Someone asked me today about my views of Heather Cox Richardson (HCR) who makes a fortune on Substack writing anti-Trump newsletters. I have read some of her stuff through the years and I have a good idea of who and what she is. Whenever one of my readers questions what I write about Trump and MAGA - they send me some “article” from HCR as if it’s the absolute truth.
Here's my view of her work - edited and expanded upon from an excellent essay by Hillsdale College - “In the Absence of Factual Truth.”
I think Heather Cox Richardson is the worst kind of partisan fraud and a liar and has suckered millions of liberals with her twisted narratives. She apparently makes more money on Substack from her poisonous BS than anyone out there. She is a liberal professor who started her "career" in journalism by writing a daily blog during Trump's bogus impeachment in 2019. She saw how many fools bought her lies that she started a new blog on Substack and now makes a fortune off it. She even renamed it “Letters from an American” in order to fool you into believing she was a legitimate “political” journalist and historian.
Heather Cox Richardson teaches history at Boston College and writes a Substack newsletter for Democrats with over 2 million subscribers. Her newsletter is a dishonest, partisan diatribe against Donald Trump and the MAGA movement disguised as a thumbnail history of the United States, primarily from the 1930s to the present. She uses her teaching "credentials" to distort history and then uses that distortion to bash Trump. That's her MO in a nutshell.
Richardson says that there's a “liberal consensus” in America that favors freedom and equality and says that the "liberal consensus" can be traced to the American Founders. She embraces the Declaration of Independence as the main document of the "liberal consensus" but at the same time condemns the Founders as “enslavers.” She basically says that Trump is destroying the "liberal consensus" of the Framers who she also despised. In other words, it's a bunch of nice words wrapped up in BS. She is a socialist - a Communist - who wants her readers to think she is pro-American and cares about the middle class.
She openly says America was built by "white supremacists" - and accuses Trump of the same. She accuses the fake news - which is "liberal" of being run by conservative "white supremacists."
Richardson says that the 1954 Brown v. Board decision resurrected the mythological cowboy, now backed by the extraordinary power of television, as a brilliant vehicle for Movement Conservatism and the birth of Trump & MAGA.
Richardson says that out of this “cowboy mythology” of rugged individualism she says emerged the “Movement Conservatism and the racist mythology of the post-Civil War years came together.”
That's actually ass-backwards.
Richardson says that Trump promising to “Make America Great Again” has “dovetailed with rising authoritarianism around the world” and the presidency of Joe Biden “expanded liberalism” through transgenderism. She loved Joe Biden. That should tell you all you need to know.
Richardson’s books and columns read like a catalog of Communist talking points spewed over the past 10 years on MSNBC.
A real "liberal" journalist like Batya Ungar-Sargon - who calls herself a MAGA-lefty and disagrees with the huckster Richardson - concluded that what Trump and his supporters in fact mean by “Make America Great Again” is something like a return to the earlier populism of Teddy, FDR and JFK—confident, faithful and patriotic citizens - which stands in sharp contrast to both the anti-American variety of "democracy" that arose after 1968 and the globalist version of today that Richardson espouses.
BATYA: “President Trump basically took an ax to the Republican party of the past and turned it into a populist party for both the left and the right. He appointed the highest-ranking openly gay person, Scott Bessent, as our Secretary of Treasury. He sidelined the pro-life wing of his party and returned the abortion issue to the states. By his actions, I believe that Trump thinks abortion should be legal for 12 weeks.
On foreign intervention, he’s anti-war. He’s trying to bring an end to all of these wars. He also does not believe in free trade - he believes in fair trade that benefits the American worker. He looked at our destroyed manufacturing base. He looked at the downwardly mobile working class. He looked at the fact that working-class Americans can no longer afford the American dream.
He looked at why both parties agreed to ship five million good manufacturing jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico and all that did was bring in millions and millions of illegal migrants to compete with the jobs that remained here. And what Donald Trump said was, “We have to stop selling out the working class.”
“Trump can’t be bribed and his voters know that.”
If you must follow a “female liberal” - may I suggest you follow Batya - at least she tells the truth.
The political realignment we see happening today in America explains why so many Democrats are leaving the party. Working-class Americans who once formed the Democrat base—not only white and Hispanic but increasingly black as well—are rallying to Trump, while the core of his opposition consists of the moneyed and information-class elites—including the media, academics, and establishment Republicans and conservatives - like HCR - whose comfortable lives are walled off from the devastation caused by both parties’ economic and foreign policies over the past three decades.
Our current political divide appears to be over conflicting views of justice and of who should rule. HCR thinks she and her kind should rule. That’s pretty obvious. The idea that her narrative is about support for Americans or opposition to an age-old “liberal consensus” - with Trump as a dangerous authoritarian and his supporters as racist deplorables - is partisan BS aimed at preserving the status quo.
Hillsdale noted that Richardson attributes her understanding of authoritarianism to Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Richardson has ludicrously compared Trump to Communist & Fascist monsters like Hitler and Stalin. Has Richardson even read Arendt? I doubt it. She is just another anti-Trump "scholar" who wants to use Arendt's name to justify her BS and get you to click on her work and pay for her lies. George Orwell warned us of grifters like Richardson who rewrite the past to brainwash the present for the future.
Hillsdale also says that Richardson has furiously tried to push J6 as an insurrection and tries to compare it to the 1933 Reichstag fire. Richardson also says that American students are NOT “taught in school to hate their own country" but later agreed that they are. If you read ALL of her work - you will see she is a master flip flopper - and she counts on you not noticing.
Richardson calls herself a Lincoln-era Republican - you can believe that about as much as you can believe never-Trump George Conway and Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project! Are they connected? My gut says yes. They both started about the same time.
Charlatans like Conway, Wilson & Richardson use Lincoln’s name to try to justify their rhetoric against Trump. In truth, they are simply garden-variety Communists name-dropping and using “credentials” to confuse you.
Historians and professors who have regurgitated themselves as "journalists" - like Heather Cox Richardson - use their credentials and partisan narratives as blunt instruments, the academic equivalent of the lawfare being waged by our politicized justice system. These “teachers” are no different than the so-called “judges” that are making illegal rulings in order to assert and gain power over the Executive branch. There is nothing Constitutional about it - as they would have you believe.
The Judicial coup plotters (like Judge Boasberg) and Academic coup plotters (like Richardson) appear to be working hand in hand today (funded by the Communists & the CIA) to take over America.
I believe that Richardson is just another Communist coup plotter facilitating the current Academic coup in America - a stupid person's idea of a smart person. She is counting on you being simpleminded enough to believe her flowery rhetoric and twisted logic. Don't do it.
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