Category: slavery

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The Schisms

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June 14, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

This week I want to write about the divides within human organizations, particularly our political and religious institutions. I’m trying to understand what there is about us as social beings that causes these splits. Typically, a fundamental issue comes up that cannot be resolved and a congregation will split over the disagreement. Are these ideological splits inevitable, a product of the human temperament? Let’s look at some historical examples and see if we can see some common elements.

Soon after the founding of our country, two political parties formed with fundamental differences about the role of the federal government. The Federalists favored a strong central government, following the sympathies of Alexander Hamilton, President Washington and John Adams. The Democratic-Republicans wanted a weaker federal government with stronger state and local control, a type of governance favored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. What started as a political dispute has now grown into separate philosophies about the role of local institutions, including the family, in our lives.

In Islam, the Sunnis and Shia split over the leadership of the Muslim community. The Sunni believed that the community should choose its leader from among qualified companions of the Prophet, leading to the selection of Abu Bakr as the first caliph. The Shias believed that succession after Muhammed’s death in 632 C.E. should remain within the Prophet’s family and that his cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib, had been designated as his rightful successor. What began as a political dispute gradually developed into distinct religious traditions. Over time, Sunni and Shia Islam evolved different views about religious authority, leadership, and certain theological questions.

In the ancient Jewish community, the Pharisees and Sadducees disagreed over the source and interpretation of religious authority. The Sadducees accepted only the written Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) as authoritative. The Pharisees accepted the written Torah but also believed in an Oral Torah—a body of interpretations and traditions passed down alongside the written text. Because the Sadducees’ authority was tied closely to the Temple, its destruction in 70 A.D. caused their movement to disappear. An oral tradition allowed the Pharisees to adapt religious law to new circumstances and eventually became the foundation of Rabbinic Judaism.

Their disagreement reminds us of the disputes between Christians who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible and those who understand the Bible as story, as allegory, as poetry. We can see elements of this dispute  in our current debates about judicial interpretation and analysis. The Sadducees rejected any doctrines that were not explicitly stated in the written Torah. Textualist judges believe that legal analysis must be firmly grounded in and confined only to the text, and its meaning as they understand it.

The first followers of Jesus were Jewish. They attended synagogues, observed Jewish law to varying degrees, and regarded themselves as part of Judaism. Some believed Jesus was the Messiah that Jewish tradition had long spoke off. However, some followers began to regard him as divine, provoking a clash with Jews who believed in strict monotheism. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Rabbinic Jews rejected claims that Jesus was the Messiah or divine. By the middle of the second century, many Jews and Christians regarded themselves as separate communities.

Over the centuries, frictions over papal authority grew between Greek-speaking Christians in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and Latin-speaking Christians in Western Europe. The bishops in Rome, the center of western Christianity, claimed universal jurisdiction over Christians everywhere. Bishops in the east believed that they should govern together as equals. This is similar to the disagreement between the Federalists and anti-Federalists at the Constitutional Convention. The Federalists wanted a strong centralized structure. The anti-Federalists wanted a confederacy of equals. In 1054 C.E., the bishop of Rome, also called the pope, and the bishop, or patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other. Western churches called themselves Roman Catholic. Eastern churches called themselves Eastern Orthodox.

The historical examples so far have been ideological divides over authority. Who gets to be boss? It surprises me that these persistent divisions in human society have similar characteristics to playground disputes. A fundamental feature of loosely organized games is the lack of authority, an anarchy that is central to the relations between countries. If the players do not agree to a higher authority, then disagreements are inevitable.

In the 16th century, Martin Luther challenged the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church and Christianity divided into Catholics and Protestants. Catholics believed in the authority of priests and bishops to interpret the Bible, and salvation was through these intermediaries. Protestants advocated for a more collegial structure in which believers and local churches had the final authority to interpret the Bible. Salvation was directly from God. This echoes the political disputes over the role of the central government in American society, and the schism between the eastern and western churches. Throughout Europe, Protestants and Catholics fought a series of bloody civil wars without resolving these conflicts. Whole countries went one way or the other. Many European countries in the south went Catholic. Those in the north went Protestant.

In 19th century France, republicans and conservatives argued over the role of religion in the educational curriculum. In 1881- 2, the Ferry Laws made primary education free, compulsory and secular. Republicans believed that the curriculum should foster loyalty to the French Republic, not the Catholic Church. Conservatives, monarchists, and many Catholics maintained that religion was essential to moral education, and the integrity of society itself. Secular schools could not instill the principles that built moral character. The dispute concerned the identity of France itself. Would it be an orderly society grounded primarily in Catholic tradition or one organized around less clearly defined republican and secular principles?

