Today’s Media Tries to Rewrite American History
The common saying that the news today becomes the history of tomorrow is probably only partially true. History has a context. The news in real time substitutes a narrative in the place of context. One would think that because there are so many sources of news today, it would be easy to find the truth. The editors and “newsreaders—info babes and guys” in our society today have very little training and education to provide context to a news story, so they replace news with uneducated opinions grounded in “talking points” that come not from their own minds, but from the handlers and politicians themselves that have a vested interest in one side of the story. It is harder today to find the truth in reported news than ever before.
When I was an officer on the USS Virginia, we were able to track over 125 different targets at a time: on, under, and over the sea. Torpedoes, missiles, and bullets were fired from many different weapons platforms. The problem when evaluating “incoming” was: 1. What is real and artifact? 2. What is an immediate threat? and 3. What “noise” could be impacting a signal and distorting the reality of what was being depicted of the battlefield as represented on a computer screen. Then another problem was presented after identifying an incoming threat and how it needed to be engaged. The allocation of “scarce resources” that could be used up within minutes was always a consideration as targets were engaged. How specific targets were engaged often changed as resources began to run low.
One of the storylines that has run through American history and is seldom told is that the Democratic Party since its’ beginning during Thomas Jefferson’s Presidency has always been the party of “subjugation”. Slaveholders in the South were Democrats. After the American Civil War, the politics of the post-war South after Reconstruction was dominated by Democratic politics. “Jim Crow” and the Ku Klux Clan were part of a social structure that informed Democratic Southern Politics through the 1960s when George Wallace the Democratic Governor of Alabama tried to stop Black Children from entering integrated schools and colleges.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson—a Democrat—have probably done more to subjugate more Black and White people living on the margins into states of dependency, a situation anticipated by sociologist-politicians like US Senator Patrick Moynihan—a Democrat—to be fair, than any economic policy, recession, or pandemic even when combined. The unemployment rate amongst Black men was decreasing after WWII until 1965 faster than for white men or any other demographic. College admission, graduation rates, income and standards of living were accelerating faster from WWII until 1965 than at any other time in our country’s history for Black men and women. During that time, the American and especially Black American families changed creating even more dependency as a direct result of those programs. 70% of Black families in 1960 had a mother and a father in the household. Unwedded pregnancies were around 20% in Black Communities and 15% in white communities. Those numbers are very different today. The social fabric of the Black Community with its “Cotillions” churches, summer camps, and even the opportunities at Historical Black Colleges and Institutions was hurt almost beyond repair by the Great Society Programs and Civil Rights Acts. “The road to hell was paved with the good intentions” of Democrats. Democratic social welfare programs destroyed the family structure in both white and Black Communities throughout the country—Think urban inner cities (Blacks) and the counties in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky (the subject of J. D. Vance’s book HILLBILLY ELIGY— whites), on both sides of the upper Ohio River.
Democratic ideas, the Democratic narrative as promulgated in the news today, should be couched with an eye to history. Their ideas and programs have hurt far more than they have helped. Think of what Obama Care has done to medicine in just 10 years. “Access—Quality—Cost” Really? Our Federalized Covid response did not help patients or citizens when economic incentives were implemented using “executive” and “special” orders that forced doctors to treat patients according to algorithms promulgated from the Federal Government. Instead of patients getting medical advice from their doctors, they got advice from Public Health Specialists via the evening news. Neither the Public Health Specialists or the “newsreaders” had ever taken care of a sick patient, nor did they have “skin in the game”
The Democratic Party as it has progressed through slavery, Jim Crow, The Progressive era of the early 20th century, through the “New Deal, and then the Great Society Programs of the last half of the twentieth century has done more to hurt the people they have promised to help than if they had purposefully tried to destroy the system that created the highest standard of living in the history of man, as they are trying to do today. They aren’t interested in creating conditions that will make people more self-sufficient. They are interested in growing government, controlling individual lives (some think your children belong to the school systems), and creating a state of dependency on the people they are representing. In the end, it must be said that when reviewing all the historical evidence they are more interested in power and control than they are in liberty and upward mobility. The facts of history speak for themselves. We must sort out what is real, what is noise, and most of all what is logical when we listen to the news. The context of history is far more important when evaluating a news story than the political narrative that is so many times made to be more important than the facts.
