So now it's Thomas Jefferson's turn

New York City has reverted to a pre-Giuliani-era "Shattered" urban hellhole, with crime, homelessness, rats, and garbage completely out of control.

What is New York's City Hall concerned about?  But of course: Removing a statue of Thomas Jefferson, given that, as an 18th-century grandee of his time in Virginia, he owned slaves by inheritance.

According to the New York Post:

A city commission voted to remove the statue of Thomas Jefferson from the City Council chamber by the end of the year — though the body is still debating where to send the monument to the Founding Father.

The Public Design Commission voted unanimously Monday to banish the nation's third president from the legislative chamber at City Hall after four lawmakers testified that his status as a slaveholder was an affront to the council's many African American members.

The little detail about Jefferson also being the author of the Declaration of Independence and a father of the Bill of Rights, not to mention an early public voice against slavery back when it was considered risky and radical to oppose that institution, are rather unimportant to them.  No wokester values such things...

But to the rest of us, it's disgusting as hell, a Taliban-like bid to erase history, moving right along down a slippery slope of cancel culture.  First, it was the Confederates, then it was colonialists and slave traders, and soon after Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln, who literally freed the slaves, with Lincoln paying for it with his life.  Now they've gotten their mitts on Jefferson and want him down, too.  It's as offensive as hell to anyone who values liberty and representative democracy, an amazing innovation at the time and since widely imitated, which is Jefferson's legacy.  A few of his contributions are readable here.

Here's the sane sort of reaction from a prominent scholar that should be everyone's reaction:

None of these creeps involved in this New York travesty could hold a candle to Jefferson.  Look at how puny and wretched and Alice in Wonderland–like they look, sitting in judgment of this man:


Image: YouTube screen shot, NBC News.

The New York Post has an even better photo of this sorry travesty — viewable here.

Once upon a time, Jefferson — effectively the founder of the Democrat party, by the way — was revered by Democrats.  "Jeffersonian Democrats," they used to be called.

Democrats held a Jefferson-Jackson Luncheon for its party elite — until a few years ago, when they decided to get rid of that illustrious name.

Remember when President John F. Kennedy, at a dinner hosting Nobel laureates, said this?

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet.

Now the press reports ignorant spoutings from assorted slack-jawed schlubs and galoots who call Jefferson statues "just like having the Confederate flag" if they don't yawp that they should be destroyed as "the right thing."  For NBC, which did that report, that's what passes for "news."

Democrats, in short, have become moral sewage, ignorant of history, and downright hostile to liberty.

Where the hell do they think the U.S. would be if the U.S. didn't have Thomas Jefferson?  At best, we'd be colonial vassals and appendages of Europe, or else not at all different from someplace like Haiti or Bolivia.  Some of these leftists have been at it against Jefferson for years in their wokester zeal.

One of them, one Stefan Sykes, now listed as an NBC News associate on his stories, has called for the removal of the Jefferson statue at Columbia University's famed journalism school.  The 2020 wokester graduate wrote this low-knowledge tripe for the New York Daily News, and some of his pals set up a Change.org petition to get the statue taken down.  It wasn't popular, not even among Columbia's many wokester students, who view the statue in front of the school as their beacon and have happy memories crawling on the statue as a group to celebrate graduation day.  After being up more than a year and seeking a mere 500 signatures, the Change.org petition drew...292.

The school, though, jumped through those wokester hoops:

This summer has revived discourse about the appropriateness of the Thomas Jefferson statue that stands so prominently before the doors of Pulitzer Hall. Some alumni and faculty have demanded that the statue be removed and replaced by a different representation of journalistic values. Sheila and I agree that the time has come to change the symbolic art that fronts our school, and we will use what influence we have this fall to advance that position. The decision belongs to the university, however. The Provost has already convened a consultative group of university faculty and leaders and he has assured us again this week that he will lead a review of problematic symbols at Columbia this fall that will include the Jefferson statue.

I can't tell if they've done anything so far.  It's possible they're hearing from alumni.  In this case, removing that statue opens the gates to removing far less illustrious but nevertheless important figures.  After all, if Jefferson isn't virtuous enough, why is Joseph Pulitzer?  Pulitzer was the media baron who invented yellow journalism, an instigator of war.  He also put up cash for the school.  Would the school like to remove his name from all the rooms and niches in the school named in his honor, or better still, the Pulitzer prizes, the holy grail of journalism?  Pulitzer was a less substantial figure than Jefferson on First Amendment values, so getting rid of supposedly bad Jefferson makes it entirely logical to get rid of even worse Pulitzer and the Pulitzer prizes, the source of the school's prestige.  Wokesters have tried to erase Yale similarly in their beaver-like bid to destroy all American names and institutions, and the Yale alumni won't stand for it, not in that elite club they worked so hard to get into in order to bear the name "Yalie."  Removing Jefferson at Columbia necessitates removing Pulitzer, too, which should be greeted about the same way.  It's likely a reaction is coming as the bid to tear down in the name of virtue-signaling grows ever more unpopular.

Which is why I can't help but think that in a perverse way, the decision to remove the statue from its place in New York's city hall was, in its own way, kind of right.

Tinpots don't like Jefferson, and neither do vicious communist tyrants.  Moral zeroes of very pathetic stature who couldn't hold a candle to Jefferson's achievements, don't want him around, either.  Jefferson ends up making them look small.

Instead of trying to match Jefferson and the values he held and try to make them better and better, they chose to erase Jefferson, same as the filthy, stinking, fly-blown Taliban which blew up the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas.  It's ugly stuff, and it wins for a day, but ultimately, it makes them creeps.  These New York City minions who unanimously voted for Jefferson's statue removal don't actually deserve someone as grand and consequential as Jefferson in their midst, given their embrace of failed fourth-world values.

Yes, they can get rid of Jefferson, for now, but all they have left in the wake of it is their wretched, miserable, selves.  What a deal for the once-great city of New York. 

Image: Screen shot from NBC News video, via shareable YouTube.

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