More American history down the memory hole. I have a nightmare vision of paranoid survivalists home schooling their children, from their barbed wire bunkers, stocked with beans, bullets, and bibles, and flying the Confederate flag. In that vision I see the home schooled kids listening to Fox News for this particular history lesson. Heaven help them and us.
Here’s what McEnany said that got an avalanche of fact checking in motion swiftly behind.
Fox's Kayleigh McEnany amazingly claims that "all of our main founding fathers were against slavery, recognized the evils of it."
The majority of signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, 41 of 56 according to one study. https://t.co/mGCZzHpR7n pic.twitter.com/hkz1xglcGn
— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) July 6, 2021
Some of the signers are world famous – among them Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams – and some are obscure. The majority owned slaves – 41 of the 56, according to one study – though there were also ardent abolitionists among their number. Some came to bad ends; one lived to the age of 95.
Whoever they were, one thing is certain: These 56 signers put their lives and livelihoods on the line for the cause of American independence, and without their actions we’d have nothing to celebrate as a nation – on the Fourth of July or any other date.
This article provides profiles of the signers. George Washington owned slaves. He had slave quarters at Mt. Vernon. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. He inserted a clause in the Declaration of Independence about abolishing slavery and the southern states wouldn’t sign it, so he deleted it. Benjamin Franklin owned two slaves, who worked on his newspaper, the Philadelphia Gazette. Franklin could have more easily dispensed with slavery than most of the other founding fathers, and certainly more ably than the plantation owners in the south.
Franklin saw the handwriting on the wall early on, that slavery was morally wrong and was going to rot the moral fiber of this country. He became an abolitionist in 1758. What was clear then and what is clear now, is that slavery was so important to the economy of the southern states that they would never willingly relinquish it. That proved true. And we live with the fallout from that time in our history to this day.
This is exactly what is so pernicious about Fox News, right-wing media, fake news in general, and conspiracy theory. People hear things, and if they don’t know anything about a subject, they believe the last thing they heard about it, or perhaps the only thing they heard about. They internalize the falsehood and nobody likes finding out later that s/he was wrong. It’s simply human nature.
Fox News plays on the worst aspects of human nature and panders to the lowest common denominator. And you saw where that got us, six months ago to this very day.
These folks are so phucking clueless, read no serious books on history, & believe any damn thing that allows them to wallow in their self pity. Unfortunately, this lying c*nt gets paid well to piss on the truth & the suffering of black folk everywhere.
Washington was a notoriously cruel slave owner. If he’d been around in the 1860s, Mt Vernon would have been turned into another cemetery. Or burned to the ground by the former slaves.