NYC Mayor Wants to Remove Jefferson Statue

By: John Semmens

Mayor Bill de Blasio has asked the City's Public Design Commission to authorize the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson from City Hall’s Council chambers where it has stood for the past 187 years.

“It's not just the fact that Jefferson owned slaves,” de Blasio argued. “It's also the insidiously anti-social phrase 'unalienable rights' that he snuck into the Declaration of Independence that undermine the power of the people to democratically replace individualism with collectivism. As this past two years of pandemic should have taught us, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness conflict with the social discipline required to protect the public health. We shouldn't be honoring a man who urged Americans to resist government authority because it interfered with their individual rights. In the socially progress America we are building there is no such thing as individual rights.”

The Mayor suggested that “the spot vacated by the removal of Jefferson's statue could be filled with a statue of someone like Fidel Castro. He was a man that tolerated no opposition to his drive to build socialism in Cuba. Seeing such a statue would provide a more appropriate model to guide the City Council toward the kind of transformation of society that former President Obama envisioned and that current President Biden is now trying to implement as he replaces the stagnant obsolescence of legislative debate and lawmaking with the efficiency of governance by executive order.”