The Secular Taliban, as my friend, Rees Lloyd, has called the left for decades, has finally come for William Penn, the man for whom Pennsylvania is named. Penn's surname is combined with the word for forest or woods, or sylvan to arrive at the name Pennsylvania. Voilà et voilà.
Philadelphia, P.A., is where the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776. Pennsylvania was the site of the first and second Continental Congresses in 1774 and 1775 respectively, and where the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787.
You don't get much more foundational than the role Pennsylvania — and William Penn — played in America's founding and the enduring religious freedom that he fought for.
Penn didn't name the original American colony for himself. He called it New Wales. But the English King paid homage to Penn and renamed it to, well, you know.
Now, William Penn's statue and the first house this Founder lived in, a slate-roofed jewel of a home, is in the way of Maoist historical cleansing. Milt wrote about this earlier.
The old Quaker, who left England due to religious persecution and who established freedom of religion in his new home, is now being canceled because he's just not the right religion. In the fullness of time, Penn, the Quaker, is simply not Native-American-y enough.
Like their tyrannical Maoist brothers, the Afghanistan Taliban, Pennsylania's Secular Taliban must scrub history of anything that disagrees with them. The leftists call this process of scrubbing the "Welcome Park" of Penn's visage and house "rehabilitating" history.
The news media use this noun without flinching.
Rehabilitating.
If you doubt that's what's happening in America, you'll need to watch/listen to my interview with Mao's Cultural Revolution survivor Xi Van Fleet. See the video of our chat below.
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But there's another aspect to this story that needs to be considered. Why is it that in this frenetic wish to scrub history in America never comes for this guy? In all of the civil unrest since 2016 — the Antifa and Black Lives Matter efforts to rip this country in half, the people who have aimed their bile at Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington — yet they have never come for this guy:
Curious. Why not this guy, again? pic.twitter.com/JGK3TioZWC
— Victoria Taft, The Adult in the Room, FITF Squad (@VictoriaTaft) January 9, 2024
As I've wondered many times, why is there never any discussion about scrubbing the history of this failed man, depicted in this Seattle statue of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the communist Bolshevik Revolution, who launched a revolution responsible for the murders of 100,000,000 souls in the 20th Century that continues today? How is it that this Seattle statue still stands? A statue of the man who represented the complete opposite of free markets of ideas and trade and who represents the nihilistic atheism of the left still stands.
His statue sits unmolested in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, a relic of an old man's whim who bought the statue on a lark. And yet through all these years, there's never been serious discussion of removing this statue that is so antithetical to American values and its founding.
There's your sign.
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