To residents of New Orleans and the state, Mayor Mitch Landrieu is responsible for the purging of history which will soon take place in the Big Easy, just as the New Orleans City Council approved Landrieu’s plan last week to remove four historical monuments. Landrieu, though, acts more as a prop it seems when it comes to removing all symbols related to the South and the Confederacy.
During the vote to remove the monuments, New Orleans City Councilwoman Latoya Cantrell said the movement to remove monuments did not come from the ground up, rather it came directly from Landrieu’s office. The monuments were pre-picked by Landrieu and it entirely unclear how the mayor actually chose which monuments should go.
Sources close to the Hayride say Landrieu’s call for monuments to be removed was not simply a reaction to the Charleston AME Church shooting, but rather a well-planned and well-organized demand.
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| General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard who advocated for increased civil rights and suffrage for recently freed slaves. |
Back in June, when Landrieu called for the monuments to be removed, immediately following was a protest rally at Robert E. Lee Circle where protesters burned the Confederate flag. Coincidentally, members of the Trilateral Commission of New Orleans, which is made up of multiple social justice advocacy groups, spoke at the flag-burning rally.
Besides the NAACP, one of the groups involved with the Trilateral Commission of New Orleans and the protest was the National Action Network, which was founded in 1991 Rev. Al Sharpton, the notorious race-baiting liberal. Sharpton has become known for perpetually running to the scenes of racial tensions across the country and drumming up controversy among local residents. Sharpton’s National Action Network, however, is certainly not the only national, elite organization involved in Landrieu’s monument removal.
The global bastion-of-liberal-thought organization, the Trilateral Commission, has been wildly pushing the narrative that New Orleans must remove monuments to shed its racist history. (The Trilateral Commission of New Orleans seems to be a smaller sect of the global Trilateral Commission.) Aspen Institute President Walter Isaacson is a member, as is New York Times writer David Brooks.
And oddly enough, both Isaacson and Brooks wrote pieces explaining why it was extremely important for monuments to be removed in New Orleans. Isaacson actually wrote a few pieces, which the Times Picayune and New Orleans Advocate published. Brooks’ piece on New Orleans monuments appeared in the New York Times shortly after Landrieu’s call for monument removal.
Brooks and Isaacson’s pro-monument removal op-ed pieces ran on the same exact day in the New York Times and the Times Picayune.
Isaacson also has very close ties to Landrieu. The former Time magazine editor was hand-picked by Landrieu to serve on the city’s Tricentennial Committee. Why would Landrieu be following a “pathway” for monument removal outlined by Brooks and Isaacson if this issue came from the grassroots like Democrats have continued to claim in the debate?
Besides Isaacson and Brooks, other very prominent liberals who sit on the Trilateral Commission, include former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell.
The New Orleans media has made the removal of monuments seem like an issue that came from the residents up to Landrieu’s office. When, in actuality, it came down directly from the Landrieu administration with the help of powerful voices of well-connected, liberal elites who foisted their politically correct worldview onto the residents of a historically-rich city.