”

Indeed, they were men of their times. And, yes, Washington and Jefferson were slaveowners. But author, talker, and thinker Dennis Prager recently provided an inconvenient history lesson about slavery— a lesson that those on the Left do their best to ignore: “Every civilization throughout history had slaves: Asian societies, Africans, Native Americans, and other Indigenous peoples around the world, and the Muslim/Arab world, which may have had the most slaves of all.”

Prager didn’t stop there, though. “Who ended slavery?” he asked. And then he answered: “There was only one thing unique about slavery in the West: It raised the issue of the morality of slavery, ferociously debated it, and finally abolished it there, before it was abolished in any other civilization.”

“Let’s be frank,” wrote McManus. “There’s no obvious good reason to change the name of, say, Brooklyn’s Thomas Jefferson High School if most of its students can’t read at grade level anyway.”

Here, we might wonder who’s to blame for the abysmal performance of New York City’s public schools. The answer? The same folks who are responsible for the miserable failure of public schools all around the country: The leftists who lead them.

Don’t distract us with your reecist facts, their fellow-traveling iconoclasts angrily sneer.

We can thus look forward to the descent of the dirty mob — or what Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson might call “a large gathering” — on New York City’s storied monuments. Not even Christopher Columbus, himself a migrant, is likely to be spared. And we can look forward to a great city being a little less great and a lot more ignorant.

This isn’t anything new, though. Two years ago, these same shortsighted fools removed from City Hall a statue of Thomas Jefferson that had been there for 187 years. Now that’s progress.

“The radical left has been trying to reframe our nation as one born from evil,” said councilwoman Joann Ariola, a Republican from Queens, “and it is time we put our foot down and say enough is enough. The Founding Fathers and the others who worked so hard to establish this great country should be celebrated, not eliminated from memory.”

We wish her Godspeed.

It’s interesting, although equally depressing, to consider the fruits of this “progress” — whether they’re yanking down statues or killing the comedy industry or wrecking sports or ruining our educational system or rewriting our nation’s one-of-a-kind story.

As Trump also said back in August 2017, “You can’t change history, but you can learn from it.”

True that. But only if we preserve our history. If we instead whitewash it by tearing down the statues and monuments to our Founding Fathers and by purging both their glorious achievements and their very human failures from our history books, perhaps we’re more inclined to repeat our past mistakes.

“As regards American slavery and everything else,” Prager concluded, “always remember this: Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value. It is not a left-wing value.”