In the 19th century, American Methodists divided over slavery. Northern Methodists opposed slavery, while southern Methodists believed slavery was compatible with Christian principles and the Bible. After a hundred years, the two branches reunified in 1939. Divisions over same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay clergy led to another split. Underneath these disagreements lies a major dispute among Protestant Christians over the interpretation of the Bible. Should sacred texts be understood through historical tradition and the plain meaning of the text, or should interpretation be guided by changing social and cultural circumstances? There is a similar dispute among judges as to the proper way to interpret the Constitution and the law.

Disputes over ideological matters can mask a dispute over authority. Take the case of the Methodists and slavery. In Colossians 3:22 and 1 Peter 2:18, the apostle Paul encourages slaves to obey their masters. Does that mean Paul endorsed slavery or is he advising a behavior within a relationship that was common in the old world? Pro-slavery interpreters argued the former. Abolitionists argued the latter contextual understanding. Slavery contradicted the central message of Christianity, that all people were equal before God and could be saved. Why did this drive the Methodist congregations apart? In many southern churches, Jim Crow laws mandated that enslaved people sit in segregated sections of the church. Northern churches had no such restriction.

Hidden within that tangle of claims and arguments is a question of authority. Whose rule wins? Who is the final interpreter, the decider of what the Bible, or the Constitution, or the Quran means?There is none. Organizations are glued together by forced or voluntary consent. To secure ratification of the Constitution, the framers agreed to add the First Amendment. This separated the government’s power to enforce consent from the voluntary consent of religious belief and association.

The natural tendency of human organizations to fracture leads to a profusion of beliefs and practices. Ideas evolve as living creatures evolve. They adapt to a changing social, economic and cultural environment. Conservatives naturally resist institutional change but it is inevitable. Progressives want to engineer institutional change but such change must happen in response to changes in the environment of a human society. That’s why so many proposed changes seem forced.

There is no newspaper titled Our Daily Disputes but that is the news. Knowing that most conflicts in our lives are really about authority, and who gets to make the rules, can help us understand our own feelings. I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Fineas Anton on Unsplash

Freedom and Captivity

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December 14, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

In 1847, abolitionist supporters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania invited William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to speak at the Dauphin County Court House. Forty miles to the south was Gettysburg, a small rural town of 2,400 people. In 16 years, it would become the site of the bloodiest battle in the Civil War as the Union Army turned away the advance of the Confederate Army into the north (Source).

Garrison (1805-1879) was the publisher of The Liberator, the foremost journal championing the banishment of slavery in the United States. Douglass (1818 – 1895) had been born into slavery and did not learn to read until he was a teenager. After escaping to freedom at the age of 20, he became a gifted speaker for the abolitionist cause (Source). Several anti-abolitionists were in the audience and gathered outside the court house. Garrison spoke for an hour, urging the assembly to honor the freedom and rights of all men promised by the Declaration of Independence. As soon as Douglass rose to speak, agitators pelted him with rotten eggs and yelled racial slurs. A security detail escorted both men from the court house. The Harrisburg police stood idly by as an angry mob threatened both men (Source).

This week I want to explore the axis of freedom and captivity. Douglass was one of perhaps 100,000 slaves that fled to northern states and Canada before the Civil War. In the same year as the Harrisburg event, more than 300,000 Irish emigrants crossed the Irish Channel to Liverpool in search of food. They were taking advantage of England’s poor laws which guaranteed them a couple of rice meals a day. The record breaking cold of the 1846-47 winter and the potato blight had killed the potato crop which served as both their primary food source and their money in an agrarian barter economy. A million more Irish emigrants fled to Canada, New York City and Boston. Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger is a good account of the famine.

Between those two poles of freedom and captivity are constraints and liberties. There are constraints of money, food and shelter, the basic needs of our survival. Sometimes those constraints reach extreme levels like the Irish experienced during the Great Famine. There are lesser constraints which make us feel as though we are trapped. We may feel captive to the indifference or incompetence of others, or frustrated by circumstances and rules that rob us of our capacity or autonomy.

We are accustomed to the temporary incapacity that an illness can bring. Some of us must endure autoimmune or degenerative diseases which permanently diminish our capacities. Alcoholics and drug addicts have inadvertently conditioned their bodies to crave a substance that keeps them trapped. They are both prisoner and warden, trapped in the walls of their physical need but holding the key of sobriety that will free them from their cell.

President Roosevelt cited four natural freedoms. Two of them are freedoms to do something, to speak freely and worship as we choose. The other two are freedoms from something, from want and fear. Liberties are freedoms of various degrees. To a teenager, freedom might be a car or some spending money. We may not be aware of a freedom until we lose it. There is a saying that good health is wasted on the young. Later in life, people realize that good health is a freedom that they took for granted.

