Marianne Williamson is the wokest presidential candidate in the entire 2020 Democratic primary – she is Michael Phelps, Jesse Owens, and Larry Bird all rolled into one in the Woke Olympics. Nobody can top her in this arena. She can cure the dark psychic force that plagues the nation by harnessing the power of love, in addition to applying some essential oils and engaging in a spiritual cleanse. Her main goal as president, it seems, is to heal the nation by apologizing to black people and Native Americans by … removing a portrait of a past president in the Oval Office.
Hit the Road Jackson
Marianne Williamson
The 2020 multimillionaire self-help guru, who is a cross between a Tennessee Williams character and a new age hippy, is upstaging her woke rivals by placing a bullseye on former President Andrew Jackson.
Speaking at an Iowa forum hosted by Native American voting rights organization Four Directions, Williamson promised that she will remove Jackson’s portrait in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Currently hanging in the Oval Office, the spiritual author promised that the nation can start to “atone” and “make amends” and that begins by taking down Jackson’s portrait.
Williamson told the crowd: “I am not a Native American woman, but I find it one of the greatest insults. You will not be insulted. You will be more than not insulted.”
This isn’t the first time that the seventh president has been the target of scorn.
A couple of years ago, many Americans petitioned the federal government to remove Andrew Jackson from the $20 Federal Reserve Note and replace him with civil rights icon Harriet Tubman. Moreover, in recent years, there have been scores of anti-Jackson op-eds, grieving about his record.
So, why is it cool to hate the 19th-century president now?
First, it seems everyone just learned that the federal government used its power to relocate large swathes of Native Americans in the east to west of the Mississippi River in the 1830s, also known as the Trail of Tears. Second, Trump is a vocal fan of Jackson and reportedly hanged his portrait in the Oval Office soon after his inauguration.
In Defense of Jackson
Andrew Jackson
Combing through American history, it can be difficult to find a perfect president – Republican, Democrat, or Whig. Abraham Lincoln, despite emancipating slaves, envisioned colonization of ex-slaves – whether he proposed mandated or voluntary is in dispute. Woodrow Wilson was a pro-war globalist who established the Federal Reserve and introduced the income tax. George W. Bush put two wars on a credit card and launched a nationwide spying program.
At the same time, most presidents have achieved at least one good thing for the country in their time in the White House.
Was Jackson a perfect president? Far from it. He expanded government powers, opposed the abolitionist movement, and seized private lands. But, like his predecessors and successors, Jackson accomplished two impressive feats: He abolished the central bank of his day and paid off the national debt.
Suspicious of central banking, he was the chief skeptic of the Second Bank of the United States, founded by President James Madison following the War of 1812. Jackson asserted that the Second Bank was a corrupt monopoly that maintained immense control of the political system. He routinely accused the institution of being established to make “the rich richer and the potent more powerful” by extending loans to influence elections.
In his July 1832 veto message to the Senate, Jackson wrote:
“The present corporate body, denominated the president, directors, and company of the Bank of the United States, will have existed at the time this act is intended to take effect twenty years. It enjoys an exclusive privilege of banking under the authority of the General Government, a monopoly of its favor and support, and, as a necessary consequence, almost a monopoly of the foreign and domestic exchange. The powers, privileges, and favors bestowed upon it in the original charter, by increasing the value of the stock far above its par value, operated as a gratuity of many millions to the stockholders.”
The institution became a key issue in the 1832 election. But Jackson received his mandate, securing victory over his Republican opponent, Senator Henry Clay (R-KY).
In September 1833, Jackson utilized his executive power and announced that the federal government would no longer deposit federal funds in the country’s national bank. A month later, he confirmed that deposits would not be permitted. Three years later, it died as its charter officially expired.
For roughly 30 years, the US did not have a central bank, enjoying the Free Banking Era. The national economy was booming, followed by a healthy diet of deflation.
So, was it a coincidence that the US government paid off the national debt in January 1835? After withdrawing the remaining funds from the Second Bank, the federal government, thanks to the sale of public lands and duty revenues, was debt-free. This is the one and only time that has ever happened in the nation’s history – it took nearly 200 years to pile up $23 trillion.
An Important Lesson
Suffice it to say, most people who see Jackson’s picture, either on a painting or a banknote, likely have zero clues about his record. Moreover, it is doubtful that black and Native Americans are crying themselves to sleep because Jackson’s face graces fiat currency and in the Oval Office.
Jackson may not have been the small-government conservative we expect from the Founding Fathers, but, as Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute writes, “’Jacksonian remains an adjective that suggests something as opposed to a powerful central government and is supportive of democratically-based local control.” Considering the left’s desire to expand the leviathan and seize state and local control, it is clear why leftists want to scrub Jackson from US history.
Who’s next in this war on history?
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Read more from Andrew Moran or comment on this article at Liberty Nation.com.
