New talking points ahoy! The liberal New York Times now condemns former Democratic and “progressive” President Woodrow Wilson, founding father of the modern-day liberal state, for his deep racism and segregationist policies he pushed as president of Princeton University and president of the United States from 1913-1921.
But that permission applies only to woke Democrats and reporters using Wilson to smear President Trump -- no credit is given to conservatives for initially pushing the anti-Wilson argument into the mainstream. In fact, the paper mocked conservatives for speaking that truth, including in an infamous New York Times symposium reacting to Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 book Liberal Fascism and his thoroughly researched condemnation of the racist Wilson.
White House correspondent Erica Green unloaded her hysterical 1,800-word hit job in Thursday’s paper under the headline “Trump Says He Is the ‘Least Racist’ President. But His Term Echoes a Grim Past.”
[Wilson] packed his cabinet with white supremacists, whom he allowed to segregate the federal work force and dismiss, demote and demean Black employees. He hosted a screening of “The Birth of a Nation,” a film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, in the East Room of the White House. And he fomented a climate for Black Americans where “every man who dreams of making the Negro race a group of menials and pariahs is alert and hopeful,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the prominent Black leaders who had initially supported him.
More than a century later, Wilson’s presidency has taken on new resonance among historians and critics of President Trump. They see distinct parallels between Wilson’s abandonment of promises to Black Americans and Mr. Trump’s policies and politics since he took office a second time last year. Mr. Trump’s gutting of the federal government, his assailing of diversity policies and his occasional use of racist imagery have made Wilson’s administration especially relevant now, they say.
….
“I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time,” Mr. Trump said last month, as he faced rare backlash from his party for posting a racist video clip on his social media feed that portrayed the Obamas as apes....
That brought out some truly wild accusations.
Ms. Rooks compared Mr. Trump’s posting of the clip to Wilson’s decision to show “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House 111 years ago.
Ending bureaucracy and D.E.I. is racist too.
By the end of his first year, Mr. Trump had slashed the federal work force by nearly 300,000 people. His biggest cuts targeted agencies that had employed a disproportionate number of Black employees, a measure economists and experts say poses the biggest threat to the Black middle class in modern history.
Historians who have documented Wilson’s presidency say it is Mr. Trump’s crusade against D.E.I. and the federal work force that is the most poignant parallel.
Green included some disgusting details about Wilson:
….A Black worker in the Postal Service was surrounded by screens so white workers would not have to look at him, according to a report by a Labor Department historian and a letter from the N.A.A.C.P.; another employee had a cage built around him to separate him from his white counterparts, Mr. Dubois wrote; a clerk in the Treasury secretary’s office was assigned to rewrite all correspondence to address Black employees by their first names.
This is the man the Times defended from scholarly conservative criticism.
That 2010 symposium, featuring six scholars including historian Jill Lepore, appeared under the slanted rubric “Hating Woodrow Wilson.” As if “hating Wilson” was unreasonable and not common sense, given what Green now has permission to tell her readers regarding Wilson’s beliefs and policies toward black Americans.
Check the cynical tone:
Why is Woodrow Wilson singled out and not, say, Theodore Roosevelt, who in popular history is far more associated with the Progressive cause? What in the current political climate is continuing to fuel the criticism of Wilson?
It was a strange “symposium,” with Lepore the only participant to even mention Wilson’s racism, in a terse, three-sentence, modified limited hangout: “ He was opposed to female suffrage. He supported Jim Crow. He wrote about Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy.” Yet amazingly, that damning record failed to convince liberal Lepore to condemn Wilson.
The Times also reviewed Liberal Fascism unfavorably, under a sarcastic headline mocking Goldberg’s condemnation of Wilson: (“Heil Woodrow!”). Ironically, that headline could serve as a summary of Green’s attitude toward former president Wilson, now that his reputation can be used to smear the current one.
