The position as an at-large delegate for the Florida Republican Party will be the highest-profile political role thus far for Barron, former President Donald Trump’s youngest son.
It will soon be Barron Trump’s time to step into the political spotlight.
Trump, former President Donald Trump’s youngest child, who will graduate from high school next week and has largely been kept out of the political spotlight, was picked by the Republican Party of Florida on Wednesday night as one of the state’s at-large delegates to the Republican National Convention, according to a list of delegates obtained by NBC News.
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In a family full of politically involved children, Barron Trump, who turned 18 in March, has retained much more of a private life than his older brothers, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., both of whom will also be Florida at-large RNC delegates, along with Trump’s daughter Tiffany.
My point was more that
Jefferson actually wasn’t completely fine with slave owning.
He didnt fuck a bunch of his slaves and have their kids grow up as slaves.
Now, the original point of the OP is right. America was, for a large part, built by white men whose own interests (staying in power) went into the establishment of the country.
“I’m-pretty-sures,” though, just de-legitimize that whole argument, and I happened to have just come off of reading Jefferson’s biography, so I chimed in. Guess maybe I shouldn’t do that next time? I’m not defending Jefferson for slave owning – he was a hypocrite, for sure – but what we know about him (and we know a lot, because he was a prolific letter writer, and many of his private letters have survived) doesn’t match up with the OPs words. It’s important to at least be accurate if you’re going to invoke historical subjects to argue your political point.
Your first point just strikes me as entirely untrue and why I don’t like your post. He owned slaves, and took advantage of that situation with at least one well documented slave. There were contemporaries out there who were publically denouncing slavery, so, no, he doesn’t really get any credit for writing in his diary that he feels bad about all the free labor he’s getting.
You could interpret it as him being two faced, that is true, and a totally valid opinion. I tend to think he felt conflicted, but went with the current attitudes of the time. Still awful, but not exactly completely fine with slave owning.
I don’t know about your point about his contemporaries publicly denouncing slavery. I would guess that no one as prominent as him was that outspoken, but that’s just my guess. A credit to your point, though, Jefferson did say some awful shit in one letter about black people being inferior to whites. That idea was challenged by Benjamin Banneker, a free, educated black man, in a letter addressed to him several years later, and Jefferson was receptive, but didn’t take a hard stance, disappointingly.
I’m still hesitant to completely vilify Jefferson, despite his glaring moral inadequacies, because I think that lends itself to oversimplifying history in general, and hurts us when we are trying to understand the actions of historical figures in their time and place. Not to mention, it gives right wingers ammo to try to label us as revisionist.
We can understand Jefferson in his time and place by seeing that he was upholding and benefiting from the institution of slavery. Just because you personally haven’t heard of antislavery activism in the 1700s, doesn’t mean those ideas weren’t around. He chose not to take them up. Since when have antiracist activists been enabled to become presidents?? He was prominent because he was racist. You are being revisionist if you think that Jefferson was some hero. I assume you would also excuse horrible takes in politicians today.
I mean, all the things you’ve said are true, except that I excuse horrible takes from other politicians today. I never said he was a hero. Or that he wasnt racist. Or that he was even a good person. Antislavery ideas were around, but they weren’t mainstream viable political stances until later, which is probably one of the reasons, you can imagine, Jefferson didn’t push them during his career.
My whole original point isn’t that Jefferson isn’t racist, or that he isn’t a rapist, it’s that he had conflicted feelings, according to his letters, about slavery. Evidently, not enough to stop him from owning slaves, which does in fact make him both racist and a hypocrite. But to assert that he was completely fine with slavery just isn’t true.
If he was not doing anything to stop slavery from happening, and he had as much power as he did, he was fine with slavery.
“I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your state [South Carolina] for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it for ever. This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.”
to Edward Rutledge, July 14,1787
Idk what else to say.
Privately supporting antislavery doesn’t do shit, you have to use your voice and power.
That is absolutely right