St. Louis is the latest Democrat-run city warring against its own past, with a new push to have a monument to the Confederacy removed.
The treasurer of the city, Tishaura Jones, has launched a GoFundMe page that has already raised almost $14,000 toward removing the monument. The move comes only weeks after New Orleans removed its Confederate monuments, including one to Robert E. Lee.
Yet some believe the Democrats are simply acting out of a guilty conscience. One of the most prominent voices in this chorus is filmmaker and New York Times bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza.
"This is a move by the left and the Democrats to shift the blame for slavery and racism from the Democratic Party onto the South," D'Souza told WND in an interview. "When people identify Confederate symbols and monuments as simply 'Southern,' it confirms the Democratic tactic of saying the South as a whole should feel guilty, the South is to blame.
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"This is a big lie that conflates slavery and secession. Now, the South obviously seceded. But the South is not to blame for slavery per se. The vast majority of Southerners did not own slaves, the vast majority of Confederates did not own slaves. Indeed, it was Northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas who protected slavery, in alliance with Southern Democrats. The battle was between the anti-slavery Republican Party and Democrats."
D'Souza challenged the Democrats to confront their party's own past in defending slavery and segregation rather than constantly attacking Republicans as racists.
"The Democrats have never acknowledged their complicity in slavery, segregation and systematic racism," D'Souza charged. "Instead, they have very successfully foisted the blame on the 'white man' generally, or on the South, or on all of America. They pin the blame on everyone except those who were directly responsible – the Democrats themselves.
"Contrast the case of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee with that of the Democrat Stephen Douglas. Douglas was a Northern Democrat who defended slavery. Robert E. Lee expressed opposition to slavery and even secession. His loyalty was simply to his home state of Virginia, his community, his neighbors. He's a much better man than Stephen Douglas. But everyone wants to pull down Lee statues and forgets Douglas."
Indeed, D'Souza thinks Republicans should be far more aggressive in confronting Democrats with their own history.
"Progressives never whisper the name of the Democratic Party when talking about the history of slavery," D'Souza said. "The Democratic Party was not only the party that dominated the South before slavery, but the party that dominated the South after slavery. Conservatives and Republicans do make a tactical mistake here. They fall for the Democratic ploy.
"Democrats say the South is to blame, or the whites are to blame, or America is to blame. Out of patriotism, or regional patriotism, we Republicans then tend to minimize the evils of the Democrats and say it wasn't so bad," he said.
"I don't think we should do that. We shouldn't minimize the horrors of slavery or segregation. We should point the finger where it belongs. On them."
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Ben Kinchlow, author of "Black Yellowdogs," said Democrats are terrified of having the truth revealed.
"Even a cursory examination of our history proves beyond doubt that the Democrat Party has its roots in, and has supported the principles established by, the Confederacy, especially as it regarded blacks and slavery," he told WND.
"There is no question that the Democrats do not want Americans to be aware that the Democrat Party essentially was part of the Confederacy. It was the Union that wanted to free the slaves, and the Democrat Party, i.e., Confederates, were so determined to maintain slavery that they seceded from the 'United' States. Even after the war, Northern Republicans wanted Reconstruction; the Democrats in the South opposed it for fear it would give blacks equal rights throughout the nation."
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David Barton, a historian and the author of "The Jefferson Lies," agreed.
In Barton's book on race relations, "Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White," he wrote:
Immediately following the Civil War, Republicans became the political majority in the southern (that is, the former Confederate) states. Most of the Republican parties in those states were started by blacks more so than whites. ... Those Republican legislatures, over unified and vehement Democrat opposition, moved quickly to protect voting rights for African-Americans, prohibit segregation, establish public education, and to open public transportation, state police, schools, and other institutions to black Americans.
So great were the gains of blacks through the Republican Party that Democrats began to fight back not only through the manipulation of laws and election results, but also to fight back – literally – as they did in Louisiana … [I]n 1866, Democrats – in conjunction with the city police and the Democratic mayor of New Orleans – physically attacked the Republican Convention in that city, killing 40 blacks, 20 whites, and wounding 150 others. Then in 1875, Democrats rushed the floor of the Louisiana Legislature to seize power – by force – away from the elected black Republicans, but federal troops arrived to restore peace and return African-Americans to their lawfully elected positions. Similar violent and often deadly attacks by Democrats against Republicans occurred in other southern states.
