Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party Read Free Page B

Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members. The last one, Robert Byrd, died in 2010 and was eulogized by President Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton called him her “mentor.”
    The sordid history of the Democratic Party in the early twentieth century is also married to the sordid history of the progressive movement during the same period. Progressives like Margaret Sanger—founder of Planned Parenthood and a role model for Hillary Clinton—supported such causes as eugenics and social Darwinism. While abortion was not an issue in Sanger’s day, she backed forced sterilization for “unfit” people, notably minorities. Sanger’s Negro Project was specifically focused on reducing the black population.
    Progressives also led the campaign to stop poor immigrants from coming to this country. They championed laws in the 1920s that brought the massive flows of immigration to this country to a virtual halt. The motives of the progressives were openly racist, and in the way the immigration restrictions were framed, progressives succeeded in broadening the Democratic Party’s target list of minority groups.
    While the Democratic Party previously singled out blacks and native Indians, progressives showed Democrats how to suppress all minorities.Included in the new list were Hispanics from Central and South America as well as Eastern and Southern Europeans. Many of these people were clearly white but progressives did not consider them white enough. Like blacks, they were considered “unfit” on the basis of their complexion.
    During the 1920s, progressives developed a fascination with and admiration for Italian and German fascism, and the fascists, for their part, praised American progressives. These were likeminded people who spoke the same language, and progressives and fascists worked together to implement programs to sterilize so-called mental defectives and “unfit” people, resulting subsequently in tens of thousands of forced sterilizations in America and hundreds of thousands in Nazi Germany.
    During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent members of his brain trust to Europe to study fascist economic programs, which he considered more advanced than anything his New Deal had implemented to date. FDR was enamored with Mussolini, whom he called the “admirable Italian gentleman.” Some Democrats even had a soft spot for Hitler: young JFK went to Germany before World War II and praised Hitler as a “legend” and blamed hostility to the Nazis as jealousy resulting from how much the Nazis had accomplished.
    Yes, I know. Very little of this is understood by people today because progressives have done such a good job of sweeping it all under the rug. This material is simply left out of the textbooks even though it is right there in the historical record. Some progressive pundits know about it, but they don’t want to talk about it. Such talk, they figure, can only hurt today’s Democrats who, after all, can hardly bear responsibility for what JFK said or what FDR and Woodrow Wilson did.
    But don’t we have some responsibility to the truth? Shouldn’t we lay out the facts of history and let people make up their own minds? The progressive answer to this question is no. Progressives detest the facts not because they are untrue but because they don’t fit in with progressive political interests. Facts constitute, as Al Gore might say, an inconvenient truth.
    So progressives have been working hard to come up with lies that can be passed off as facts. Progressives have a whole culturalcontingent—Hollywood, the mainline media, the elite universities, even professional comedians—to peddle their propaganda. From the television show Madame Secretary to the front page of the New York Times to nightly quips by Stephen Colbert, the progressive bilge comes at us continually and