Whole article can be found here.
Claire Brighn is the pen name of a conservative researcher and writer with previous domestic and foreign policy experience in the Executive Branch.
On Monday, a statue of Thomas Jefferson that had stood watch over the New York City Council chambers for 187 years was carted away to be relocated just a few miles North at the New York Historical Society. The removal follows a vote by a mayoral commission in October to remove the statue after months of increased pressure from leftists on the City Council, and is the culmination of a decades-long campaign by progressive city leaders, who claim that the statue is offensive to minority groups because Jefferson was a slave owner.
Rather, Jefferson appears to be despised by the far left today for the same reason that he was nearly universally acclaimed for most of American history: he is the author of the principle of human equality contained in the Declaration of Independence that founded our country in 1776. And the Declaration’s principle of human equality is very much out of fashion with today’s radical left—which is trying to turn the very year “1776” into a symbol of hate.
Jefferson’s vision of equality also underpinned the Civil Rights Movement a century later. In his famous “I Have a Dream Speech,” Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously called for all Americans to “live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” The words of the slave owner Jefferson became the rallying cry for the end of racial segregation in America.