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As Barton notes, it was Democrats who were involved in the organization of the Ku Klux Klan, which chiefly targeted black Republicans in the South with their terror tactics. Nor did the Democrats' support of white supremacy cease a few years after the war.
"Republicans had passed a federal civil rights bill in 1871 that punished Klan violence, but in 1893 when Democrats gained the U.S. House, Senate, and presidency, they repealed that anti-Klan bill," Barton wrote in "Setting The Record Straight." "Over subsequent years, Republicans repeatedly led efforts to pass federal anti-lynching laws, and their platforms consistently called for a ban on lynching well into the twentieth century; but across the years, Democrats successfully blocked all of those bills, and their platforms never did condemn lynchings."
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Yet one can imagine contemporary Democrats saying, so what? What is the connection between the Democratic Party of 1860 and the self-styled "progressive" party of today? But Kinchlow argues the same principles are still at work today.
"It must be clearly understood that the Confederates were determined to keep blacks dependent upon their slave masters," Kinchlow said of the Democrats' past.
"Today, that is still the premise of the Democrat Party, to keep blacks dependent upon the government. The number of blacks receiving government 'benefits' indicates why the overwhelming majority of these same blacks vote Democrat. The Democratic Party is determined to keep blacks on the plantation; they are not to achieve for themselves, but must be dependent upon government largesse."
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D'Souza also shares this analysis.
"If you look at the platforms of the two parties in 1860 and today, they are eerily identical," he argued. "The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, famously defined slavery as 'you work and I eat.' The stealing of another man's labor was the definition of slavery. Well, isn't it true, that even today this is the core platform of the Democratic Party? The form of the slavery is different, but the principle is the same. You rob Peter to pay Paul. You make sure no one has the fruits of their labors. They used to loot blacks, now they loot the taxpayer generally.
"And it is impossible to ignore how the plantations of the past have been recreated in America's crumbling inner cities. The Democrats reinvented them. Welfare, broken families, a dysfunctional culture. All of these things keep people bound."
Author and WND columnist Bill Federer, who specializes in history, claims the Democrats are using "communist/Islamic tactics, namely, deconstruction and psychological projection" to defend and justify their skewed view of history.
He cited an excerpt from his book "Who Is The King In America" describing the former technique.
"Deconstruction [is] where you separate a people from their past, get them into a neutral position where they do not remember where they came from, then you can easily brainwash them into whatever future you have planned for them," he wrote. "It is like cultural gene therapy."
In his book, Federer said Americans' best hope for the future lies in remembering their past.
"Any hope of preserving America's freedoms is dependent upon Americans learning their history – regaining their corporate memory – and rediscovering how truly rare their liberties are," he said.
In another one of his books, "What Every American Needs To Know About The Quran," Federer described "projection," using Freud's description of the technique as a "pattern in which a hostile person shifts the blame for his hostility onto their victim, accusing the victim of instigating the aggressor's negative behavior by offending them." In this case, he suggested the Democrats are projecting their own past onto Republicans.
Kinchlow, like Federer, urges Americans to become more aware of the real history of the Confederacy and its supporters.
"The Bible says that the truth sets us free," he said. "People should be made aware of the basis for the Confederacy. Once they understand that the whole purpose of the Confederate states was to prohibit black Americans from attaining full citizenship, they will clearly see that these statues and memorials represent a time in our history when the black community was not considered 'human.'"
And D'Souza believes Republicans need to stop shying away from direct criticism of the Democrats' dark history.
"What I call 'hidden history' really allows us to see some of the underlying narratives of the American story," he told WND. "Now, I'm a creature of the Reagan era. In the Reagan era, a whole generation of us were brought up to believe the Dems were basically a good party that went off the rails in the 60s because it embraced a leftist agenda completely out of sync with 'good guys' like Truman, FDR, JFK, etc. This was a new [George] McGovernite Democratic Party that had somehow become bad. That was my thing for half my career.
"But now I realize when you look under the stones, there is a corrupt, racketeering, bigoted strain since the beginning."
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