There’s a fear afoot in the land, as a merciless authoritarian spirit informs a spate of firings and cancellations.
If nothing else, President Trump’s July Fourth speech at Mount Rushmore clarified the battle lines of our culture war.
The New York Times called the speech “dark and divisive,” while an Associated Press headline declared, “Trump pushes racial division.” A Washington Post story said the speech “crystallized” the president’s “unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination.”
Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth insisted that Trump “spent all his time talking about dead traitors.”
To be clear — and despite all of this — the media and the left didn’t freak out about a speech extolling the valor of Robert E. Lee, the statesmanship of Jefferson Davis or the prowess of Nathan Bedford Forrest. They didn’t scorn a speech pining for Antebellum America or expressing ambiguity about the Civil War. They didn’t pan a speech that slighted the quest for justice and civil rights throughout American history.
As a matter of fact, Trump didn’t mention any Confederates at all. He hailed Abraham Lincoln at length and called the Civil War “the struggle that saved our union and extinguished the evil of slavery.