In an ideal world, liberty and constraint should not be a zero sum game. Yet we often gain greater liberty at someone else’s constraint and sometimes without us being aware of it. Redlining was a euphemism for an official government policy adopted by the Federal Housing Authority in the 1930s. The agency drew up maps of urban areas which classified neighborhoods into four groups and was designed to keep racial groups separate. Areas where blacks and immigrants lived were marked as red, leading banks to deny mortgages or offer undesirable loan terms. People who lived in the more desirable green and blue neighborhoods did not want to be downgraded to yellow, indicating a declining area, because it affected their property values (Source). A constraint on some folks helped enhance the property values for other folks.

Another avenue I want to explore is trust. I think we tend to trust those who promise a freedom either from something or to something. We trust religious leaders who promise eternal salvation. For many of us, that is a freedom to and a freedom from. A journey to eternity and a relief from the burdens of this world. We trust healers of every sort because they promise us a freedom, a new capability or knowledge. They may promise a relief from the captivity of some emotional or physical pain. Now some of us may be very distrustful of most healers, but they proliferate because a sufficient number of people trust their message, their promise.

In the 1980s, First Lady Nancy Reagan launched a Just Say No campaign, a companion to her husband President Reagan’s War on Drugs. Many Just Say No clubs opened but the overly simplistic message evoked scorn in some of the young people the campaign targeted. Today, organizations like the Center for Humane Technology expose the public to the manipulative design of social media algorithms (Source). The American Psychological Association has issued more caution than warning (Source). This month, Australia banned social media use by teenagers under the age of 16 (Source). The social media company Reddit quickly sued, claiming that the ban is an infringement on free speech (Source).

Do teens trust these warnings? Do their parents? If a 20-year old working at a coffee shop cannot remember my order for more than five seconds, is that because the consumption of social media from an early age has destroyed their ability to focus? Or is it just a boring job? Whose interpretation should I trust?

Each of walks around with our own custom designed measuring stick, our own scales that we build over a lifetime. We use those unique tools to evaluate what we see, what we read, what we experience. Many times we want to reach conclusions that are simple and definitive, but anything we measure is only distinct because of the scale we use. When 12 jurors try to reach a consensus in a murder trial using their different yardsticks of evidence and ethics, innocence and guilt, we understand the complexity of our different evaluation systems. Events occur within a context and each of us pays attention to different aspects of any context.

Some people are free of any doubts in their own judgment while others are trapped by their self-doubt, their lack of trust in their own judgment. For some, that distrust can be debilitating. Should I do that, we ask? Am I being too hasty? What if I am wrong? Am I not fully considering the repercussions of my preference? On and on, we weave a busy web of questions and doubts that keep us trapped. We may tell ourselves that those doubts keep us safe and perhaps they do sometimes.

Do we trust our judgment as we get older? The founders who wrote the Constitution believed so, that others could trust our judgment as we grew older. Article I stipulates a minimum age of 25 to represent a district in the House and 33 to represent a state in the Senate (Source). When it was drafted, James Madison, a primary architect of the Constitution, was only 36, barely old enough to run for President.

Politicians are particularly blind to their misjudgments. To run for office, they must overcome self-doubt. Some become masters of that ability. They work and live in circles of consensus nested within each other like Russian dolls and far removed from the common realities of the very people they represent. The party system preserves incumbency. Most members of Congress are re-elected and that gives representatives the false impression that they are in touch with their constituency.

In the decades since the 1950s, public trust in government has declined. In a 1958 National Elections Survey, 73% of Americans thought government did the right thing all or most of the time. Recent polls indicate only 17% of Americans feel the same way (Source). Election funding now relies less on public trust and more on donations from wealthy donors. In 2024, political action committees (PACs) accounted for 65% of election spending (Source). Some are of the traditional type, subject to donation and spending limits. Others are Super PACs, independent organizations that can spend unlimited amounts on advertising and election activities as long as they don’t coordinate those activities with a political candidate.

Since Johnson’s Great Society began in the mid-1960s, federal programs have benefitted millions of Americans but have created a society dependent on these programs. The programs and the politicians who promote them overpromise and underdeliver, leading many to question the sincerity of those in government. Because many American families are dependent on those programs they are susceptible to the promises of a political huckster.

The founders built checks and balances into the Constitution to restrain the representatives of the people. Instead, it is the public who is restrained by a political system that does not hold representatives accountable to their constituents. As the public loses trust in their political system, that creates an opening for a political group to assume power after campaigning on a promise of change. Their gain in power may come at a cost of more constraints on voters.

