We’ve written about how Democrats sowed the wind for decades with accusations that conservatives are racists. This was a calumny intended to win black voters by traducing ideas and a party whose policies would free minorities to thrive instead of locking them into wasted generations of dysfunction and relative economic failure.
Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presidential champion, was at it again recently, lacerating President Trump in a town hall meeting, saying, “The way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening.”
The idea that Trump is a racist is debatable; there is evidence on both sides. His utter lack of rhetorical dexterity often produces phrasing and ambiguity that can be interpreted as supporting ugly tropes. And his political enemies disingenuously interpret anything ambiguous as deliberately incendiary — for example, their assertion that he described neo-Nazis as “very fine people” after the 2017 Charlottesville riot, when a fair reading is that he was describing some people protesting the removal of Confederate statues, and distinguishing them from the fascists.
Whatever you think of Trump’s attitude toward race, Biden’s most ludicrous assertion was that he’s America’s first racist president: “No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has ever done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed. They’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”
Then why is President Woodrow Wilson’s name being removed from Princeton University’s school of public policy? What about the 12 presidents who owned slaves? What about even the liberator, Lincoln, who frankly asserted the superiority of white people over black people?
It’s not my purpose here to follow facile fashion and condemn historical figures for holding views that were widely accepted when they lived. It is, rather, to point out Biden’s ignorance or rejection of historical fact. “Erasing History” is the theme of this week’s magazine. It’s a trend driven by malice, ignorance, and some good intentions, and it’s gaining acceptance across the nation to the great detriment of America and its humane and admirable founding ideals. One of the chief forces bent on eradicating the past is Black Lives Matter, an organization that, as reporter Jerry Dunleavy makes clear, is avowedly Marxist, revolutionary, and determined to make America unrecognizable.
Leif Le Mahieu gives a history lesson about a Civil War race hero whose statue the mob toppled in Wisconsin. Jonathan Tobin explains why efforts to come to terms with our slaveholding past could not and should not follow the pattern of de-Nazification in Germany and Austria.
Peter Tonguette finds that, unlike in the past, the artistic Left has expunged all traces of patriotism. Ilya Shapiro grades the Supreme Court, which has finally become “the Roberts court.” And our obituary is of civil rights hero John Lewis, who marched with MLK to hold America to account for not living up to its ideals, and lived long enough to see his political heirs tossing those ideals in the trash.
