Paul Kengor, Craig Shirley and Kiron Skinner and Steve Hayward of Power Line, who have all written books on former President Reagan and his life and times, explore the latest Hollywood smear campaign against the 40th president, in the Washington Post. (A paper that’s had its own smear campaigns over the years against Reagan, of course):
One cold evening in Dixon, Ill., in the early 1930s, a young man known as Dutch Reagan brought home two African American teammates from his Eureka College football team. The team was on the road, and the local hotels had refused the two black players. So Reagan invited them to spend the night and have breakfast with his family.
In November 1952, in one of his final meetings as president of Hollywood’s Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan called upon the entertainment industry to provide greater employment for black actors. His stand went against the times and received national media attention.
As president, in the same March 1983 speech in which he called the Soviet regime an “evil empire,” Reagan decried “the resurgence of some hate groups preaching bigotry and prejudice” in America. And at a reception for the National Council of Negro Women in July of that year, Reagan declared: “I’ve lived a long time, but I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t believe that prejudice and bigotry were the worst of sins.”
These are just a few examples of Reagan’s sensitivity to racial discrimination. This attitude was instilled by his mother, who was deeply involved in the Disciples of Christ, and his father, who refused to allow him to see the movie “Birth of a Nation” because it glorified the Ku Klux Klan.
But you don’t get any sense of that in the film “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.”
Read the whole thing; the left has a narrative, and reality simply can’t sway it. But it also has control of the culture and academia, and as a certain Mr. E. Blair once wrote, he who controls the past, controls the future.
(See also: Karen Finney and Alger Hiss, and “Confederacy: The New Democrat Talking Point,” for other recent examples. Or to put it another way, “A history note for President Obama: Bull Connor was not a libertarian.”)
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