REWRITING HISTORY
If Democrats have their way, the public will be convinced every Republican is Marjorie Taylor Greene and the storming of the Capitol in January was the Civil War.
That’s the current playbook being used by the party and by its mainstream media supporters.
We’ve made clear our disgust with both Greene’s pronouncements and the actions of protesters on Jan. 6, who forced their way into the Capitol with some deranged idea that they could overturn the results of the Electoral College presidential vote.
But one elected representative’s deluded thoughts and a moment-in-history action by what federal officials believe were around 800 people who entered the Capitol do not represent the more than 74 million people who voted for Republican Donald Trump in November.
Any attempt to convince Americans otherwise is an intentional political misrepresentation, designed to confuse voters about their political party and the principles it actually upholds.
It’s akin to the rewriting of history by the left that’s taking place across the country.
We’ve written previously about The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which attempts to tie the country’s founding to the year in which slaves were first brought to the continent rather than its actual 1776 beginning.
Last week, the San Francisco school board removed the names of the likes of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Revere, and current Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein from schools, deciding that, for most, some racially tinged aspect of their lives was more heinous than anything positive they accomplished.
On Thursday, The New York Times — the so-called Gray Lady of journalism — in its “The Morning” newsletter led by presenting its readers an incomplete picture in an attempt to say legislative compromise has never been practiced by Republicans.
It tells us, for instance, that initial legislation by Bill Clinton in 1993 was opposed by all Republicans and only passed because Vice President Al Gore broke a 50-50 Senate tie. What it doesn’t tell us is that Democrats held a 56-44 margin over Republicans and that six Democrats were against the legislation. In other words, the only bipartisan position on the vote opposed the new president’s legislation.
It later references Affordable Care Act legislation, which all Republicans opposed. It suggests the bill “included conservative ideas” and that President Barack Obama wanted Republican support, both of which are true. But it doesn’t remind readers that after the measure had been discussed in two Senate committees, the final bill took shape with only Democrats.
“[B]y the fall of 2009,” USA Today wrote in 2017, “it was clear that having the support of only one or two GOP senators would not be enough Republican DNA to support a plausible claim of bipartisanship. It was at this point that the work did move behind closed doors and into the leadership suite of Democratic leader Harry Reid.”
The newsletter article also conveniently omits any reference to the just concluded term of President Donald Trump, where any signature legislation coming from the White House was uniformly opposed by every Democrat, not because it wasn’t legislation worth considering but because it had the support of the president they vowed to oppose at every turn.
The incidents remind us of the musical “Hamilton” in which a song asks poignantly, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
If the mainstream media is an echo chamber of the country’s left, who will tell the real story? Who will give us a balanced, unbiased view of the truth?
Two New York Democrats, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in the news recently, have not.
Cuomo was praised by the national media for his state’s handling of the COVID-19 virus in 2020 and even wrote a self-congratulatory book about his strategies, but his administration was exposed recently for undercounting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes and may have obscured data that was available to assess the risk to patients.
Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, insinuated last month she was in the Capitol during the Jan. 6 breach but had actually been in her office in a nearby House office building.
“I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of the day alive,” she said in a video.
Later, Ocasio-Cortez recast her story about hiding behind a bathroom door after hearing a ruckus in the hallway outside her office. A Capitol policeman then entered her office to check on her safety, and she claimed the officer “was looking at me with a tremendous amount of anger and hostility.”
Another House member on the same floor said, in fact, there had been no uprising on the hallway.
In some future year, Americans likely will look back with embarrassment to this era when a political culture sought to rewrite history and so tightly control the narrative that truth is never heard. In the meantime, we should be diligent and watchful for times when attempts are made to do so.