Capital City plan to remove Andrew Jackson’s statue a big mistake

• The City of Jackson is reportedly preparing to remove the statue of Andrew Jackson, its namesake. Auditor Shad White says the move is part of an extremist effort to erase history.

Yesterday the Clarion Ledger reported the City of Jackson plans to remove the statue of Andrew Jackson that currently sits in front of City Hall.

This is nuts. The city is named Jackson, after all. If Jackson is such a reprehensible figure, why stop with the statue? Why not rename the city? Why not rename Washington, DC, for that matter? And then tear down the Washington Monument? Where does the cultural destruction end?

For those who will say Jackson did bad things, please name someone through history who is perfect. I know of only one man who was without blemish, and he lived 2,000 years ago. Even Civil Rights heroes had their flaws, because we are all human.

I also imagine that the Jackson-hating liberals cannot name the important political, military, and societal contributions Jackson made—the reasons the city bears his name. They would have us forget his investigations of corruption and the new standards for tracking taxpayer money he instituted. They would blot out his initiatives to cut waste and the fact that he balanced the federal budget for the first time ever. They would have us ignore his stand against the Bank of the United States when there were allegations that only the rich and connected benefitted from the Banks’ loans. 

The truth is, I seriously doubt these liberals have taken the opportunity to weigh Jackson’s legacy, if they can even describe it accurately. 

Of course, the liberals who seek to take Jackson’s statue out to the dumpster probably think themselves perfect—that history will look back and find no fault among these pure-hearted public servants. No flaw among them, they say. 

These are the same folks who tell us men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports or that children should be given irreversible hormone treatment. And now they’ve come to tell us who should survive their barn fire of history.  

The effort to wipe away the memory of historical figures in our nation’s history is just Cultural Marxism. When Mao brought his communist Cultural Revolution to China, his followers set out to destroy the Four Olds (“old ideas, old customs, old culture and old habits”). The communists renamed roads, destroyed historical sites, and even exhumed the bodies of controversial figures from their graves. It got violent.

We need to stop this before it gets out of hand. Especially given our state’s laws. Historical statues like this cannot be moved except under specific circumstances under our laws. The Clarion Ledger’s reporting suggests the city has already decided to move the statue without taking these steps and considering the historical implications of moving a statue of the city’s namesake. As State Auditor, I should point out that the city should be careful about using taxpayer resources to move the statue if they haven’t followed the law.

As we wait to see what the city will do, let this stand as proof: if you ever heard someone say Mississippi’s left-leaning folks are a bunch of moderates, you haven’t been paying attention. They are extremists.