Tearing Down Thomas Jefferson Over Slavery Is Moral Idiocy

You can always count on woke progressives to live up to the worst caricatures of their ideas. Democrats on the New York City Council have now removed a statue of the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, from the City Council chamber in New York City Hall. The statue has been in City Hall since 1834 (eight years after Jefferson’s death), when it was erected to celebrate his advocacy of religious liberty. It is a sign of how proud Democrats are of their decision that they tried to block the press from witnessing the removal.

This is madness, and it vindicates many on the right — prominently including Donald Trump — who argued that the campaigns against Confederate statues were dangerous precisely because the people pushing for the removals were certain to move next against the Founding Fathers. When Trump made that argument in 2017, he was met with sneers. In a piece titled “Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t ‘Next,’ But It’s Complicated, Historians Say,” Dartunorro Clark of NBC News wrote:

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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You can always count on woke progressives to live up to the worst caricatures of their ideas. Democrats on the New York City Council have now removed a statue of the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, from the City Council chamber in New York City Hall. The statue has been in City Hall since 1834 (eight years after Jefferson’s death), when it was erected to celebrate his advocacy of religious liberty. It is a sign of how proud Democrats are of their decision that they tried to block the press from witnessing the removal.

This is madness, and it vindicates many on the right — prominently including Donald Trump — who argued that the campaigns against Confederate statues were dangerous precisely because the people pushing for the removals were certain to move next against the Founding Fathers. When Trump made that argument in 2017, he was met with sneers. In a piece titled “Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t ‘Next,’ But It’s Complicated, Historians Say,” Dartunorro Clark of NBC News wrote: