The other day, I wrote about Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s new, Confederate-monuments-defending appointment to the Virginia Board of Historic Resources. Among other things, Youngkin’s appointee, Ann McLean, claimed that Thomas Jefferson “really loved many of the people that he cared for and his laborers”; claimed that criticism of Jefferson is “going back to Karl Marx”; cited a debunked book about Jefferson by “Christian nationalist” David Barton; etc. So this morning, McLean went on right-wing talk radio (WRVA) and had some more, er, “interesting” things to day, this time about the push by Sen. Tim Kaine and Rep. Don Beyer to end Arlington House’s “Robert E. Lee Memorial” designation. According to McLean:
- Robert E. Lee was a “morally fine human being who understood the constitution of 1787.”
- The constitution was “broken when Lincoln called up 75,000 troops to fight against secession.” And, she added, “secession was not treason…each state was allowed to secede, we all had seceded from Britain…each state was like its own country, so Lee considered Virginia his country.”
- “Invasion, just like we see Russia invading Ukraine, invading a new territory was wrong. And so many people want to just flatten the whole Civil War to slavery, and of course we know slavery is not good. But I think…slavery would have been outlawed in the South within 5 or 10 years, but they wanted to do it on their time.”
Again, Youngkin appointed this Confederacy apologist – who among other things minimizes the importance of slavery and compares the United States under Abraham Lincoln to Russia under Vladimir Putin – to the Virginia Board of Historic Resources! So next time you read some idiot “journalist” blabbering on about how Youngkin’s some sort of “sane” “moderate” who’s not Trump-like at all, just remember that he’s made numerous extreme appointments to his administration (e.g., Elizabeth Schultz, Andrew Wheeler, Dr. Marty Makary, Colin Greene, Casey Flores, etc.), including this one!
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