The Patriot Post® · Our Racist National Archives

Trigger warning: The United States of America was founded by white men, and no amount of wokeism, critical race theorizing, or armchair quarterbacking from two and a half centuries hence can ever undo that inconvenient truth.

Nor can they undo the truth that one of those men, Thomas Jefferson, the tall guy in the middle of the picture above, was the author of our Declaration of Independence and perhaps the most brilliant and talented American who ever lived — yes, even more brilliant and talented than Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, or Ibram X. Kendi.

And, yes, Jefferson was a slaveholder — an enigmatic man who wrote that “all men are created equal” while he himself enslaved more than 600 people during his life. But an accurate rendering of history will also note the following:

Throughout his entire life, Thomas Jefferson was publicly a consistent opponent of slavery. Calling it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation. Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. These views were radical in a world where unfree labor was the norm.

This last sentence is critical. Jefferson lived in a world where slavery was the rule rather than the exception. He understood the evil nature of the institution, though, and he and his fellow Founders laid the rhetorical groundwork for successive generations to abolish the practice on the North American continent — even while it continued to flourish in Africa and elsewhere around the globe.

The pallor of our Founding Fathers, though, was apparently too much for a taxpayer-funded National Archives and Records Administration task force on racism, which recently released a 105-page report on the subject.

As The Daily Signal’s Jarrett Stepman writes, “The report, which was critical of the Founding Fathers, claimed that the Rotunda — which houses the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — is an example of ‘structural racism’ because it ‘lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color], women, and other communities.’”

The report goes on to highlight such leftist mainstays as “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “equity,” and it cites the New York Times’ dubious and debunked 1619 Project, as well as the aforementioned Ibram X. Kendi, the notorious antiracist racist who infamously wrote, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Apparently, two wrongs make a right on the Left.

House Oversight Committee ranking member James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, slammed the report as “radical” and “nothing more than progressive propaganda seeking to erase our nation’s history.”

Comer continued: “America should be celebrated, not reviled — especially by our own federal government. This report is a prime example of government waste. Taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund a woke agenda seeking to revise America’s history.”

Indeed. The Left seems hell-bent on wrecking the remarkable story of our nation’s founding and on teaching our children to be ashamed of their country.

“Is it even possible,” Stepman wonders, “to simply acknowledge both the flaws and accomplishments of the heroes of our past without treating them as villains at this point? Apparently, they must be torn down and their achievements portrayed as no more than a conspiracy to oppress others.”

The National Archives Museum is a beautiful structure, and the artifacts within it are awe-inspiring. It’s just a low-down dirty shame that a bunch of America-loathing leftists are running the place.