Woke Montpelier leaders envision massive land grab in Virginia

The left-wing cabal that engineered a hostile takeover of James Madison’s Montpelier property is formally planning a large “heritage space and path” that encompasses an space 70% of the scale of Rhode Island.

The particular person employed to plan this unprecedented mission additionally will likely be tasked with an academic position, not on Madison or the Structure, however “to plan and implement instructional applications that handle the legacies of slavery and racism in our state and nation.”

Somebody ought to inform Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears to ensure none of this infringes on property rights and to make sure no Virginia state funding goes to pushing misnamed “antiracism” nostrums such because the discredited 1619 Challenge or important race idea.

In accordance with Montpelier’s job description for a memorialization mission director, the mission, referred to as the Arc of Enslaved Communities, “is an 850-square-mile heritage space radiating from the backbone of the Southwest Mountains right into a historic area of central Virginia.”

The area, says the job itemizing, “encompassed one of many highest concentrations of enslaved People through the youth of america.” That’s uncontroversial. The subsequent sentence, although, is extraordinarily doubtful: “These enslaved communities fashioned the socioeconomic, cultural, and mental spine of an ecosystem that produced, amongst different issues,” the Structure (Montpelier’s Madison) and the Declaration of Independence (Monticello’s Thomas Jefferson).

As I reported within the Washington Examiner journal earlier this month, the unique concept was to show the complete area right into a United Nations World Heritage web site. Generally, UNESCO heritage websites contain “the switch of duty from personal possession to native and territorial governments.” Moreover, “identification and delineation of properties can contain a spread of authorized and monetary implications, in addition to technical complexities, and may doubtlessly elevate a lot of cultural, social, political, financial, human rights, and spiritual points.”

And a 2011 Washington College College of Legislation paper famous that this system “could have created a tradition of financial and political quagmires.”

It’s not clear whether or not the UNESCO concept remains to be half of the present “heritage web site” planning, however the very concept of a heritage space so large is worrisome.

In the meantime, the unusual declare about enslaved communities forming the mental background for the Declaration and Structure was posited in a 2021 Harvard discussion board by now-Montpelier Board Chairman James French, who engineered the takeover of Madison’s property basis. There, Montpelier archaeologist Matt Reeves defined his fascinating however unproven idea, which Reeves mentioned they introduced from Africa, referred to as “black engineering.” French launched from there into an assumption that one way or the other the enslaved communities offered the mental underpinnings for the Structure.

French mentioned of Madison that the slaves have been “the individuals upon whom he relied for all the things, together with his concepts, his sustenance, his wealth, his energy, and all the things. And that is really disputed information now, and that dispute is revealed by the archaeology.”

“It’s not simply labor that flows from the enslaved individuals to Madison, but it surely’s tradition. It’s concepts. It’s mind.” All of his, French mentioned, comes from the “floor truthing.” Which is why, he says, he needs a behemoth heritage web site to cowl floor all the best way from Fredericksburg to the mountains and again to Richmond.

As French himself repeatedly describes it, he’s engaged in energy politics, maybe together with plans for what may very well be a large land seize — all in service of a leap of logic so large that it’s nonsense.

Virginia had higher watch out for his plans. And the Nationwide Belief for Historic Preservation, which owns Montpelier, ought to rethink whether or not this hyper-ambitious nonsense is one thing it needs to assist.