By now I should know better than to keep tweeting, right? I keep getting into situations.
So over the weekend the Museum of Natural History in New York announced it would remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt out front – the colonialist one with the Black and Native men in subservient positions to the 26th president.
Since I have seen this statue in person, and statues with presidents on them is something I follow pretty closely, I tweeted about it. All I really did was link to the New York Times article and pulled a quote from the president’s great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV.
https://twitter.com/BradyCarlson/status/1274836965909725184
For whatever reason Twitter added this to one of its Twitter Moments, which meant that anyone who had strong feelings about controversial statues (current estimates put the number around 3 trillion) were replying to me as if I had made the statement from the great grandson.
I told some friends it was odd that hundreds of people on Twitter were coming at me saying “’why are you taking the statue down?’ Yep, that’s what I, Theodore Roosevelt IV, just did.
Happily this news outlet quickly pulled that part of the article from their site, while leaving my tweet in the text without any context, as if it had just been sort of inserted in there to give me, a rando, the last word. Which wasn’t even my word. But anyway, as you can see, I have updated my Twitter profile to point out that I am not Theodore Roosevelt’s great grandson. Can’t be too careful about these things.
