As if to prove the point that legacy media rely on “historians” to score political points, the New York City Council will remove a statue of former President Thomas Jefferson despite repeated assurances that no one would do such a thing.
Back in 2017, we were assured that such a move was not on the horizon. NBC News wrote a piece titled “Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t ‘Next,’ But It’s Complicated, Historians Say.” The Washington Post went for a far snarkier version: “Historians: No, Mr. President, Washington and Jefferson are not the same as Confederate generals.”
Similar pieces in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and Slate assured us that statues of Jefferson and former President George Washington were not in danger. This was all in response to former President Donald Trump’s opposition to removing statues of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, as he suggested statues of Washington and Jefferson would be next.
As we can see, legacy media and their quoted historians turned out to be wrong. But it isn’t just that these outlets were wrong: It’s that they either couldn’t see, or refused to see, the direction the Left was going at the time.
Students at the University of Missouri were protesting and calling for a statue of Jefferson to be removed back in 2015. Students at the University of Virginia, which was founded by Jefferson, covered up a statue of him just one month after these authoritative pieces were written. As these pieces were being published and read, CNN commentator Angela Rye was on the network comparing Washington and Jefferson to Lee.
“I don’t care if it’s a George Washington statue, or a Thomas Jefferson statue, or a Robert E. Lee statue, they all need to come down,” Rye said.
This was made even more clear over the years as liberal institutions and Democratic politicians continued to embrace a position of opposing the founding fathers. Take the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which erroneously claimed that preserving slavery was one of the primary reasons for the American Revolution.
Or Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who claimed we must “listen to everybody” and “listen to the argument there” about removing statues of Washington. This was when Duckworth was still being considered as a possible running mate for Joe Biden. It was also the day after the Fourth of July.
It was clear almost immediately what direction the Left was going in. If these outlets were simply unaware of it, they failed miserably. Otherwise, they were trying to score political points by painting Trump’s comments as ridiculous. Either way, this once again exposes their blind spots, intentional or not.
