C.J. Bartunek, writing in the Oxford American in June 2023, documented what the mountaintop looked like a year after the article. Visitors now arrived in pairs with scripted questions; one would loudly ask something provocative about slavery and states’ rights, while the other recorded. Bill Barker described the pattern: “They’re always white men.” When a volunteer asked one man to stop filming, he left in a huff but was soon spotted hiding behind the sugar maple, phone pointed at the presentation. Metal detectors and bag checks had been added to the front entrance. Pocket knives were confiscated and stored in what one volunteer whimsically called the “knife hotel.” Nasty reviews, Bartunek confirmed, appeared on Tripadvisor “echoing the media commentators”—not the language of people who had visited and been disappointed, but the language of people who had watched a Fox News segment and felt deputized.
These were permanent changes to a site that had welcomed 25 million visitors since 1923.
Inside the institution, the response was silence. Jenn put a hold on posting anything slavery-related to social media until the backlash abated. The institution whose decade-long mission had been to tell the full history of the mountaintop, including the lives of the 600 people Jefferson enslaved, stopped talking about slavery online.
THE NEW YORK POST ARTICLE WAS BYLINED by Jon Levine and Mary Kay Linge. Levine’s beat at the Post, until he left for the Washington Free Beacon in 2025, was media and culture. A chunk of it consisted of writing up Bill Maher’s anti-woke tirades on Real Time for Post readers the next day.
At the Post, he and Linge co-bylined a specific kind of politically loaded story: Federal investigators probing AOC’s chief of staff. A forensic timeline of Hunter Biden’s business ties to China, later cited in a congressional letter. Two hundred thousand dollars in public funds spent on drag queen performances in New York City schools. The CIA and FBI’s involvement in Twitter’s content moderation.
The Monticello story’s third paragraph offered a pure then-and-now contrast: Jefferson’s mansion, “once preserved as a tribute to the author of the Declaration of Independence, now offers visitors a harangue on the horrors of slavery.” That is a specific rhetorical construction: the golden age corrupted by the present. Old liberalism was noble; new progressivism is a disease.