At first glance, a statue garden might strike some readers as a tangential issue. Conditioned by years of secular propaganda, which prioritizes the practical and immediate over the transcendent and eternal, Americans might instinctively prefer bread-and-butter-type initiatives to a garden that celebrates heroes of the past.
Viewed through the proper lens, however, President Donald Trump’s recent order restoring the traditional Columbus Day holiday represents the precise line of demarcation between liberal wokeness and the informed patriotism at the core of conservative populism.
The order was a sign of the president’s enduring interest in the civic health-related concerns that originally prompted his 2021 executive order to establish a National Garden of American Heroes, which he termed a “new monument to our country’s greatness.”
In May 2021, President Joe Biden canceled Trump’s National Garden.
One wonders, of course, why Biden and other woke liberals would object to such a thing. Needless to say, it has nothing to do with cost. Biden and his establishment supporters spent decades enriching themselves at public expense, not to mention the astounding level of often frivolous government spending his administration engaged in during his four-year term.
Thus, let us consider a few possible explanations.
First, did woke liberals object to the National Garden because they found it insufficiently diverse?
The word “diverse,” in its present common usage, undoubtedly affects most readers like nails on a chalkboard. It has emerged as the all-purpose wrench in the virtue-signaler’s tool kit.
Nonetheless, a National Garden of American Heroes absolutely must include ALL American heroes — or at least, as many as possible — regardless of their situation or how they looked. And it must do this for the sake of honesty, not diversity.
Would the National Garden satisfy that requirement?
Trump’s 2021 executive order identified more than 200 American heroes. Last week, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced a “special funding opportunity” for 250 life-sized statues.
As one would expect from a president who cherishes greatness, the National Garden will honor great Americans of every description.
For instance, the president’s original list included black American heroes such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, Medgar Evers, and a host of more modern choices such as Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, and Kobe Bryant.
President Trump announces the National Garden of American Heroes will have the following statues of African American icons:
– Harriet Tubman
– Rosa Parks
– Billie Holiday
– Aretha Franklin
– Coretta Scott King
– Frederick Douglass
– Jackie Robinson
– Martin Luther King Jr.
-… pic.twitter.com/DE0W7wuv8n— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 20, 2025
Moreover, the list includes an impressive array of heroic American women, headed by Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dolley Madison, Julia Ward Howe, Amelia Earhart, Clara Barton, Helen Keller, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Parks, Tubman, and many, many others.
Thus, woke liberals cannot cry “white supremacy” or “misogyny.”
Second, do those liberals fear that the National Garden will celebrate American imperialism?
If so, then they will have to explain statues of Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Red Cloud. Few brave Indians resisted U.S. expansion with more fierceness and even periodic success.
Do woke liberals hate the idea of a statue to President Andrew Jackson, architect of the 1830s Indian Removal policy? No doubt they do. If they wish to depict the Jackson statue as a celebration of racism and imperialism, however, then they will have to account for the presence of a statue to Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who forged perhaps the most formidable Indian confederacy in American history and allied with the British during the War of 1812 — the same war in which Jackson commanded victorious forces at the Battle of New Orleans.
Third, does the National Garden celebrate conservatives and Republicans at the expense of liberals and Democrats?
To make that argument, one would have to explain statues of Ginsburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Daniel Inouye, Barbara Jordan, and others.
Thus, the National Garden features neither lack of diversity nor jingoistic endorsements of imperialism nor partisanship.
So what could explain the hostility of Biden and other woke liberals?
In short, wokeness derives all its energy from evil. Its purpose, above all else, is to destroy the very idea of heroism and, in the process, to eradicate from public memory any sense of the American past as a place to which modern Americans may look for examples of both goodness and greatness.
If that sounds exaggerated, give it some thought.
Whom do woke liberals revere?
Health-establishment bureaucrats with a Napoleon complex who claim to represent “science?”
By contrast, for whom do woke liberals show contempt? Victims of those whom woke liberals revere.
Moreover, heroism implies the possibility of rejecting identity-based resentments and overcoming one’s circumstances.
Take, for instance, the great 19th-century runaway slave, abolitionist, and civil rights leader Frederick Douglass. No “National Garden of American Heroes” worthy of the name would exclude the great Douglass, and Trump’s does not.
In a rightly celebrated speech marking the Fourth of July, 1852, Douglass castigated slavery’s defenders as hostile to America’s Founding.
“Fellow-citizens!” Douglass declared. “[T]here is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”
Imagine: a runaway slave, who, fewer than five years later, the Supreme Court would rule incapable of U.S. citizenship on account of his skin color, nonetheless proclaimed the Constitution a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”
Woke liberals cannot have this. They cannot have examples of legitimately oppressed people, particularly oppressed people of color, recognizing the truth about American liberty. Woke liberals must have legions of perpetually aggrieved victims responding, pied piper-like, to the deceptive inducements of woke race-mongers.
Thus, Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes threatens the core tenet of wokeness, which denies the existence of heroism altogether.
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