Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center believes that only right-wingers are allowed to portray themselves as true patriots, which is why it's so weirdly hostile over Juneteenth getting elevated to a national holiday (since it's more about full independence for people than the Declaration of Independence was). So when a PBS news segment pointed out how right-wingers have hijacked Independence Day for its own ideologial purposes, Clay Waters spent a July 8 post whining that it somehow "wrecked" the holiday for such inconvenient facts to be noted:
While PBS stations celebrated music and fireworks with A Capitol Fourth from coast to coast on July 4, the tax-funded PBS NewsHour marked the Independence Day holiday in its own inimitable style by trying to tie the patriotic celebration to right-wing extremism and the January 6 Capitol Hill riots. Congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins sat down with two liberal professors to decry the dangers of the right wing on Tuesday evening.
Host Amna Nawaz set the scene for PBS’s attempt to deflate the spirit of the Fourth of July by linking the Founding Fathers to right-wing extremism, while also reminding viewers that many of the Founders were slave-owners, as if that’s shocking news.
[...]
Desjardins even chided Republican Sen. Tim Scott, a black Republican running for president, for praising the “genius” of the nation’s founders.
Waters went on to grumble that guest Jim Grossman of the American Historical Association "unleashed pomposity" by pointing out that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves and that women weren't allowed to have any role in the founding. He complained further:
Later Desjardins asked Grossman: “What in the last 50 years could have led to this?” Grossman blamed grumpy conservative white men for not getting with the liberal program, while ignoring the possibility that left-wing extremism and governmental overreach may have contributed to a right-wing reaction.
Grossman: “….changes in immigration law, feminism of the 1960s, and the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and civil rights activism….for many Americans, this is not the country that they thought it was or that it should be, because women are not acting the way their wives and daughters and mothers acted a generation before the 1960s….
Cooter blamed the school system, which apparently hasn’t been teaching about slavery or the plight of American Indians, a notion hard to square with most American’s memories of school.
Only at the MRC is the idea of not hating or discriminating against people a "liberal program" and not, you know, a fuller expression of rights guaranteed in the Constitution.
