I cite the following facts not to suggest that they in any way reflect the values of contemporary American Democrats, but to illustrate the ludicrous Leftist bias of both the Mainstream Media and today’s Academics, whose failure to respect the Truth will no doubt leave most people shocked at what they are about to read.
On a recent podcast, Trish Regan featured Ted Cruz in conversation with one who was no doubt a conservative, in which they exposed multiple historical examples of Democrats who were in fact Racists to their very core! While Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was appalled by the slavery exploited in the South, I have read multiple articles over the years suggesting he launched the Civil War not to eradicate that abomination, but simply to keep the country in tact. The logic of this Leftist argument is absurd inasmuch as he need only have given his assent to slavery to put an end to the secession threatened by various confederate states. Instead he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863.
Among the earliest of Democrats mentioned by Ted Cruz was Nathan Bedford Forrest, a plantation owner who was appalled by Lincoln’s anti-slavery agenda. A Confederate General throughout the Civil War, Forrest reacted to the Emancipation Proclamation by supporting the foundation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865. Indeed he did everything he could in the ensuing years to thwart Lincoln’s post-war Reconstruction efforts to welcome the country’s freed slaves into the mainstream of American society. He was, by the way, not just another citizen, but a delegate to the 1860 Democratic National Convention!
When Cruz asks his associate who was responsible for the Jim Crow laws designed to keep Blacks politically and economically impotent, he is told it was predominantly Southern Democrats, many of whom continued to support such measures until the Civil Rights movement began to gain momentum in the 1960s. Typical of those measures were “literacy tests” whose goal was to deprive predictably uneducated Blacks of the right to Vote! But even worse than that, people of Color throughout the South were denied access to public places such as restaurants, theaters, schools, etc.. Truly abominable!
With the advent of the Cultural Revolution of the 60s, Cruz points out, there were still rabidly racist Democrats active in the South. Bull Connor, for example, a lifelong member of the party and a political force in the city of Birmingham for over two decades, aggressively opposed the Civil Rights movement until his death in 1973. Shockingly, according to the podcast in question, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supported more universally by Republicans than by Democrats!
Am I attempting to paint a simplistic, black and white picture of the Left and Right? Of course not! Cruz may in fact have been intent on doing so or he might merely have been trying to explode the narrative that has come to dominate contemporary American Culture. Feeding that narrative, shared by so many in both the Media and Academia, is the self-righteous conviction that Republicans are White Supremacists, implicitly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc., etc.. But History, it seems, paints a far more complicated picture.
I have cited the Trish Regan podcast not because I think all or even most Southern Democrats were racists 150 years ago, but because it highlights facts which are not likely to ever be discussed by those who pretend to be purveyors of the Truth. Were the Republican Party, 60 years ago, to have included a racist such as Bull Connor, it would be cited as just another example of the perversity of the Political Right. Yet that Connor was in fact tolerated by the Democrats is no doubt unknown to those who get their information from CNN, MSNBC, etc., etc..