The Other Shoe Drops: Far-Left DOES Want Washington, Jefferson, Jackson Statues Gone

Jackson Park, Chiago Paul BeatyAP
Paul Beaty/AP

The furious campaign by left-wing activists to erase American history they find offensive entered a new phase Wednesday as leftists rushed to prove President Donald Trump right.

What began as an absurdist parody of leftist calls for the removal of Confederate monuments and then morphed into a serious argument against them, became a reality as a pastor on Chicago’s south-side called for two area parks to be renamed and statues of George Washington and Andrew Jackson removed. “Bishop” James Dukes sent letters to Mayor Rahm Emanuel Dukes demanding the changes. He made his case to WBBM, Chicago’s CBS radio affiliate.

“In an African-American community, it’s a slap in the face and it’s a disgrace for them to honor someone who was a slave owner,” Dukes told CBS, calling for Washington Park to be renamed and the towering equestrian statue of the slave-owning father of our country to be removed.

Later, Green Party Vice Presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka addressed President Trump directly, calling Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson “symbols of white supremacy.”

Dukes, who preaches at Liberation Christian Center in West Englewood, a Chicago neighborhood at the epicenter of that city’s murder epidemic, also wants Jackson Park renamed. That park, site of the famous 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition and future home of the Barack Obama Presidential Library, was named in honor of slave-owner and father of American popular democracy Andrew Jackson in 1881. In the intervening 136 years, the neighborhoods around both parks have become predominately black.

Black Americans, Dukes argues, should not be subjected to living near monuments to the likes of Washington and Jackson. Of Washington, he says, “I see a person who fought for the liberties, and I see people that fought for the justice and freedom of white America, because at that moment, we were still chattel slavery, and was three-fifths of humans.”

Apparently unaware of examples like Malcolm Shabazz High School in 78 percent white Madison, Wisconsin, Dukes compared keeping the names Washington Park and Jackson Park to trying to erect statues of Malcolm X in certain predominently white Chicago neighborhoods. “There’s no way plausible that we would even think that they would erect a Malcolm X statue in Mount Greenwood, Lincoln Park, or any of that. Not that say Malcolm X was a bad guy; they just would not go for it,” he told WBBM.

Dukes then suggested the parks could be renamed in honor of black Chicago mayor Harold Washington, whose own family named themselves our first president, and pop-star Micheal Jackson, a native of nearby Gary, Indiana.

The leftists’ demands come after President Donald Trump was widely mocked in the mainstream press for his plea that the amplifying calls to destroy or remove public monuments with a Confederate connection could not be logically separated from giant swaths of American history with connection to unsavory practices like slavery. “This week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” the president asked reporters Tuesday.

The response on the likes of CNN and across left-leaning social media was that Trump could only be making such an argument out of historical ignorance. Celebrities rushed to blast Trump’s supposed historical illiteracy:

Leftist politicians like Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) also got in on the mockery of Trump’s slippery slope argument:

We have yet to see if any of these commentators will make the same observation about Baraka and Dukes’s historical analyses.

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