“Fox & Friends” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy is upset that she was made to feel “ashamed” and “guilty” when she visited Monticello, the home of late President Thomas Jefferson, and was told that Jefferson was a slaveholder.
Campos-Duffy’s fellow co-host, Pete Hegseth, began the whining by claiming the “whole tone” at Monticello has now turned to Jefferson’s owning of slaves:
“It’s overwhelmingly negative! You go to visit the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and you learn about what a terrible person Thomas Jefferson was.”
And then Campos-Duffy joined the conversation:
“I visited many of these homes. And that is definitely what I picked up from all of this, that there is a reorienting, reconstructing of the history to basically make sure that the idea that they had slaves is on the same level as what they did for our country.”
But she was far from finished, adding:
“There are slaves across human history. I get that. It’s a terrible history we should talk about but we should not feel guilty or ashamed of our leaders when we go and visit the people who brought us the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. You leave feeling that way.”
Co-host Joey Jones then added his voice to the matter:
“These were great men as far as their ideas go but they were able to build this on the backs of slaves and we honor that. And we talk about that. That’s different than re-writing the importance of Jefferson, the importance of Washington or whoever it may be. And why have Monticello at all if you’re only going to use it for grievance?”
All of this, Campos-Duffy interjected, is part of a plan by the left to rewrite history:
“Where’s all this coming from? The homes of these presidents are being populated — this is a very diabolical plan on the part of the left. So what they’ve done is they’ve taken their donors on the left and they’ve populated the boards of these estates with leftists.”
Yes, let’s tell our children what a great man Thomas Jefferson was, but not that he owned slaves. They don’t need to know that the man who wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” was, in a very real sense, a hypocrite. Better to just let them think Tom was a great guy and not explore the fact that he likely had children by at least one of the women he owned as a piece of property.
Conservatives are truth deniers who want to pretend the United States has never done anything wrong. But that’s not accurate. And if Rachel Campos-Duffy doesn’t like that fact, then she needs to stay away from Monticello, grab a fluffy blanket, and go find her safe space.
Here’s the video: