On Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” the host discusses how George Washington University is mulling removing statue of America’s first president in order to please students who claim to be threatened by the mere image of George Washington.
Students at GW University now want to get rid of George Washington. For those of you who don’t know G.W. University stands for George Washington University, and they want to get rid of their namesake and their mascot. This is the majority of students here. There was a vote that was conducted that fifty-four percent of students at G.W. want to get rid of George Washington. How about George Washington High School in northern California? They now want to get rid of a mural that depicts George Washington. And the way they did it is so insidious. It’s just that creeping, tyrannical, leftism that seems like it’s nice and orderly, so they mask all of their totally destructive instincts with this sort of orderliness of bureaucracy and meetings. They didn’t just take a sledgehammer to it -no. They formed a working group. Oh, it’s a working group, there’s a committee and they’re going to meet and then they’re going to decide to take a wrecking ball to a work of art and a piece of history.
The working group decided that a mural of George Washington the founder and father of our country at a high school called George Washington High School quote, “traumatizes students and community members.” It doesn’t just offend them it traumatizes them.
This is what we have been seeing increasingly for years now, and what I see at these universities when I go and give speeches there. They are conflating speech with violence. So, it’s this work of art and history. History is not simply offensive, not simply unpleasant, not simply unappreciated – no. It is traumatizing, which is to say it is committing an act of violence that has physical repercussions on students. And so, if the school is going to protect the student’s safety, their physical well-being, then they have to paint over the artwork. Very clever strategy because what the school should say is, we’re not going to erase art in history because you don’t like it – because some mob is demanding it.
What is happening, in reality, is a mob is demanding that we burn books, burn history, burn artwork and burn paintings. But the way the left organizes it is they say, it’s not a mob it’s a working group and we’re not destroying art because it offends us, we’re destroying art because it traumatizes us. It committed violence on us, so we now will commit violence on it.
The spokesman for the administration of the school district said, “at its conclusion, the group voted, and the majority recommended that the life of Washington mural be archived and removed because the mural does not represent the school district’s values.” Then what values does the school district hold?
George Washington, the father of our country, created the greatest country in the history of the world. A country premised on the idea that all men are created equal that we’re endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That, that man and what that man established and presided over and fought for and won, has led to the most just, most equitable, most prosperous and most charitable country in the history of the world ever, at any time. Certainly now, by orders of magnitude.
If the school district doesn’t stand for that what do, they stand for? What are their principles? They apparently oppose life liberty in the pursuit of happiness. They oppose charity. They oppose justice. They oppose equality. What do they stand for? If we were to give this school district the benefit of the doubt, it seems that they just don’t know anything about history. They don’t know anything about George Washington or about what he stands for. But that indictment is just as bad because they’re a school district. They are supposed to educate students but they don’t know anything themselves. They don’t know anything about history.