1/11/19
When Historians Get Hysterical
Rounduptags: Conservative, political historians
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official and an author.
In the age of Donald Trump, highly accomplished and well-respected liberal voices continue to lose their collective minds — Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian, seemingly among them.
After President Trump’s Oval Office address on the need for a wall on our Southern border, Meacham tweeted: America should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as Heaven” against the flow of immigrants, quoting Georgia Gov. Clifford Walker, at a 1924 convention of the Ku Klux Klan, then a powerful force at a time of strain for the white working class.
Wow. A “historian” deliberately linking the current president of the United States to the most vile, repugnant and reviled organization in American history.
It should be noted that Meacham made no such comparison when President Barack Obama said: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked.” Or when Hillary Clinton admitted: “I voted, when I was a senator, to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in.”
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