My latest in PJ Media:
If their objective is really to destroy monuments to slave owners (which it isn’t, of course: the goal is to obliterate American history in general and America itself), the Antifa rioters who are busy tearing down statues all over the United States have demonstrated more than once that they have only the most glancing grasp of the history against which they’re at war. They recently tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general who, more than any other single person, deserves credit for defeating the Confederacy and winning the Civil War. But so far, a President who actually did foster racial hatred and injustice has not been targeted: Woodrow Wilson, who was President from 1913 to 1921.
Wilson remains a hero of “progressive” internationalists and a pioneer of American interventionism. As Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster shows, Wilson articulated the messianic foreign policy objective that has prevailed in the State Department ever since his day. America’s goal in World War I, he declared, was not to protect American interests or indeed to do anything for the benefit of the United States at all; rather, it was to “make the world safe for democracy.”
But besides this savior-complex globalism, Wilson had an even darker side. He was born on December 28, 1856 in Staunton, Virginia to a Presbyterian minister and his wife, and was still a baby when his family moved to Augusta, Georgia. One of his earliest memories was hearing, at the age of three, that Abraham Lincoln had been elected President and civil war was on the horizon. When it came, young Woodrow saw his father’s church turned into a hospital for Confederate soldiers wounded in the Battle of Chickamauga and other Civil War battles.
It is unlikely that Wilson’s father was unwilling to turn over his church for this service. His parents were fervent supporters of the Southern cause, and it is clear that they imparted their sentiments to their son. Even after Woodrow Wilson moved north in the course of his academic career, he retained the racist attitudes he learned in his youth. When he became president, he made them U.S. government policy.
There is much more. Read the rest here.