My latest at PJ Media:
The media establishment has made it a never-ending series: features on the political views of public figures who just happen to be far-Leftists. The latest ran in the Independent on Wednesday: musician Bruce Hornsby, author of the deathless eighties classic “The Way It Is,” reminiscences about growing up in the “deeply conservative” town of Williamsburg, Virginia, where, he says, the kids in his third-grade class cheered when they heard that JFK had been assassinated. It’s a jarring story, but it reveals more about the Left’s false historical narrative – particularly regarding the fabled “switch” of the Democratic and Republican parties over civil rights – than it does about Williamsburg or the South in the sixties.
There are numerous oddities in Hornsby’s recollections, suggesting that the aging boomer’s memories may be filtered at this late date through the prism of the Leftist narrative. For instance, he says that when Kennedy’s death was announced at his school, “almost my entire class cheered. They were shouting: ‘Hurray! Now Nixon can take over!’ But I was so shocked. I felt awful. It was a seminal moment in my childhood, just stamped on my brain and I still get chills when I think about it.”
What little monsters. But of course they were only reflecting attitudes they had imbibed at home. “Narrow-minded attitudes prevailed in my small southern town,” Hornsby explains. “But my mum, Lois, was from a more forward-thinking family of New Englanders who’d moved down to Richmond when her dad got a job there as a church organist. Liberal Lois, my mum, married a big old handsome country boy. Bob Hornsby was from a fishing village and he was cut from the local cloth. My parents’ votes cancelled each other out in elections from 1948 to 1976 when my mum persuaded my dad to vote for Jimmy Carter and he never looked back and he voted Democrat for the rest of his life.”…
What’s more, as Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster explains, Nixon and Kennedy were running to succeed the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had a “forward-thinking” stance on civil rights, and was bitterly opposed by segregationist Southerners who were all Democrats. When Eisenhower’s Secretary of the Navy Robert Anderson advised the president not to press the South to accept the integration of the armed forces, the president shot back: “We have not taken and we shall not take a single backward step. There must be no second-class citizens in this country.”…
There is much more. Read the rest here.