Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 6:06pm

Most Racist

Historian Jon Meacham considers President Trump the most racist president since Democrat Andrew Johnson.  Really?

 

Well, first we have the Presidents who owned slaves:  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,  James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant.  Most Presidents prior to the Civil War made statements indicating their belief that blacks were an inferior race.  Even Lincoln made carefully worded statements indicating support for the idea that blacks and whites could never live together on grounds of complete equality. Almost all Presidents up to the present have used the term “nigger”, including such Democrat heroes as LBJ.  Woodrow Wilson segregated the Civil Service and lectured a visiting black delegation that came to him about this that segregation was actually a positive for blacks.  FDR, the demigod of demigods for Democrats, oversaw the rounding up of Japanese Americans on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor, in the teeth of opposition by noted civil libertarians like J. Edgar Hoover.  FDR also turned a deaf ear prior to World War II to the admission of Jewish refugees.  When seeking a larger role for blacks in the US military he noted how naturally musical, his belief, that blacks were.  This list of the sins of past presidents against the standards of public discourse today on the issue of race could go on at some length.

If we are going to judge past presidents by the hyper sensitive standards of today on the question of race, Trump would stand among the most enlightened.  Of course Meacham’s statement has nothing to do about race and everything to do about “Orange man bad!”.

 

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Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 4:58am

Meacham is not a historian. He is a fool who pretends to be a historian.

Art Deco
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 5:09am

Meacham was the editor of Newsweek during its terminal phase, when it tried to re-invent itself as an opinion magazine. What it revealed was how talented people like Martin Peretz and William Whitworth had been in assembling a set of contributors and drafting and implementing an editorial policy. All of these mainstream reporters, encouraged to give their own view of the world, revealed themselves to be liberals of a peculiarly jejune sort, their editor most of all. (First prize for stupidity may go to Howard Fineman for his column contending Sarah Palin was more unscrupulous than Richard Nixon; Meacham wasn’t providing any critical editing).

Meacham is a journalist who writes trade books for the Bill Moyers / Ken Burns audience. He has no research degree and the only reason you’d call him a historian is that he makes occasional use of archives.

David WS
David WS
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 5:14am

Every Republican President in my lifetime has been accused by the Left as being “racist” told to sit in the corner, be quiet, don’t push back and take being smeared.
Trump is breaking the mold, of course he’s “the most racist”. Lol.

Art Deco
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 5:21am

What it indicates is that Meacham is a stone-cold propagandist, doesn’t actually know much American history, or is a fine example of Thomas Sowell’s dictum that articulate people are not necessarily intelligent people.

White liberals commonly use ‘racist’ to mean ‘insufficiently deferential to liberal mascot groups’. (Black nationalists use it to mean ‘not deferential to ME!’). The point Meacham’s making isn’t even an arguable one. Woodrow Wilson came from a doughface family and was frankly hostile to blacks (segregating federal offices by executive order. Herbert Hoover was stone-cold indifferent to them. Harry Truman made regular use of slurs in private conversation. Calvin Coolidge wasn’t adverse to making use of popular anthropological terminology of the day (chatter about ‘nordics’). We have it on the authority of Earl Warren (not trustworthy, I know), that Dwight Eisenhower called him in in 1957 to tell him that Southern segregationists were not bad people and that it was perfectly reasonable to not want some ‘big, overgrown Negro’ sitting next to your daughter in school. Previous generations weren’t deferential. Big time.

White liberals aren’t the most perspicacious subsegment of the population, and it shows.

Art Deco
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 5:25am

Every Republican President in my lifetime has been accused by the Left as being “racist” told to sit in the corner, be quiet, don’t push back and take being smeared.

