And They’ve Come for the Founders

“However, as one watches the Founders find their way into the crosshairs of so many, perhaps the obvious needs to be restated.”

In a letter dated June 18th and addressed to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, the City Council of New York requested that the statue of Thomas Jefferson in the City Council Chambers be removed. The letter’s authors referred to Thomas Jefferson as “America’s most noted slave holder” and argued that keeping the statue on display “sends a terrible message to the people who are counting on us to work towards a more equitable New York City.”

This letter was sent on the same day that the City of Portland, Oregon awoke to find a statue of George Washington, which had stood in the city since 1926, torn from its pedestal, badly burned, and covered in graffiti. Along with the various profanities and slogans (including “Defund White Men”) spray-painted onto the bronze statue—and in the vicinity—was the number 1619, an apparent reference to The New York Times’ widely-discussed 1619 project, which debuted in August, 2019 and aimed to tell the story of American history through the lens of slavery. (The project’s progenitor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the project.) And, as if anticipating New York City’s targeting of Jefferson, Portland had also witnessed the June 14th destruction of its own statue of Thomas Jefferson, which had sat outside of the city’s Jefferson High School.

And it became inevitable once widespread demands had begun to uproot from our national consciousness those historical figures that did not meet the moral purity thresholds demanded by our current activist class.

In the days immediately following the toppling of Portland’s statues of these two Founding Fathers, a number of commentators, from Thomas Chatterton Williams to Wesley Yang, expressed their astonishment—not so much that the Founders would eventually have been targeted, but that it had happened seemingly so quickly. However, what these commentators—and many others—would recognize, upon reflection, is that pummeling the Founders was precisely the outcome that had become nearly inevitable. And it became inevitable once widespread demands had begun to uproot from our national consciousness those historical figures that did not meet the moral purity thresholds demanded by our current activist class. (1) All the while, clearly reveling in the unfolding of events, Hannah-Jones tweeted (in a now-deleted post) above a photograph of the badly damaged statue of Jefferson in Portland that “It would be honor” to have the events that gave rise to these statue topplings be known as “the 1619 riots.”