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Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

You Don’t Count

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April 12, 2020

by Steve Stofka

Wisconsin voters held their state’s primary this past week. At stake was an important state Supreme Court seat. The long lines at the few polling places open in urban areas highlighted the distinction in voting power between urban and rural communities. Voters in urban areas that are largely Democratic must wait for hours to vote while those in rural Republican leaning districts experience short wait times when they vote (NCSL, 2014).

Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi advocates a federal law requiring states to have a mail in ballot as an option in federal elections. Republicans from low population states want to protect the enormous power that their rural communities have over those in urban areas. They continue to resist mail in ballots.

The map below from the Census Bureau shows the population density per county (US Census Bureau, 2018). The light green and yellow areas have populations below the U.S. average, which is only 88 people per square mile. Western European countries have an average of 468 people per square mile, more than 5 times the density of the U.S.

I have numbered the 7 states that had not implemented stay at home orders as of April 6th (Silverstein, 2020). Each state is one of 21 states that have less than 1% of the nation’s population (List, 2020).

Twelve of those states have majority rural populations (HAC, 2011).  25 states have only 20% of the country’s population but each state gets two Senators, regardless of population. The Senate does not have proportional representation.  20% of voters control half of the Senate.

This outrageous discrepancy in voting power grew out of – stop reading and guess. Did you guess slavery? That’s right. At this country’s founding, the slave states in the south did not want the more populous states in the north to make slavery illegal in the southern states. In an age when most people grew their own food, the northern states guessed that the population of the southern states would grow more quickly because of the longer growing season. The Senate and the Electoral College were a compromise between slave and free states at the country’s founding.

Many of the plains and Rocky Mountain states have little population but have the same power in the Senate as states with twenty times their population. Why are there so many states with so few people? Stop reading and guess again. Did you guess slavery? Right again. There were 37 states in 1870, five years after the Civil War, but the western territories had already been formed during or just prior to the Civil War. So how did slavery lead to the formation of states?

Let’s look at the example of Colorado. The discovery of gold near Pikes Peak attracted a large influx of people into the region in 1859. In December 1860, a month after Lincoln was elected President, South Carolina seceded from the Union. In February 1861, two months before the formal secession of the other states, an act was introduced into the Congress to make Colorado a territory. Why? To secure mineral rights for the coming war. 15 years later, Colorado finally became a state.

In January 1862, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, recognized Arizona as a Territory. The population was sympathetic to slavery and Davis hoped to use Arizona as a launching point to capture California and it’s gold. Imagine the Confederate Army camped out on the Colorado River, in present day Lake Havasu, prepared to invade – yes, hundreds of miles of godforsaken desert. This was not a well thought out plan by Mr. Davis.

Tit for tat. A month later, the U.S. Congress, composed of only delegates from Union states, recognized Arizona as a territory along different borders to block the recognition of the Territory under the borders established by the Confederacy.  Because of its low population, the territories of Arizona and neighboring New Mexico did not become states until 1912, when progressives of both parties overcame persistent opposition in the Senate to pass the 17th Amendment (NCC, n.d.). That amendment gave voters in each state the power to elect their state’s two Senators.

 Wyoming used to have more sheep than people (USDA, 2018). People in the state now outnumber sheep almost 2-to-1. It was part of the Nebraska Territory that was created along with the Kansas Territory prior to the Civil War as part of the Kansas-Nebraska act. A month after S. Carolina’s secession in response to Lincoln’s election, Kansas entered the union as a free state in 1861. Both the Union and the Confederacy engaged in a concerted effort to secure territory and its resources in anticipation of war.  Nebraska became a state after the Civil War. The Union states wanted power in the Senate to secure the Civil War Amendments and other legislation passed after the war. Nebraska voters get 20 times more clout in the Senate than voters in New York. Why? Don’t pause. The answer is slavery again.

As part of the effort to secure the Civil War Amendments, Nevada was made a state a month after the 13th Amendment passed out of the Senate on its way to the states in 1864. As it is today, there were few people living in the territory. Congress wanted access to the silver mines in the territory and it mandated that Nevada outlaw slavery as a precondition to statehood.

The territories of Utah and New Mexico were created as part of the Compromise of 1850 to keep a balance between the slave holding states and the free states. Antipathy to Mormons delayed admission of the Utah Territory into the Union until 1896.

Will the Civil War continue to influence our everyday lives? During the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s we would read about animosities between Albanians and Serbs that dated back to the 14th Century (Geldenhuys, 2014). Shi’a and Sunni Muslims are still killing each other over a controversy about Mohammed’s successor following his death in the 7th century (McLean, n.d.). If America lasts a few more centuries, the Civil War’s legacy of injustice and bitterness will infect our descendants because it is baked into our institutions.

For a hundred years after the Civil War, Democrats fought to limit access to the vote and punished or killed those who fought for the rights of black voters in southern states. For the past fifty years, the baton of injustice has passed to the Republicans who deny people this fundamental right. Voting is a blood sport. Those who want greater access to voting will have to fight for it.

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Notes:

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Geldenhuys, D. (2014). Contested States In World Politics. New York. Palgrave MacMillan. (p. 107-8)

Housing Assistance Council (HAC). (2011, November). Rurality in the United States. [PDF]. Retrieved from http://www.ruralhome.org/storage/research_notes/Rural_Research_Note_Rurality_web.pdf (p.4).

List of U.S. states by population (List). (2020, April 2). Retrieved from https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population

McLean, J. (n.d.). World Civilization. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldcivilization/chapter/muhammads-successors/

National Constitution Center (NCC). (n.d.). The Seventeenth Amendment. Retrieved from https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/amendment-xvii/interps/147

NCSL. (2014, October). States and Election Reform. The Canvass (Issue 52). [PDF]. Retrieved from https://www.ncsl.org/Documents/legismgt/elect/Canvass_Oct_2014_No_52.pdf

Silverstein, J. (2020, April 6). 43 states now have stay-at-home orders for coronavirus. These are the 7 that don’t. [Web page]. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stay-at-home-orders-states/

US Census Bureau. (2018, May 7). Population Density by County: 2010. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2010/geo/population-density-county-2010.html

Hillary’s America

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August 7, 2016

Those of us who did not fall asleep in sixth grade civics class remember that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery in this country for almost two hundred years.  (To save some typing, I’ll use DP and RP for the Democratic and Republican parties.) Dinesh D’Souza, the maker of the political documentary “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party” beats us over the head with that party association for about half the length of the film.

The film’s release was deliberately timed for July, coinciding with the conventions of both political parties.  The timing and the strong audience interest surely have the industry’s attention. In almost two weeks, the film had grossed over $5  million, admittedly weak compared to the usual movie offerings from Hollywood.  For a documentary, however, those are strong numbers.  I went to an early afternoon showing on a weekday, expecting a theater of mostly vacant seats.  Instead, I had difficulty finding a seat among a sea of gray haired retirees, the age demographic that votes in consistently high percentages each election.  The person manning the ticket booth later confirmed that the movie was the most popular daytime choice among the twelve movies it was showing.

The movie begins with the conviction and two year imprisonment of D’Souza, who contributed too much money to the campaign of a friend who was running for local office.  An innocent man persecuted by our legal system, we are told.  A sentence that was hardly commensurate with a technical violation of election law.  D’Souza had my sympathies until he attributed his plight to a vendetta by President Obama who evidently orchestrated this judicial persection of D’Souza in retribution for earlier documentaries that D’Souza had created.  What was next, I wondered?  The Illuminati?

Taking notes during the film, I did some fact checking afterwards.  Did D’Souza go to prison for two years?  Not according to this NY Times article.   By law, the judge could have given D’Souza two years but declined to do so.  The details of the trial are here. The reader will see that this was not an innocent mistake of  mistakenly writing one too many checks to a political campaign. The audience is led to believe that several scenes and conversations that occurred inside the jail were during D’Souza’s two year sentence.  They might have happened while he was in detention, not a pleasant experience, for sure, but not two years in prison.

D’Souza makes the claim that Obama rules over an urban plantation of blacks, other minorities and immigrants, following a template laid down by rural southern plantation owners and urban DP politicians.  Obama’s political background is rooted in the state of Illinois where Democratic mayors and a gang of political cronies have ruled Chicago through a system of voter impressment, physically forcing immigrants and blacks to the ballot box. D’Souza neglects to mention that the most corrupt mayor of Chicago was “Big Bill” Thompson, a Republican whose two terms during the Prohibition era set the template of power and corruption that marked successive administrations in the city. But this is not a Republican Party hatchet job, is it? More inconvenient facts, darn it.

D’Souza makes the case that FDR’s reign during the Depression era 1930s marks the beginning of the Democratic theft of America.  Whether it was a theft is a matter of opinion.  As Lincoln did, FDR used the crisis to help rewrite the relationship of the Federal government to the states and its citizens.

