The Left’s war on American statuary is a calculated one. The idea of pulling down statues of Washington, Jefferson, and other former national heroes is to signal to Americans, and to the entire world, that a new regime is in power, one that has radically different values. The old order has gone, and a new one is in place, and those who fail to go along with the new authorities will be punished accordingly. The best way to communicate this to distracted, low-information, busy Americans is to tear down the statues of those whom they were taught to respect and revere as heroes and to put new heroes in their place. It is happening now in the U.S. embassy in France, where Old Joe Biden’s woke ambassador has made it clear with a series of wall portraits that the revolutionaries have triumphed, and the old regime has been overthrown.
Biden’s handlers’ far-Left ambassador to France, Denise Bauer, happily announced the change in a French-language tweet on Feb. 3. Over two photos, one of her standing in 2022 before portraits of her early predecessors, and then standing in the same area in 2023, with all the portraits replaced by those of Leftist activists, Bauer wrote: “It was one of the first photos taken when I arrived in Paris. 1 year later, we decided to do it again. Proud that the entrance to our embassy now better reflects the #IncredibleDiversity of my country. A value that I wear wherever I go in France.”
C'était l'une des 1ères photos prises à mon arrivée à Paris. 1 an plus tard, on a décidé de la refaire. Fière que l'entrée de notre ambassade reflète aujourd'hui mieux l'#IncroyableDiversité de mon pays 🇺🇸. Une valeur que je porte où que j'aille en France. pic.twitter.com/kkwdlQeWtz
— Denise Bauer, Ambassadrice des USA en France (@USAmbFrance) February 3, 2023
According to a Tuesday report in the Washington Free Beacon, “among the portraits Bauer banished was that of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who served as minister to France in 1796. A portrait of Pinckney, a signer of the Constitution and general in George Washington’s Continental Army, was replaced by a photograph of transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, who claimed to have played a prominent role in the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City.” Rivera recounted proudly: “I have been given the credit for throwing the first Molotov cocktail by many historians but I always like to correct it. I threw the second one, I did not throw the first one!”
Also getting the axe in Bauer’s redecoration for the new, woke America was John Armstrong Jr., who was “minister to France from 1804 to 1810” and “was a major during the revolution who eventually became a U.S. senator and secretary of war.” Likewise deep-sixed was “Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, known as ‘America’s Swiss Founding Father,’ was minister to France as well as secretary of the Treasury and founder of New York University.” The likes of Pinckney, Armstrong, and Gallatin have an immense mark against them: they were all white males. That will never do, not for the embassy of a duly diverse and multicultural regime.
Bauer doesn’t appear to be proceeding on her own initiative. Her “preoccupation with diversity in the embassy,” says the Free Beacon, is “consistent with Biden’s directives for the executive branch. The president on his first day in office issued an executive order to all cabinet-level agencies ordering they assess their commitment to ‘racial equity’ and develop an ‘action plan’ with the objective of ‘embedding equity in the everyday business of government.’”
Denise Bauer, apparently, is nothing if not a team player. Among those with whom she has replaced all those dead white racists is Dolores Huerta, “a labor leader and former honorary chair of Democratic Socialists of America. Huerta was a frequent speaker at conferences and rallies allegedly linked to the Communist Party USA from the 1960s through the ’90s, and in the 2000s was an outspoken advocate for the release of five Cuban spies arrested while operating in the United States.”
Related: What’s With the New Statue at One of New York City’s State Courthouses?
Also now adorning the walls of our embassy in France are portraits of labor activist Cesar Chavez, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, novelist Sandra Cisneros, and baseball star Roberto Clemente.
Notice anything? That’s right: Denise Bauer has filled our embassy in France with portraits of Hispanics. Does she think she is the ambassador to Spain? Does wokeness so eschew basic reality now that she thinks it’s all the same, Spain, France, all bad old countries of Old White Europe? It’s apparently not quite as bad as all that. The State Department explained that it was a “temporary exhibition space” for National Hispanic Heritage Month. So watch for a new assortment of woke heroes to go up for every new month of the Left’s new calendar. One thing you can say about our new civil religion: it has plenty of saints.
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