James Madison stays in the news, but one report is off key. (Two columns, with full pieces embedded in the headlines.)
Story about Madison’s flute (and twerking) is really less than meets the eye (Sept. 29):
There’s too much of a big to-do about the musician Lizzo playing founding father James Madison’s crystal flute. For the record, Lizzo plays it well (twerking aside), but she is absolutely not the first to play it — despite her claims and the misreporting of numerous news outlets.
I myself heard it played, about 10 paces from where I sat, on Madison’s 250th birthday on March 16, 2001. But I wasn’t special. Several hundred people were there with me, listening as well. The Washington Post reported on it at the time…..
The wokesters at Montpelier dream of an 850-square-mile land grab (Sept. 26):
The left-wing cabal that engineered a hostile takeover of James Madison’s Montpelier estate is officially planning a massive “heritage area and trail” that encompasses an area 70% of the size of Rhode Island.
The person hired to plan this unprecedented project also will be tasked with an educational role, not on Madison or the Constitution, but “to plan and implement educational programs that address the legacies of slavery and racism in our state and nation.”
Someone should tell Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears to make sure none of this infringes on property rights and to ensure no Virginia state funding goes to pushing misnamed “antiracism” nostrums such as the discredited 1619 Project or critical race theory.
According to Montpelier’s job description for a memorialization project director , the project, called the Arc of Enslaved Communities, “is an 850-square-mile heritage area radiating from the spine of the Southwest Mountains into a historic region of central Virginia.”…
As I reported in the Washington Examiner magazine earlier this month, the original idea was to turn the entire region into a United Nations World Heritage site . Sometimes, UNESCO heritage sites involve “the transfer of responsibility from private ownership to local and territorial governments.” Furthermore, “identification and delineation of properties can involve a range of legal and financial implications, as well as technical complexities, and can potentially raise a number of cultural, social, political, economic, human rights, and religious issues.”….