During some forty minutes, the movie documents the many horrors of slavery by Democratic landholders. The moral rot at the heart of the DP is evidenced by the election of a savage, ruthless man to the highest position in the land.  Andrew Jackson was a Democratic President who treated his slaves worse than farm animals and forced Indian tribes on a long death march from their ancestral lands.  The party of slavery and Jim Crow laws now tries to market itself as the champion of blacks and minorities.

As with other documentaries of political propoganda – yes, Michael Moore, I’m talking about you – there are careful omissions of fact and context as well as just plain old sloppy research.  Facts are sacrificed to the cause the film promotes.  D’Souza tells us that Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party, a falsehood that is easily checked by anyone with a cell phone.  Why tell such balderdash? D’Souza wants to stress that the RP, which began as a friend to the blacks, is still a friend of the blacks and other minorities.

D’Souza notes that it was Republicans who took land from the defeated Democrats after the Civil War and gave it to the blacks who had worked those lands.  On the face of it, this is true.  Now for the rest of the story, as broadcaster Paul Harvey would say. In the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, Republican politicians took over state legislatures and did award white owned farms to the newly freed blacks.  Many blacks, illiterate and unschooled in the management of a farm, lost the newly awarded lands to tax forfeiture.  Republican legislators and their friends were at the courthouse when the lands were auctioned and became the new owners of the land for a paltry sum.  That unlovely coincidence of human greed surpasses all political affiliation.

Emphasizing the point that it is the Democrats who are the party of racism, D’Souza recounts Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s sordid sentiments toward blacks, his endorsement of the KKK and the hosting of a White House screening of the D.W. Griffith film “Birth of a Nation.”  D’Souza includes several clips from the movie to cement the association between the Democratic Wilson and slavery.

D’Souza dramatizes a scene where Wilson repulses the efforts of Ida Wells, a black journalist and activist, who attempted to get the President’s help to stop lynchings in the Democratic South.  Left out is the fact that Wells had been unable to get cooperation in this cause from a Republican President, William McKinley (Source).  In 1918 and subsequent Congresses, there were repeated Republican efforts to pass anti-lynching legislation but they were blocked by Democratic Senators (See notes at end).

The RP is a friend of women as well as blacks, D’Souza tells us.  After all, a Republican Congress passed the women’s suffrage amendment.  What we are not told is that Republicans specifically excluded women from the draft language of the 14th Amendment.  As this historian notes, “History is messy.”  Inconvenient facts are tossed aside to present a consistent narrative with a simple, clear message.  Donkeys bad.  Elephants good.

Although Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, D’Souza reminds us that it was the Republicans who overcame a Senate filibuster of the Act by southern Democrats.  One more reminder in an election season that the RP has been a friend to blacks.  Republican efforts to make voting by blacks a bit more difficult is conveniently left out of the narrative.

D’Souza dismantles the notion of a party switch, the idea that southern racist Democrats switched parties and are now Republican.  To refute this theory popular in Democratic circles , D’Souza shows a graphic of the 1500 KKK leaders and Democratic politicians in the southern states in the 1960s.  After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, less than 1% switched parties.  The graphic is a visually powerful argument but there is little explanatory information with this graphic. What years are compared? Why include the KKK members?  How were the party affiliations of these members checked?  A comparison of election maps before and after the passage of the Civil Rights Act makes it clear that there was a party switch.

In the 1960 Presidential election, most of the southern states, including Johnson’s home state of Texas, voted Democratic. This election map shows the southern blue voting block.  The Civil Rights Act passed in July 1964, a few months before that year’s Presidential election.  Texas stayed with Johnson but five Southern states went Republican, as this election map shows. (You can also toggle the election year above the map.)

In the 1968 election, four of those five southern states voted for George Wallace, the former Democratic governor of Alabama who had refused to integrate public schools in the state. Running as an Independent and a champion of segregation and states’ rights, Wallace won about 10% of the electoral votes, a feat achieved by no third party candidate since. (Map)

Clearly now the southern states were in the hands of Republicans and segregationists. Or were they?  In the 1976 election, many southern states voted for Jimmy Carter, a fellow southerner and the Democratic governor of Georgia. (Map)

The appeal of political propoganda documentaries is that they simplify history by carefully filtering out the confusion of contradictory events and data.  We would all like to disregard the complexity of human behavior, the conflicting loyalties that confirm the chaotic in human affairs.  We want tidy circles, not ragged inkblot shapes.  What keeps historians busy in a lifetime of academic research and study can be easily brushed aside by the makers of message films.  Darn it, we’re still arguing over the causes of WWI  and that was a century ago!

