This has to be stopped or there will be no country, but how?
/Monticello goes woke — and destroys Jefferson’s legacy in the process. Deliberately.
The Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the Founding Father and America’s third president is one of our best-known national monuments, familiar from its appearance on the nickel since 1938.
But the hilltop mansion designed by Jefferson himself, once preserved as a tribute to the author of the Declaration of Independence, now offers visitors a harangue on the horrors of slavery.
“The whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation,” Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the libertarian Brownstone Institute and a recent visitor, told The Post. “People on my tour seemed sad and demoralized.”
The new emphasis is the culmination of a 10-year effort to balance the historical record, officials of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the estate, have said.
But visitors complain that employees go out of their way to belittle Jefferson and his life.
“The tour guides play ‘besmirchment derby,’ never missing a chance to defame this brilliant, complex man,” Stephen Owen of Enochville, NC, wrote on Facebook.
“Half of the comments on Jefferson were critical,” wrote William Bailes of Chester, Virginia in an online review after visiting in June. “Even my 11-year-old daughter noticed the bias.”
Tucker described his guide last month as “surly and dismissive” of Jefferson’s accomplishments.
“Someone asked if Jefferson had built a machine in the house, and the guide said, ‘Nah, he never built anything, he was just a tinkerer,’” Tucker recalled.
“It was ridiculous. He was the architect of this house and of the University of Virginia — what are you talking about?”
….
Guides begin their outdoor tours of Monticello’s gardens and grounds by invoking the Native Americans who once lived on the land.
“How does that land come to be in European possession?” a guide named Justin asked an unresponsive group of vacationers from Germany. “A lot of violence, right?” he prodded.
Placards with conversation starters on the topic of civil rights festoon a patio outside the snack shop. “Is ‘all men are created equal’ being lived up to in our country today?” one reads. “When will we know when it is?” it continues — supplying a negative answer to the first question.
Books by critical race theory proponents Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates enjoy pride of place in the visitor center’s gift shop, while the smaller Farm Shop store displays five titles on Jefferson’s slaves — and a single biography of the man himself.
I’ll just add this, which I learned when I visited Monticello myself 30 years ago:
Thomas Jefferson's Library Becomes the Core of the New Library of Congress
Within a month after the burning of the Library of Congress in the United States Capitol building, in September 1814 President Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement. Jefferson spent 50 years accumulating 6,487 books, "putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science."
Pygmies attacking giants.