The mob has no memory; it can never comprehend when its own interests are at stake.
― Alexandre Koyré
Despite his pivotal role in our nation's founding, slaveholder Thomas Jefferson is about to be cancelled.
Watching the wholesale cancellation of the Confederates, mossbacks like myself knew, in our hearts, the founder's days were numbered.
Mobs are just as oppressive as governments, and faster acting.
And have no doubt it's a mob that's gunning for Jefferson, a multiracial one comprising angry Blacks, Latinos, and Asians.
When it comes to condemning Whites' hypocrisy, this mob's unstoppable.
Hypocrisy like Jefferson's no doubt merits condemnation.
But cancellation?
Jefferson deserves better.
Jefferson's cancellation lumps the Founding Fathers with the Confederates "in a way which minimizes the crimes and problems of the Confederacy," Jefferson scholar Annette Gordon-Reed told The New York Times.
I agree with her.
While Jefferson owned slaves, he didn't extol slavery; he called it, in fact, a "moral and political depravity" he'd abolish were abolition "practicable."
For my own part, I've tried for years to plumb the depths of Jefferson's hypocrisy and finally found forgiveness in historian Henry Wiencek's dark biography, Master of the Mountain.
In Master of the Mountain, Wiencek makes clear that Jefferson, our celebrant of liberty and equality, kept slaves because he could not bear to lose Monticello to his creditors, nor see his daughter and grandchildren plunged into poverty.
Had he been frugal (he spent a fortune he didn't have on books, groceries, and fine wines) and smart about business (farming and manufacturing), Jefferson well might have freed his slaves. But he was neither, and he didn't.
Instead, Jefferson ran up enormous debt and remained, his whole life, a slave to his slaves, earning a four percent profit from breeding and selling them—a "bonanza," according to Wiencek.
Jefferson, a failure at farming and a klutz at commerce, sold out his ideals for a soft life.
And for his sin—monetizing people—the mob has moved to cancel the author of our Declaration of Independence, decrying all statues of Jefferson as symbols of "the disgusting and racist basis on which America was founded."
But that's the way of mobs.
Forgiveness demands acceptance, something mobs suck at.
Mobs are really only good at vengeance.
So here's my prediction of who's next on the block.
Jesus Christ, founder of the most oppressive institution in the history of the world.
It's inevitable.
Welcome the twilight of the idols.
