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snip - Adam Kimelman, a third-year College student and chair of the College Republicans, said he supported the sentiment of the demands, but took issue with some aspects of the list. “I agree we should have more black students here, but we can’t put a quota on it, that’s literally unconstitutional,” he said. He also took issue with calling Thomas Jefferson a symbol of white supremacy, and claimed the University wouldn’t take some of the demands seriously. “We could definitely use an amendment to make these things more reasonable,” Kimelman said. One of the demands on the list specifically references...

Only those who are so-called “woke” (I just threw up in my mouth) are deserving of statues in American history. That’s what CNN commentator Angela Rye said during a panel discussion with CNN’s Kate Bolduan. As the nation descends into chaos concerning political commentary over the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia that left scores of people injured and one woman dead, we’re on the discussion of statues. White nationalists descended into the city last Saturday to supposedly protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. Far left counter protesters arrived and skirmishes broke out. It culminated when a...

Like your favorite radio hosts I’m doing a “best of” today. Happy Birthday America! From 2010: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? These founding documents were designed and declared with full knowledge of human nature and complete understanding of the soul’s tendencies. The result was the formation of a more perfect union which has stood the test of time in no small part due to the wisdom of these founders who crafted a near sacred separation of powers within the government they created.  Let us honor their courage, their genius and their foresight. And for our part, let us be ever...

Almost everyone knows Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. But did you know he also wrote a Declaration of Arms? A year prior to Congress’ adoption and ratification of the Declaration of Independence, the members were signing a declaration to pick up arms against the mother country. And Jefferson was again the primary author. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was just 33 years old, the youngest member of Congress. He penned the Declaration of Arms when he was just 32 years old. Jefferson’s eloquence in written expression was apparent to John Adams, who later described him...

The establishment media became upset this weekend after President Donald Trump canceled the “White House Muslim Iftar Dinner tradition started by Thomas Jefferson.” But the media is wrong in every respect. Thomas Jefferson never held any Iftar dinner and only three out of 45 presidents ever hosted one, so there is no such “tradition” to cancel. Amy B. Wang of the Washington Post led the pack with this nonsense that Thomas Jefferson held the “first Iftar dinner” with a June 24 piece entitled, “Trump just ended a long tradition of celebrating Ramadan at the White House.” The often-used claim that Thomas Jefferson...

The establishment media became upset this weekend after President Donald Trump canceled the “White House Muslim Iftar Dinner tradition started by Thomas Jefferson.” But the media is wrong in every respect. Thomas Jefferson never held any Iftar dinner and only three out of 45 presidents ever hosted one, so there is no such “tradition” to cancel. Amy B. Wang of the Washington Post led the pack with this nonsense that Thomas Jefferson held the “first Iftar dinner” with a June 24 piece entitled, “Trump just ended a long tradition of celebrating Ramadan at the White House.” The often-used claim that Thomas Jefferson...

A $35 million restoration of Monticello is underway, but it's what's been buried under a restroom there for nearly 80 years that's been attracting the most attention of late: the bedroom of Sally Hemings, one of President Thomas Jefferson's slaves and the mother of six children who historians suspect were his, the Washington Post reports. The WWII-era bathroom that was apparently built over where Hemings slept, close to Jefferson's own bedroom, has been slowly pulled apart by archaeologists based on coordinates provided by the third president's own grandson. The work is revealing the 18th-century plaster walls and brick floor, and...

A William & Mary student posted two pictures of a Thomas Jefferson statue stained with fake blood and a message reading: “Overseen: TJ caught with the blood of all the people he owned on his hands.”

On Friday, August 13th, President Obama welcomed members of the Muslim community to the White House to celebrate the Islamic holiday of Ramadan with an Iftar banquet — the meal served after the sunrise-to-sunset fast. Ramadan is the ninth month in the Islamic lunar calendar.In the course of his flattering remarks about the great contributions of Muslims to America, the President mentioned the presence at the banquet of two Muslim members of Congress: Andre Carson, Democrat from Indiana, and Keith Ellison, Democrat from Minnesota, the latter of whom took his oath on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Quran, which has...

