The anti-American Left almost entirely won the battle over American history while the rest of us slept, but the conservative Heritage Foundation is exploring whether there’s a chance to avoid permanent defeat.
In one sense, a single 22-mile-wide corridor in Virginia is the epicenter of the entire national battle. There, the wholly untrustworthy “trusts” that operate James Madison’s Montpelier and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello — the homes of the two most influential thinkers who laid the foundation of this nation’s grand experiment of liberty — are on a malevolent mission to trash the reputations of those two great founders. It’s part of a larger attempt to recast the great “American experiment” into something irrevocably shameful rather than noble.
I wrote twice last week on how the forces of wokeness, obsessed with slavery and willfully dismissive of historical context, took over the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and turned Monticello into a grim spectacle of self-flagellation. The same agenda is at work, arguably farther along and thus worse, at Montpelier, where the misnamed National Trust for Historic Preservation operates more like an agent for historic destruction.
Take just one example. On Montpelier’s website as the official “Independence Day Message” — from 2020, mind you, as if it couldn’t be bothered to commemorate July 4 in 2021 or 2022 — is an outlandish paean to the “America is evil” ideology. The message opens like this:
“On our nation’s Independence Day, the Montpelier community wishes to reaffirm its commitment to the Descendant Community of the enslaved at Montpelier, telling the stories of Black lives at Montpelier, and to being part of the larger conversation about why those lives matter in America’s past, present, and future. Black Lives Matter. Black History Matters.”
It’s just getting started. The next sentence is this: “We investigate and share ways that the U.S. Constitution has perpetuated and addressed racism throughout our nation’s complicated past.” It then continues with four long paragraphs exclusively about how “Montpelier affirms the much-needed truth-telling about slavery’s role in the shaping of the United States, the legacy it continues to have within race relations in America, and the lingering institutional disparities that prevent Americans from realizing the ideals expressed in our founding documents.”
Nowhere in its Independence Day message — not in even a single word — is there mention of why we celebrate the Fourth of July. Not a word about self-evident truths expressing unalienable rights, not a word about consent of the governed, not a word about a sincere effort to appeal to “the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,” and certainly not even a backward glance at sacred honor.
This is a self-hating sickness. This is unacceptable. Even one of the Montpelier board members who is a descendant of one of Madison’s servants says the whole organization is off the rails.
The overwhelming focus on enslavement at Montpelier, said Mary Alexander to the Orange County Review, “is a disservice to Madison. There were hundreds of thousands of slaveowners, but not hundreds of thousands who wrote the Constitution.”
No decent person wants the reality of slavery to be swept under the historical rug. Still, to posit that slavery is the single lens through which to view U.S. history is flagrantly dishonest.
On July 29, Heritage will explore what can be done about these assaults against the American ideal. In a forum viewable online, four top scholars will address “A Tale of Three Presidential Houses: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” to “discuss what Americans can and should do to save these cradles of the Republic.”
Here’s hoping someone outlines an aggressive battle plan. In the campaign to learn about and from U.S. history, the foundations that run Montpelier and Monticello now are enemy combatants. They must be defeated.