Champions of slavery, tolerant of racist Jim Crow laws and lynchings in the southern states,  the DP has also supported eugenics laws.  D’Souza implies that this is part of a continuing effort to eradicate the black race.  No longer able to use black people as free slave labor, the DP seeks to rid the country of them through sterilization and abortion.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of what is now called Planned Parenthood, was also a champion of eugenics (see here),  as were many progressives.  In today’s political alignment, progressives are part of the DP, but they used to be part of the Republican Party when the eugenics movement first gained popular strength.  Led by President Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive movement was responsible for workplace and social reforms, and the creation of the first national parks.  Eugenics was an “enlightened” and scientific idea at the time, but horrifies us now. Hitler’s devotion to the concept impelled his commitment to the methodical destruction of the Jewish race, and the wholesale slaughter of Slavs and Communists who surrounded and threatened the noble German race.

Linking Sanger with another group devoted to the suppression and eventual eradicaton of the black race, D’Souza shows a picture of Sanger at a KKK rally as proof of her association with the racist group. The researchers at the debunking site Snopes showed that this was a doctored photo .  Sanger did speak before a NJ women’s chapter of the KKK as part of her effort to speak about birth control to as many groups as possible.  In her autobiography, Sanger wrote about the meeting and the strangeness of the experience so D’Souza uncovers no dark and hidden secrets.

Sanger wrote that she wanted Negro parents to have the ability to make the same family planning decisions that white parents did.  She envisioned a day when Negro parents had the same access to hospital services for their births that white parents did.  She wrote ” Some day … there will not be a single section of the country without adequate hospital facilities for all. But until that day is here, Negro mothers should be given all possible protection against needless sacrifice through childbearing.”  Doesn’t sound like someone who wants to eradicate the Negro race, does it?

D’Souza’s message is that abortion and sterilization are the twin weapons of the eugenics movement.  Although sterilization was discontinued after the 1970s, abortion remains a tool of the eugenics movement primarily aimed at black women and the gradual reduction of the black race in America.

As evidence of this, D’Souza notes that the majority of Planned Parenthood (PP) clinics are in black-majority neighborhoods.  Protecting Black Life, a pro-life advocacy group, has an interactive tool using 2010 census figures that verifies the correlation of clinics in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.  With a tendency to have lower incomes, these minority population may simply use PP’s services more frequently, prompting PP to position their clinics in these areas.  Secondly, lease rates are lower in these neighborhoods and are attractive to an organization with constant funding needs.  However, those are boring pedestrian explanations for the correlation of locations.  D’Souza’s more dramatic explanation is that the location of PP clinics is part of a DP master plan of genocide.  Republican presidential candidates Herman Cain (2012) and Ben Carson (2016) have made accusations similar to D’Souza’s (WP article)  Maybe D’Souza will write the next Jason Bourne film?

A conservative propoganda piece must include Saul Alinsky, the anti-Christ of liberal politics who wrote “Rules For Radicals.”  The 1971 book consisted of tactics that a community organizer might use to knit low income communities into a more powerful voice at the political bargaining table. Confrontation and conflict are themes common to many of the tactics.

Political propoganda consists of a series of “dog whistles” familiar to the target congregation.  Conservatives are quick to tar any Democratic politician with the epithet “Alinskyite” as in “Alinskyite ideas.”  The congregation barks with approval.

Obama was only ten years old when Alinsky died in 1972 but Obama was a community organizer who has quoted Alinsky.  The quotes are not direct but close enough that any true conservative can see that Obama is a commie radical like Alinsky.  In Chapter 2 of Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote about the world as it is and the world as it should be. When Obama uses the words “world”, “is” and “should” in the same sentence, he is quoting Alinsky and professing to be a Communist.  I totally get that.  Here is one example of this kind of dogmatic analysis.

In a 1963 speech, President Kennedy – yes, a Democrat – differentiated those who saw the world as it was and asked why, and those who dreamed of what the world could be and asked why not.  His brother, Robert Kennedy, used the phrase as well in several speeches.  In that same speech, JFK  attributed the original quote to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.  Using the logic of this conservative accusation, we can assume that anyone who has dreams about a better world is a disciple of Alinsky and yes, a radical Commie Utopian.

The movie’s title begins with Hillary’s America, so when is D’Souza going to show us Hillary’s secrets?  Why, just about now. Hillary Clinton actually wrote a student thesis on Alinsky.  As president of the student club, Hillary invited Alinsky to speak at Wellesley College. The audience does not have to be good at math to realize that Hillary Clinton = Communist.

As the student commencement speaker at her graduation from Wellesley in 1969, Hillary went off script to chide the guest speaker, Republican Senator Edward Brooks, an African American, about his remarks (Transcript of Hillary’s speech). D’Souza dramatizes it for his audience. White girl at Wellesley rebukes black senator, showing no respect for either his position or his race.  Senator sits quietly in chair on dais as Hillary says these disrespectful words.  Bad Hillary.