Thomas Jefferson acquired 530 million acres for $15 million and, under the Constitution, relinquished the vast majority of it to newly created states and their people- and changed the world. Outgoing President Barack Obama has now locked up 553 million acres as national monuments, in disregard of the Constitution and the equal protection of law, leaving western states and their people with burning forests, polluted air, devastated water supplies, blocked off access, underfunded schools and dead communities- and also changed the world.

When Thomas Jefferson crafted the Declaration of Independence, he pointed to “certain unalienable rights” with which we were endowed by our “Creator.” What did he mean when he wrote the phrase “unalienable rights,” and what rights are “unalienable”? Jefferson understood “unalienable rights” as fixed rights given to us by our Creator rather than by government. The emphasis on our Creator is crucial, because it shows that the rights are permanent just as the Creator is permanent. Jefferson’s thought on the source of these rights was impacted by Oxford’s William Blackstone, who described “unalienable rights” as “absolute” rights–showing that they were...

Hundreds of students and faculty at the University of Virginia have asked the school’s president to stop quoting President Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, because of his slave-owning past. The letter garnered 469 signatures before being sent to University President Teresa Sullivan on Friday, The Cavalier Daily reported. It was prompted by an email sent last week by Ms. Sullivan promoting unity in light of Donald Trump’s presidential victory.  “Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and...

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson, then a minister to the French government of Louis XVI, had a concern more intimidating than anything else he’d faced before: the threat of pirates off the coast of North Africa, a region known as the Barbary Coast. These pirates had already taken over two American ships, the Dauphin and the Maria, plundering their goods and taking their crews hostage. Unfortunately, this was a common fate for ships venturing near the area, where the Sahara’s arid coast was divided into four Islamic nation-states. Running west to east were the Barbary nations Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and...

In the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote the following: he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every...

It pays to check those musty old boxes in your attic. An unidentified family in the Deep South made the discovery of a lifetime when they found a letter written by Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in which the third president extols the virtues of American independence and hails victory in the War of 1812. “As in the Revolutionary War, [the British] conquests were never more than of the spot on which their army stood, never extended beyond the range of their cannon shot,” Jefferson wrote in the letter, penned at his Monticello home on Valentine's Day, 1815. "We owe to...

I once admired Jefferson, seeing him as an essentially good, no, great man with one tragic flaw: The writer of the inspiring words “all men are created equal” owned slaves. Now, I see Jefferson as an egregious hypocrite, who willfully betrayed the ideals he espoused. I reached this conclusion only after visiting Monticello, Jefferson’s famous Virginia estate, last month. Previously, I didn't realize the extent of Jefferson’s slave ownership, and I lazily—and ignorantly--excused it as a common ethical blind spot of his time. *Jefferson often denounced slavery. He wrote in 1774, "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object...

Our contemporary American experience seems often Orwellian. We have a Congress that denies our Rights in the name of security. We have a president who not only writes laws with his pen, but is also in the habit of rewriting history to serve his political purposes. Many patriots have expended a great deal of energy this year in the fight to see our Liberty protected and America’s greatness restored. We are all well aware that there are still many struggles ahead and mountains yet to be conquered. But let us be reminded of a hope that is rooted firmly in...

Thomas Jefferson famously adapted key passages of John Locke’s Second Treatise in his draft Declaration of Independence. An 18th century gentleman could hardly regard himself as learned without the ability to quote a few Lockean passages from memory. Yet, what of the average colonial? Books were expensive imports. How were the yeomanry educated well enough in Lockean concepts to readily understand and accept this radical document, the Declaration of Independence? Through newspapers. Like modern Americans, our colonial forebears were also political junkies. Freewheeling editorials, letters to the editor that criticized parliamentary and colonial governments were standing features of public life....

27 Things That Every American Should Know About The National Debt The U.S. government has stolen $15,876,457,645,132.66 from future generations of Americans, and we continue to add well over a hundred million dollars to that total every single day day. The 15 trillion dollar binge that we have been on over the past 30 years has fueled the greatest standard of living the world has ever seen, but this wonderful prosperity that we have been enjoying has been a lie. It isn't real. We have been living way above our means for so long that we do not have...

"The conclusion then, is, that neither the representatives of a nation, nor the whole nation itself assembled, can validly engage debts beyond what they may pay in their own time." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:457, Papers 15:398n "Then I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead...