New York City Mayor Democrat Bill de Blasio is removing a statue of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and an author of the Declaration of Independence, from City Hall after nearly two centuries.
“The city’s Public Design Commission — comprised of mayoral appointees — has listed ‘the long term loan’ of the 1833 painted plaster statue of the Declaration of Independence author to the New-York Historical Society on its ‘consent’ agenda for Monday,” the New York Post reported. “The consent designation means the historic statue’s removal is not scheduled for public debate. The 11-member design commission will vote on de Blasio’s Jefferson exile after reviewing public comments, a City Hall spokesman said.”
“The de Blasio administration will continue the progressive war on history as he, himself, fades away into a portrait on a City Hall wall,” Republican Councilman Joe Borelli told the New York Post. “I hope he is at least gone a couple hundred years before someone cancels him.”
Historically ignorant Democrats and progressives sitting on New York’s city council had been pushing for the statue’s removal for over a year. Democratic Councilwoman Debi Rose said that Jefferson’s ownership of slaves justifies the statue’s expulsion from City Hall.
“His words are ‘all men are created equal’ but they were not matched by his action, which included the ability to sell, buy, mortgage and lease human beings,” Rose said in June 2020.
However, when Thomas Jefferson was president he banned the importation of slaves. He also famously condemned slavery and King George III for forcing slavery onto the colonies in the initial rough draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson wrote:
[King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
