Twisted Monuments For A New America
Why is the state of New Jersey building public statues of drag queen prostitutes?
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Editor’s note: Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and he served as United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior in the Trump administration. This article is an excerpt from his new book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart, which is available now for pre-order and will be publicly released on April 23rd.
Follow Jeremy on X at @realJeremyCarl and find his Substack at The Course of Empire.
We live in an age in which America’s monuments are being torn down.
But, amidst the historical wreckage, there are some new monuments rising. Perhaps the ultimate expression of the Left’s desire to humiliate white Americans while bestowing esteem upon the most deranged people imaginable, is their dedication of monuments to people such as Marsha P. Johnson (born Malcolm Michaels Jr.), a violent, mentally ill, transgender sex worker. One of these monuments, in a deeply symbolic move, was originally supposed to replace a statue dedicated to Columbus.
That monument, still in the planning stages as of publication, is set to be built in Johnson’s hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey. A petition in favor of the statue collected more than 165,000 signatures before the city announced it would be built—though ultimately they decided on a different location, “saving” Columbus, at least for now. Columbus, of course, “discovered” America, as his voyages led to the age of European settlement in the Americas and the birth of the society we know today.
His birthday is still a national holiday, despite the continuous howls of the Left to change it to “Indigenous People’s Day,” a holiday first born at a United Nations Conference in 1977 and first celebrated in the United States in far-left Berkeley, California, in 1992. As Trump noted at a 2020 rally, “Sadly, in recent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy. . . . These extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discoveries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions.”
When people protest against Columbus, they protest against the creation of modern Western societies, which would have been impossible without his voyages. They thus protest against themselves. Like so many leftists, they’re sawing off the civilizational limb they have heretofore been sitting on. And they do so in favor of people such as Johnson, whose significance is anti-civilizational.
As I wrote about the gender cult in another context, “[T]he absurdity is the point. The deviance is the point. To have someone suffering from florid mental illness shaming and mocking normality is the point.”
In 2020, Johnson had a fountain named for “her” in Manhattan, and subsequently the East River Park — a substantial seven-acre space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — was also named for “her.” Not content with that recognition, a group of transgender activists illegally installed a bust of Johnson in Christopher Street Park in New York City, across from the famous Stonewall Inn, the site of riots by patrons against a police raid that is seen as the birth of the modern gay rights movement. The bust, in a surprise only to those who do not understand leftist governance, was allowed to remain for at least a year and a half before going on exhibit at a prestigious city venue. Imagine how long a statue of Columbus would be allowed to stay unauthorized in a New York City park.
And who was Marsha P. Johnson (born Malcolm Michaels) you might ask? He was a black drag queen who was evidently known within his circles for cultivating an unusual look and having a charismatic personality. Along with a few others, he briefly started a ramshackle group house to take in gay street kids. That’s about it for redeeming virtues.
He was present at the Stonewall Riots, the birthplace of the modern “gay rights” movement, yet even assuming one found that praiseworthy, he was not one of the instigators. (As a side note, the original statues commemorating the Stonewall Riots, placed near the Stonewall Inn, were created by noted sculptor George Segal. Segal’s sculptures were usually white, a result of his use of plaster, a choice of material that would lead to Segal being attacked for racial exclusion.
Black plaster matters, I guess.
Johnson described his life in New York City as having “been built around sex and gay liberation and being a drag queen,” as well as engaging in prostitution. He founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and established a communal house where twenty of them, including some young street gays Johnson took in, lived, and presumably turned tricks. “Some overdosed, some were stabbed by johns,” noted one account of the house. Of course, as Johnson never paid rent, the place was a dangerous dive that lacked electricity. By his own account, during his “career” in street prostitution (during which he acquired HIV and no doubt spread it to many of his customers), he had several attempts made on his life, with at least eight nervous breakdowns and more than one hundred arrests. Not content to live on the margins (to put it politely) of mainstream society, he was banned from several gay clubs for his violent outbursts.
One acquaintance in the local gay community called Marsha a “bully underneath that soft sweet manner.” According to others who knew Johnson, he “become a very nasty, vicious man, looking for fights,” and was described as schizophrenic. He regularly picked fights with police and was frequently cited for violently assisting arrests. He would sometimes walk the streets naked before being hospitalized for mental breakdowns.
What can we say about a society that elevates a man with virtually no redeeming virtues to a place of honor while denigrating Columbus, Washington, and others who created this country? We can say it is institutionally racist against whites and intrinsically depraved—two phenomena that are hardly uncorrelated.
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Let us agree that when a human in the throes of delusion decides that they are not the sex (of which there are two) defined by their DNA, that we shall anoint such as “it”.
Let us also agree to anoint a plurality of “its” as informally as “its” or, formally, as “those goddamned freaks”.
Just ruminating….
In Upside Down World, the worst of the worst can be idolized and memorialized and thugs like George Floyd can be elevated to sainthood and buried in a gold coffin. Stop the world I would like to get off now. Please.