Falls Church, Virginia School Board Cancels Thomas Jefferson

In a unanimous vote Tuesday, the Falls Church, Virginia School Board voted to rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, as well as George Mason High School, replacing the names of these Founding Fathers with those of people who are more woke and acceptable to the vanguard of today’s Cultural Revolution.

School Board Chair Greg Anderson, tongue no doubt planted firmly in cheek, intoned the usual pieties: “The Board took seriously the viewpoints and concerns raised by many students, parents, staff, and community members.” Except it didn’t, since according to WTOP, “a survey of the Falls Church community taken in October…revealed that 56% of the community overall asked that the names stay on the schools, including 61% of the parents of Thomas Jefferson Elementary students and 57% of George Mason High parents.” But their viewpoints didn’t count. As is always the case, the only viewpoints that mattered were those of the woke mob.

Not grasping the old adage that it is better to be silent and be thought an idiot than to open one’s mouth and prove it, Anderson rambled on: “We thank everyone who shared their perspectives with us and will be mindful of your comments as we now begin selecting names that reflect the diversity of opinions in our community” – except, that is, the opinions of the majorities who thought Thomas Jefferson and George Mason were fine names and need not be changed. “Our schools must be places where all students, staff, and community members feel safe, supported, and inspired.” Except, that is, those who respect and revere the Founding Fathers.

And so the foes of American history and America itself, for to repudiate the one is to repudiate the other, score another victory. If His Fraudulency Joe Biden succeeds in gaining the presidency by massive voter fraud, it will hardly matter anyway, but America can only have a future as a free society if its people recover a deep appreciation for its heroes and a pride in its achievements. In fact, that’s why the Left embarked upon its statue-destroying frenzy, tearing down statues not just of Confederates but of Lincoln, Grant, and even Frederick Douglass. They want to make you ashamed of American history so that you won’t see in America anything worth defending as the country continues to be assaulted from within and from outside, with useful idiots such as Greg Anderson helping on the destroyers.

Ahistorical myopia and ignorance of history as displayed by Anderson is a significant cause of the current outpouring of hatred for America. The war on Jefferson and Mason, both slaveowners, is just one small part of the Left’s relentless defamation of our country as a bastion of racial hatred and injustice. Leftist rioters and destroyers are enraged at Americans who are memorialized despite being slaveowners. They’re oblivious to the fact that slavery was not universally considered a moral evil at the time these men lived, and that this is relevant because there are very likely to be people in future ages who look at our times and scratch their heads and ask each other How could they not have known that was wrong?

Even more importantly, the Leftists are heedless of the fact that the movement to abolish slavery arose in Britain and America because of Christian principles that they despise, while slavery persisted long into the twentieth century in several Muslim countries because of Islamic principles that Leftists would rather be caught at a Trump rally than criticize. Saudi Arabia, a country based strictly upon Islamic law, only abolished slavery in 1962, and North African states including Mauritania and Niger only did so in the early twenty-first century, because of Islamic laws that the Leftist rioters would no doubt say it was “Islamophobic” to denounce.

In contrast, it was Greg Anderson’s bête noire Thomas Jefferson who wrote the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It was those words that led many Americans, long before the Civil War, to believe that slavery was not only evil in itself, but incompatible with the principles of the American republic. Slavery was ultimately eradicated in the United States by people who believed that Thomas Jefferson had enunciated the principles that made it necessary to wipe it out.

It will be interesting to see who Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason High are named for now. Malcolm X? Angela Davis? Che Guevara? Mao Zedong? Whoever it will be, it is almost certain that the honored figures will be just as imperfect, and maybe even worse violators of human rights than Jefferson or Mason. But the Left is indifferent to the imperfections of its own heroes; its objective is not to find perfect or sinless people to venerate, but to turn Americans against their own heritage. In Falls Church, Virginia, it’s working.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.