Another day, another leadership shake-up at Montpelier, the museum home of "Father of the Constitution” James Madison .

As one longtime board member put it, it’s not clear whether the new developments “mean chaos, or if they mean light at the end of the tunnel.”

Either way, staff turmoil continues, operational funds are perilously limited, “woke” forces still dominate the Montpelier Foundation board, lawsuits remain active, and longtime supporters estranged from board leadership in recent years remain wary of current management.

In sum, a place that should be a world-renowned landmark extolling the virtues of a constitutional republic remains at risk.

Last year, leftist financial services entrepreneur James French and Paul Edmondson, the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, essentially engineered a coup , in many ways openly hostile to Madison himself, that was aimed at elevating Montpelier’s “enslaved communities” to be the central focus of the landmark property. (The National Trust owns Montpelier.) As French took over as board chairman and pushed an ideological agenda of racial grievances, longtime donors stopped contributing and finances for basic operations fell dramatically. At the last report , Montpelier was being run by two “interim co-directors,” one of whom is a recent Ph.D. recipient specializing in what one reviewer describes as “cutting-edge scholarship on queer communities.”

Well, now French is out as board chairman. The foundation board in late April replaced him with Hasan Jeffries, an Ohio State assistant professor affiliated with the radical Southern Poverty Law Center . It is not known what led to French’s reduced role, but some observers speculate it had something to do with a breach of contract suit against Montpelier filed on March 31 by George Urban, the foundation’s former chief financial officer. Several pleadings were entered in that case in the same week as the board meeting that ousted French.

Jeffries is the brother of Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the nephew of Leonard Jeffries, the former Black Studies chairman at City College of New York who was infamous for antisemitic rantings .

Despite his podcasts for the SPLC, a discredited , radical group roiled with lawsuits , and his work with the SPLC’s race-tinged curriculum for sixth through 12th graders, Hasan Jeffries has been described to me as considerably more conciliatory, on a personal level, than French.

I left a voice message at Jeffries’s Ohio State office asking for comment, but haven’t yet heard back.

The change from French to Jeffries has been welcomed by Mary Alexander, who is a direct descendant of Madison’s manservant and is one of the few remaining Montpelier board members of a more traditionalist bent. Alexander has objected strenuously for several years to the increasingly woke and race-centric policies at the old plantation, but she sent a May 2 letter to dozens of current and past board members and Montpelier supporters expressing a “renewal of interest and hope on the part of a vast community of grassroots supporters and Montpelier descendants.”

The letter makes numerous requests from the new board leadership, essentially amounting to calling for, first, a massive effort to reengage with “core support groups” who have been estranged and, second, for Montpelier to “refocus on its core mission, to preserve and educate the public about the life of James Madison and his contributions as the author of the Constitution, while telling the whole history, neither diminishing nor competing with the central mandate to tell Madison’s story.”

Almost simultaneously with that letter, co-interim Director Krista Costello was emailing letters on behalf of Jeffries to prior financial stalwarts of Montpelier, asking them to meet with Jeffries “to share your thoughts, ask questions, and provide your guidance in moving Montpelier forward in a way that is inclusive to all.” In short, an apparent olive branch.

One recipient was Margaret Rhoads, a direct descendant of Madison’s sister Sarah, who has been involved in preserving Montpelier since even before the foundation was formed. Sounding pleased at the overture but hesitant because Jeffries has previously pushed the same basic agenda as French, Rhoads told me that “a large group of substantial former supporters are watching to see whether the new leadership will return Madison as the focus of Montpelier.”

That, then, is the acid test: policies, not personalities. Even before the coup, Montpelier had been in the forefront of historic institutions explaining the lives of, and honoring the contributions of, slaves. For French and company, that wasn’t enough: They wanted to tell an ideological story they called “hard history” that treated Madison as almost incidental to the need for Montpelier to “unpack and interrogate white privilege and supremacy and systemic racism.”

The former donors won’t come back unless Montpelier stops serving up this toxic brew.