Liberals Want to Tear Down the Jefferson Memorial!

Tuesday - August 15, 2017

RUSH: Audio sound bite 4 and, in order, this is Charlie Rose and Al Sharpton last night on Charlie Rose’s PBS show, and this is their discussion about getting rid of the Jefferson Memorial.

ROSE: (whispering) Thomas Jefferson had slaves.

SHARPTON: Had slaves, and children with the slaves.

ROSE: Exactly. Should they take down the Jefferson Memorial?

SHARPTON: I think that people need to understand when people that were in enslaved and robbed of even the right to marry — and had forced sex with their slave masters — this is personal. This is not some kind of removed discussion from us. Our families were victims of this. Public monuments are supported by public funds. You’re asking me to subsidize the insult of my family.

ROSE: Then I repeat: Thomas Jefferson had slaves.

SHARPTON: And I repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who has had that kind of background.

RUSH: Way to go. Charlie, who are you trying to impress here? Why are you even needed on this show? You don’t even need to be there. You know, just turn the segment over to Al Sharpton, tell him he’s got a minute and then reclaim your show. Charlie, what the hell is going on here to allow this kind of tripe, unchallenged? Not even make Sharpton explain this lunacy that he’s talking about here? Remember, folks, we can’t change what happened. Getting rid of the Jefferson Memorial…

Thomas Jefferson was one of the founders of this country, and you see what this really is about here? This is about not just delegitimizing Donald Trump, and it’s not just about getting rid of him. These people are on a tear to delegitimize this entire country, as part of their effort to transform it and — dare I say — overthrow it however they might try to make that happen. But it is absurd — and during all of this, what I notice is that people on our side of the aisle, we kind of chuckle. “Ha-ha-ha. Listen to Reverend Sharpton, he’s off on another wild tangent.”

And nobody stands up and responds to this stuff in any kind of way in the public square that defends it. And it’s as though if we let the kids have their say and get it out of their system, it will eventually go away. I think we have learned that this isn’t gonna go away. These are people that cannot be mollified. These people are gonna have to be defeated, folks. And I think that’s what a lot of people don’t have the stomach for. I mean, the idea of tearing down the Jefferson Memorial?

This stupid reasoning that Sharpton comes up with, that he somehow has some personal involvement in what Thomas Jefferson did, he’s got some personal stake? His life has been negatively influenced because of Thomas Jefferson? And these people don’t even take the time to explain the contributions of Thomas Jefferson and the other founders in creating the single greatest place for human beings to reside in the history of this planet.

We’re all a product of our times. But even with slavery, if you go back (and we discussed it on this program countless times), the founders knew that it was a deep problem. They had a compromise they had to make. Boiling this down to it’s simplest essence… It’s always dangerous when you do that, I acknowledge. But the people of the original 13 colonies wanted to get out from underneath the boot of the king in England. They wanted to found a nation based on religious liberty and universal liberty. They had to be together to do this.

There had to be a union. There had to be a united front organized around the principles of independence rooted in liberty, religious liberty, and otherwise. Well, that included some of the Southern colonies. And slavery came up, and it was a compromise issue in order for the union to be created. But if you take the time to read some of the founding documents, some of the history, you’ll find that many of the founders from the North were very uncomfortable with this. They didn’t like it.

They weren’t crazy about it, didn’t want any part of it, but they had to make a compromise for it. Constitution of this country and other founding documents were set up so as to allow amendments and change and accommodations, and that’s exactly what happened. Eventually this country eliminated slavery — and, in part, went to war to do so, with over 500,000 lives lost. That feat and that achievement and that accomplishment is now ignored, discounted as irrelevant and unreal. Because if they acknowledge it, then they have to admit that what they’re complaining about was dealt with.

And their whole argument resides on the notion that it hasn’t changed, that there still is, for all intents and purposes, slavery. There still is racism. There still is bigotry. And now it’s been joined by a bunch of Nazis and Klan members — and the Klan was all Democrats, and the segregationists in the South were all Democrats. I’d like to ask a question about this, for those of you on the left. You want to tear down the statues of Robert E. Lee and you want to tear down, now, the Jefferson Memorial if you’re Al Sharpton.

But you want to get rid of all of these monuments that have been erected to people and events in our nation’s past, tied to the Civil War, which you find horribly, horribly offensive and you want to get rid of all vestiges. Well, at what point are you gonna realize that you also have to disband the Democrat Party? If you’re gonna really succeed and follow through to the end on this mission, you’ve got to get rid of the Democrat Party, and you have got to wipe a bunch of people out of it. You gotta get rid of J. William Fulbright.

You gotta get rid of all those Southern governors. You gotta get rid of all those Southern police chiefs. You got to tear down every highway in West Virginia named after Robert Byrd and rename it, because he was a Grand Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan. So just how far are you leftists prepared to go here in carrying out your cleansing mission to eliminate all reminders of our horrid, racist past? And then after you do this, could you please tell me how the lives of all of you people are going to magically be improved?

Could you explain to me how, at that fateful day when you have eliminated every monument, when you have changed every name of a building and highway — and there’s hundreds of them named after Robert Byrd in West Virginia alone. After you have thrown Bull Connor and J. William Fulbright and Algore’s dad out of the Democrat Party, and then to be intellectually pure you have to admit the Democrat Party from the founding days of the country were the people that did this.

And yet they are your party today. That’s where you vote. So at some point are you going to have to eliminate the Democrat Party? If you do, if you cleanse all of these uncomfortable and painful reminders — the statues are down, the roads are renamed, all of these monuments are gone — how is your life on that day made better? How is your standard of living impacted? How is your overall degree of happiness measured?

And I guarantee you they haven’t thought this far because that’s not what any of this is about. We’re dealing hip deep with an unhinged irrationality that has the full-fledged support of the American media, which remains the organizing power today that projects the power of the American and the worldwide left.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Calvin in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I’m glad you called. How are you doing, Calvin?

CALLER: I’m doing great.

RUSH: Well, good. Thank you. What’s up?

CALLER: Well, it’s an honor to talk to you. I’ll get right to my point.

RUSH: Appreciate that.

CALLER: I have recently changed my mind about the removal of Confederate monuments. I mean, I understand how they could be offensive. However, when I hear someone like Al Sharpton talking about removing the Thomas Jefferson Memorial?

RUSH: That’s predictable. It’s Charlie Rose not objecting to it that, to me, is the news.

CALLER: Don’t you think that that puts us in the same bucket with the ISIS thugs that are destroying thousand-year-old artifacts because they don’t agree with what they might have done a thousand years ago?

RUSH: Which we, by the way, condemned when they did it. That’s not what ISIS says is —

CALLER: We condemned that.

RUSH: Can I go back to something else you said, Calvin? I think there’s a very interesting and teachable moment here in something you said. You said you used to be sympathetic to the concept of tearing down and getting rid of these statues because you —

CALLER: Correct.

RUSH: — didn’t like that it offended anybody. Don’t misunderstand tone of my voice, and you’re not gonna have time to answer before the break, so I’m gonna hold you through the break, so don’t panic that you’re running out of time here. I want you to think about the question during the break. I want to know, why is it just because somebody is offended, we have to take down statues? Or just because somebody is offended, we have to do anything? Why is it the offended, no matter how few of them there are, always must be acknowledged?