At Montpelier, the home of James Madison, a massive political reeducation effort financed by leftist billionaire David Rubenstein has made it “All About Slavery, All of the Time.” Madison’s role as the key architect of the Constitution and defender of its provisions in the Federalist Papers is given little attention.
The race hustlers on the board in charge of the fourth president’s home have proposed a national slavery monument on the foundings father’s plantation.
His home serves as the housing for what amounts to a “one-hour Critical Race Theory disguised as a tour,” said one disappointed visitor. “I was kind of thinking we’d be hearing more about the Constitution,” said another. “But everything here is about slavery.”
Apparently, it isn’t woke enough for Montpelier to acknowledge that fact the Madison owned slaves. It is necessary to impugn everything Madison was and did because of that fact. Notwithstanding the fact that Madison was the man most singularly responsible for creating the form of government that led to blacks in America becoming the freest and most prosperous in the world.
More wealth has been created for black Americans because of the Constitution’s brilliance than can be summed up in a tired virtue-signaling monument funded by a left-wing globalist.
It is the reason why refugees from Ethiopia and Uganda and the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo come to this country and why few, if any, American blacks have any interest in relocating to places like Ethiopia and Uganda and the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo—where everyone is a de facto slave. Because in those countries the government is unrestrained. There is no Constitution worthy of the name. Only the arbitrary authority of the ruling junta or Maximum Leader—though the latter is now often referred to as “president,” a term used by the founders to signify an entirely different kind of office.
The U.S. Constitution was itself not only entirely different, it was unprecedented. For the first time in history, the rights of the people in relation to the government were codified. Was it perfect? Of course not. But it contained within it the mechanism of continuous, orderly improvement—exactly as Madison intended. That is a story of far deeper, more profound significance than the fact that Madison owned slaves. The descendants of James Madison should tell the country you’re welcome.
Our founding was orders-of-magnitude better than anything the world had ever seen before. A world that—prior to the Constitution—knew mostly rule by kings and other autocrats; that is to say, the rule of force, arbitrarily applied, and the people without recourse, except to violence.
And that is exactly what happened in countries such as France, which did not have the good fortune of having a giant such as Madison among them. France didn’t have slavery. But it did have the guillotine and the Reign of Terror.
Americans were lucky—because of Madison. He gave us a system of checks and balances, of delegated powers and federalism, ingeniously designed to keep the power of the government from enslaving everyone—as has almost invariably been the fate of every country that didn’t have the benefit of a Madison and a Constitution.
But never mind all of that. The man owned slaves. It must be obsessed over, hammered into the heads of all who visit Montpelier, so as to assure they leave the place thinking that’s all there was to the man, who must be made despicable so that the Constitution can be rendered disreputable.
“The home of the Constitution should be the place that recognizes the contributions of the enslaved communities across America,” says one of the new trustees of Montpelier, Rev. Larry Walker. “We want to make this a national monument to the ‘Invisible Founders,’” whom Walker believes are the ones truly responsible for the Constitution and all that followed from it.
Having such a man as a trustee of Montpelier is not unlike putting Ralph Nader in charge of the Corvette Museum, in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Thus, rather than exhibits explaining Madison’s role as America’s preeminent political scientist—the man who put into practice the noble sentiments expressed by his mentor, Thomas Jefferson—visitors to Montpelier are shepherded from one race-grievance diorama to the next. These include “The Mere Distinction of Color,” “Slavery and the Constitution,” and an interactive “Slavery and the Presidency” display. Push the button to see which ones owned slaves. Never mind what they did to free us all.
The wokeness even extends to the bookstore, where such titles as Anti-racist Baby and She Persisted—by Chelsea Clinton!—are on display. What either has to do with Madison, Montpelier, or the Constitution is hard to divine.
But that is just the point: to get people who visit Madison’s home to forget about the Constitution by refusing to teach them anything about it; to favor feeling guilty about it via the imputed, intergenerational guilt of the men who were responsible for it.
The object is to accuse them of responsibility for everything wrong done to black people while giving them no credit for anything they accomplished that was great—such as the country that has produced more freedom than any people have ever enjoyed, anywhere, ever.
Author Doug MacKinnon, who wrote The 56 —a book about the signers of the Declaration of Independence—says “these people are doing what any totalitarian regime would do . . . they want to create a whole new narrative not based on reality. As they say, the victor gets to write the history and now our history is being rewritten right before our very eyes.”
Interestingly—speaking of history—there is also the history of the man behind the remaking of Montpelier into a shrine to wokeness. What is David Rubenstein’s history as chairman of the Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity funds in the world, with an estimated $376 billion in assets under management? Among other things, Carlyle functions as a kind of plantation owner for mobile homes, accused of rent-gouging the low-income residents who live there, so as to profit off their suffering.
According to an article in the New Yorker, Carlyle “. . .began buying mobile-home parks, first in Florida and later in California, focusing on areas where technology companies had pushed up the cost of living.” This, in turn, drove up the rent on the land mobile homes occupied. Many of the residents could not afford the upticked rent—or “chattel loans”—needed to remain there, or the cost of moving their trailers elsewhere. So they were moved into homelessness, by billionaire equity king David Rubenstein, who never wrote a Constitution, defended the rights it enshrined so eloquently (or even at all), and didn’t serve two terms as president of his country.
He hopes, though, that the $10 million grant he gave to remake Montpelier will make people forget all about that—by making them obsess about something else.