Here is a piece of Hillary’s remarks: “we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”  Any conservative can see what she is saying.  We feed her words into the conservative de-confabulator and out pops the translation. She is talking about the world as it is and as it should or could be.  Alinskyite Communist thinking of a better world, for sure.

D’Souza left out the Senator’s remarks that prompted Hillary’s response. Senator Brooke adopted what was a mild authoritarian posture typical of the time.  Student protests against the Vietnam war, discrimination and entrenched power structures occurred almost weekly, it seemed.  He said: “Dissent and protest are essential ingredients in the democratic concoction. Without them an open society becomes a contradiction in terms, and representative government becomes as stagnant as despotism. Yet there is a narrow but distinct line between productive dissent and counter-productive disruption.” (Transcript of Brooke’s speech)

Brooke cautioned against protest for the sake of protest, sentiments that sound reasonable to most American ears today.  Other elements of the speech would be typical of today’s moderate Democrat or Republican, animals who may have been driven to extinction in the current era of polarized opinions.  Only a Republican very secure in his seat would dare to give such a speech today.  Brooke endorsed the growth of the many Federal government cabinets recently created to combat housing and job discrimination, poor education and poverty.  Yes, a Republican endorsing bigger government. He was practically a Socialist in the eyes of some conservatives today! What did bad Hillary find wrong with those sentiments?

Hillary’s response is rather tame for the period when there was open antagonism between the rulers and the ruled. D’Souza uses a snippet of a sentence taken out of context to portray Hillary as an uncivil person with little respect for authority.  That’s the message of this segment of the film.  Hillary bad.

These days ain’t those days.  There, I said that and you can quote me.

Rulers had rigid rules that gave most of society’s power to men, not women.  Hillary spoke for many who wanted a change.

The rulers said war was necessary and that the ruled were supposed to go fight the war to stop Communism.  The ruled were ordered to fight but were not allowed to vote. The ruled broke things in protest.

At the universities, rulers had clearly defined and time honored curricula choices that reflected the prejudices and preferences of past generations.  The ruled wanted a greater voice in curricula selection.

The rulers had a grading system that seemed arbitrary to the ruled.  What is the difference between a B+ and a B paper?  With few consistent rules to guide the grading process, wouldn’t a pass-fail grading system make more sense?  No, the rulers said.  Rulers make the rules and students follow them.  Is that clear?

Those were the good old days.  College students today are surprised when they hear of these old rules, most of which have been either abandoned or dramatically altered.  The ruled stormed the forts of power and the rulers compromised so that they could continue ruling in whatever capacity they could manage.  Some of the ruled became the rulers.

I do encourage the reader to read the speeches of both Hillary and Brooke.  Hillary’s speech is the shorter, for sure, but both speakers are rather moderate and deliberate, remarkable in an age of sometimes murderous (Kent State) and often bloody (Columbia U. and others in NYC, for example) protests.

Having established that Hillary is a socialist, anarchist Communist, D’Souza then shows the tragedy of her personal life.  For several decades she has been covering up for the sex addiction of her husband and former President Bill Clinton.  Democratic Party = slavery = sexual deviants = Communism = Godlessness = bad.

I was busy writing out D’Souza’s equations when I realized that I was going to miss an appointment.  I had to miss the final 15 minutes of the film but I suspect that D’Souza was going to finish with the tragedy at Benghazi and Hillary’s personal email server while she was Secretary of State. If you want to know how the film turned out, you can rent it on Vudu or spend a couple of hours at your local theater.  I have now seen a Michael Moore film and a Dinesh D’Souza film.  As Johnny Cash sang, I walk the line between either extreme.  I hope I can keep my balance.

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Notes:

“We urge Congress to consider the most effective means to end Iynching in this country which continues to be a terrible blot on our American civilization.”  Republican presidential platform, 1920. In the House, Republicans held a 50 seat majority, 240 seats to 192 Democratic seats.  In the Senate, Republicans had won a 49 to 47 majority in the 1918 elections.  Repeated Republican efforts were blocked by Democratic Senators (more here)

The claim that Lincoln founded the Republican party is incorrect.  Here and here.

In Buck v. Bell (1927), the Supreme Court ruled that state sterilization laws were legal.  As further evidence of the DP’s efforts to eradicate the black race, D’Souza notes that it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Progressive, who wrote the court’s majority opinion.  D’Souza omits the fact that a Republican President, Theodore Roosevelt, appointed Holmes to the court and a Republican majority Senate approved the appointment.