After Tuesday’s magical trip through Donald Trump’s angry, racist, and paranoid mind played out in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City, the propaganda wing of the Republican Party—Fox News—began their spin machine. Having lost their grand-wizard spinmaster Bill O’Reilly to the march of time, the job is now on Roger Ailes’ lovechild Tucker Carlson. Carlson went to his bully pulpit last night and decided to articulate the oldest, most classic anxiety of white supremacists—our history is going to disappear!
Thomas Jefferson indisputably was a great man, he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia and maybe most importantly, the greatest thinker in American political history. All of us live in his shadow. Unfortunately, he was also a slaveholder. It's real. It was a moral taint and we are to remember it. The two fanatics on the left it means that Jefferson must be purged from public memory forever. The demand is already coming that we do that. In 2015, students at the university of Missouri demanded that the removal of a statue. Two years ago Ashley Banfield suggested the Jefferson memorial in Washington might have to go. Needless to say, there is no limit when you start thinking like this. Hundreds of activists in New York demanded that statue of Theodore Roosevelt be dismantled, they argued that Roosevelt was a racist. That's the standard, nobody is safe. Watch out Abraham Lincoln, you're next.
To be clear, slavery is evil. If you believe in the rights of the individual it's hard to think of anything worse than slavery. Let's be honest, up WHA until 150 years ago when a group of brave Americans fought and died to finally put an end to it. Slavery was the rule rather the exception around the world. It had been for thousands of years, sadly.
Plato owned slaves. So did Mohammed—peace be upon him. Many African tribes held slaves and sold them. The Aztecs did too. Before he liberated Latin America, Simon Bolivar owned slaves. Slave holding was so common among the North American Indian that the Cherokee brought their slaves with them on the trail of tears. It wasn't something they learned from the European settlers. They were holding and trading slaves when Christopher Columbus arrived.
Watch out, Abraham Lincoln. Nobody is safe. Mostly people of color aren’t safe, FYI. But let’s break this down very simply. The reason why people want to get rid of Confederate memorial statues is because the Confederacy was a terrorist, traitorous, rebellion that was beaten back at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives. A sticking point for the Confederacy was the forced enslavement of an entire race of people. The history lesson about how slavery was a standard in human history is meaningless. The United States turned slavery into a racially derived, genocidal practice—the likes of which humanity had never seen. The United States needed to have a war, with assholes like Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis, in order to rejoin the rest of the developed world community who had already abolished slavery.
Tucker Carlson is trying to work off of the Trumponian logic displayed at the press conference on Tuesday that tried to equivocate taking down a Robert E Lee—general of the traitor army—with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, because they owned slaves. There are indeed many people who want our “Founding Fathers” to be remembered for both their impressive deeds as well as their moral failings. It’s important to our history to recognize that we built this country on the backs of people who were tortured and murdered and raped. Our country, as you can see from Charlottesville, continues to suffer greatly from the inability of many to acknowledge racism and bigotry and white supremacy for what it is—a deadly disease attacking our humanity.