History

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's Morning Joe, New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins joined show regular Al Sharpton in comparing the election of Donald Trump in 2016 to an 1898 coup by white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The anti-Trump newspapers find so many Trump scandals you can't actually tell if it's a scandal. On Monday, The Washington Post reported the president has added a statue of Thomas Jefferson to the Rose Garden. Scandalous? Well, The Post found an art expert to suggest this Jefferson thing reminds them of North Korean communist dictators. Whaaaaat?

Marco Rubio claimed “the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy.” National Review writer and author Noah Rothman explains how the media and extremism “experts” combine to claim there’s not a serious amount of left-wing political violence.

The New York Times tried to play Historian in a series of little profiles on "These 8 Americans Shaped History." Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a "folk hero," and Phyllis Schafly was a hypocrite responsible for "today's hyper-polarization." Feminists aren't divisive? 

On Friday night, MS NOW broadcast a special program titled We The People: America 250. MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow put on her smirky face to tout the patriotism of National “Public” Radio and how it’s so misunderstood by stupid conservative tweeters. They have an annual tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence on air! Fact check: False. 

On CNN This Morning, host Audie Cornish let a guest describe President Trump's alleged corruption in accepting the gift of a plane from Qatar, but shut the guest down when he attempted to discuss Nancy Pelosi's enrichment while in office.

On Tuesday, Washington Post local breaking news reporter Dana Hedgpeth penned an article entitled “Three words in the Declaration of Independence paint a cruel picture of Natives.” However, while Hedgpeth was eager to remind everyone this meant the Declaration’s “ideals were not extended to everyone,” the historical context she provided for the “merciless Indian savages” passage was quite thin…

On his Saturday morning show First Of All, CNN anchor Victor Blackwell felt it necessary to proclaim that the Declaration of Independence is racist. Deep in the grievances against the King of England, the founders complained about "merciless Indian savages."

Ahead of America 250, PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson penned an article on Monday chronicling what he considered to be eleven instances where presidents “shaded reality as they shaped US history.” Unfortunately for Jacobson, in some instances it was he who did the shading, especially when he considered some of the nation’s most defining foreign policy moments.

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart welcomed liberal historians David Blight and Annette Gordon-Reed to Wednesday’s The Weekly Show podcast to look at competing visions of the country’s history ahead of America 250. According to all involved, conservatives are trying to erase complications and nuances from the country’s efforts, which Stewart wondered is just a way to amass power.

One way you can appreciate that America is a free country is that the Left feels free to dump on the 250th anniversary of America. The New Yorker can ask “How Problematic Is Patriotism?” MS NOW host Ali Velshi channeled this spirit on May 31. "I feel a deep unease about the celebrations to which I am invited to mark the 250th anniversary of our so-called democracy.”

If you weren’t a political junkie, you could watch actress Sally Field give a 65-second speech at the end of Sunday’s 60 Minutes about the First Amendment and the “brilliance of our Constitution” and think it was like a “Bicentennial Minute” (which CBS aired in 1976). Dig a little deeper, and it seems timed to protest the end of Stephen Colbert's show on CBS.

On MS NOW’s Katy Tur Reports on Monday, the host brought on three guests to address this frightening Sunday prayer event on the Mall. The amazing nugget of ignorance came when Tur expressed concern that Speaker Mike Johnson could be "putting God over the Declaration of Independence"....when he was citing the Declaration of Independence. 

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is hailed by her allies as a refugee from Somalia. So does she know her American history? When she made a comical gaffe, reading from her notes about “World War II” and calling it “World War Eleven,” a Newsweek writer felt the need to “fact check” it. As usual, the complaint it “has been shared online without context.”