Thomas Jefferson under attack: Next up — the Declaration of Independence

OPINION:

Black Lives Matter protesters gathered ’round the Thomas Jefferson statue that stands in front of the rotunda at the University of Virginia and shrouded the Founding Father’s face, demanding “justice” as they draped a sign that read, “Black Lives Matter — F—k White Supremacy” over the monument base.

Mark my words: First Robert E. Lee. Then Jefferson. Next up will be the Declaration of Independence and America’s founding and governing documents.

“Thomas Jefferson is a racist and a rapist,” one sign carried by a protester read, the Cavalier Daily reported.

So, as the logic goes, all evidence of Jefferson from public American life must naturally go. But it’s a shaky sort of logic, one that’s built on a shifting, sandy foundation. Why?

Because if it were based on purity, then the purge of racists from public life would trample into Democratic territory, as well.

In West Virginia, for example, stands a statue to the deceased Sen. Robert Byrd, a long-time Democrat who took the lead in his party’s filibuster against the Civil Rights Act — a filibuster that spanned months. Byrd came at that filibuster from a KKK point of view; he was an Exalted Cyclops with the Ku Klux Klan, and one of the group’s most active recruiters.

How about Black Lives Matter heading to West Virginia for a while?

Or, in Washington, D.C., stands a memorial to progressives’ biggest love, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a president who not only took it on himself to intern tens of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry, but who also, in the words of even the liberal leaning PBS, “did not publicly support civil rights for blacks, and his administration was silent on the issue until the late 1930s.”

Why should Roosevelt get a free pass on racism?

Or, how about Woodrow Wilson, another of the left’s progressive-minded heroes, and the Memorial Bridge in Fort Washington, Maryland, as well as the learning center in Washington, D.C., that bear his name — all that, despite the fact this Democrat was a “raving bigot” who once said “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit,” as National Review noted?

But it’s not justice, or even truth, the left is after here. It’s the crumbling of free America.

All these monument attacks are leading to one core point, and it goes like this: America is racist.

Once that’s proven, once the next generation is taught that the history of America is rooted in racism and that the founding fathers themselves were racists, the next step is to debate the merits of the founding documents — to challenge and decide whether documents penned by racists are inherently racist.

It’s a “how can good come from evil” theme that’s emerging.

This display of anti-Jeffersonism will not stop with the statues. It’s leading to widespread, leftist revolt against the very documents that guide the government, beginning with the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson took the lead in penning.

The tea leaves are easy to read. In the minds of the left, if founders are racist, their documents are racist and therefore, America’s entire structure of government is racist — and that realization is just one short hop and skip from concluding that a new system of government is needed. Well, guess which form the left will recommend?

A progressive-slash-socialist system, the one they can sell on the wings of justice and equality — which, of course, means the top-down redistribution of resources, in accordance with their own far-left determinations of justice, equality and need.

In other words: Conservatives and capitalists, need not apply. Rather, stand back, make room — the special interests are coming through.