I’m not sure that particular slander was lobbed at Gerald Ford or George W. Bush (though Bush received a dozen others). Mostly, liberals have fictional narratives of recent history, which the older among them have no reason not to know are lies but have passed into their understanding of ‘Truth’. The whole ‘Southern Strategy’ discourse is utter humbug, just to take one example. All of this goes on even after the Bush crew abandoned the resistance to racial preference schemes maintained during the Reagan Administration. Moral: never giver liberals an inch.

father of seven
father of seven
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 5:37am

Like all liberals, Meacham lies. Even he doesn’t believe that President Trump is the most racist president ever. Although there are fair criticisms of the president on a personal level, this surely isn’t one of them. Go back in time and ask Jesse or the Rev. Al or any number of “Black” leaders and there is no doubt they would defend his unbiased views on race. They would do so based on his personal interactions with them and his philanthropy in the black community. In fact, one thing President Trump doesn’t do is patronize. That makes him one of the least racist presidents ever.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 5:42am

Scott Adams tweeted, “The racist press is reporting to a racist public that racist Pelosi condemns racist Trump for offending four racist Congresswomen.”

I think there is a Thomas Sowell quote that “racist” is like ketchup that liars pour on everything they don’t like and have no articulate argument to present.

Crazy out there and getting crazier.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 5:45am

Tell your liberal friends that after the 2020 re-election President Trump’s preferred appellation will be “His Most Glorious Majesty.” Seen at Instapundit.

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 6:06am

“I’m not sure that particular slander was lobbed at Gerald Ford or George W. Bush”

It was. I can’t account for Ford, who was a bit before my time (9 years old when he lost to Carter). But Reagan, Bush Sr and Jr (remember the James Byrd commercial in the 2000 campaign), Gingrich (though maybe not Dole), McCain (hinted at if not explicitly stated), Romney, and of course Trump the minute he put an R in front of his name and ran for president. I think it was Jonah Goldberg who said that was a problem with getting ‘Trump as Racist’ to stick. A little of the ‘boy who cried wolf’ syndrome on the part of the Left that insisted this time it was true.

Art Deco
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 6:48am

I’d forgotten about the James Byrd commercial. That was another indication (in case you needed one) that the NAACP had no serious institutional mission. (Bruce Gordon during his tenure as executive secretary tried to construct a serious institutional mission and was rebuffed by the board, so he resigned. Gordon was a retired Verizon executive who figured life’s too short to have to answer to a no-account like Julian Bond).

Art Deco
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 6:53am

It was. I can’t account for Ford,

Ford and the 1976 election are a problem for the narrative spinners among partisan Democrats, because you had a Republican with no baggage on racial questions losing among black voters (by a margin of somewhere between 5-to-1 and 11-to-1 depending on which poll you consult) to a Democrat who did have such baggage. The explanation I’ve seen for this anomaly among partisan Democrats was along the lines of “…something, something, Southern Strategy”.

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 8:43am

“I’m not sure that particular slander was lobbed at Gerald Ford or George W. Bush”

I’ll back up the Bush one. Hurricane Katrina and the infamous moment Kayne West declared “Bush doesn’t care about Black People!”

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 9:13am

The fake news media hate President Trump because he doesn’t run crying into a corner and wet himself whenever they lie at him.

The fake news media needed this brouhaha to divert attention from Former KKK Grand Wizard Dukes heaping praise on Ilhan Omar. Jew Haters Of The World Unite!

Of course, LBJ was one of the more vile slugs that soiled the Oval Office. He was no dope. He said, “You know the difference between cannibals and liberals? Cannibals eat only their enemies.” Unfortunately, utterly gutless, establishment (pro-abortion, pro-open borders, country club, new world order, as anti-American as AOC and Omar) GOP and acute Trump Tourette Syndrome conservatives have big-time leapt into the autophagia.

Mary De Voe
Wednesday, July 17, AD 2019 9:57am

This is a grand and glorious post and comments long overdue. Thank you.

Hank
Thursday, July 18, AD 2019 4:01am

Don

May I submit Woodrow Wilson for this distinction.

For entertainment one evening he screened “birth of the Nation” in the White House.

He is the President who’s Civil Service changes took “separate but equal” north of the Mason Dixon Line.

After getting the support of the African AMerican leadership during the election, explained this by saying he only promised them justice.

In possible response to the recent poetic exportation “Take up the white man’s burden, Fight the savage wars of peace” invaded Mexico (twice), Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

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