Woodrow Wilson Redux
Remakes are almost always worse than the original, and this one promises to be awful.
Often people like me get tagged as sensationalists who are given to hyperbole.
Guilty as charged.
But the reason is this – how many of us, when we heard a car alarm going off a decade ago thought, “Somebody’s car is getting broken into”? I would say most of us – but today, how many people think that when they hear a car alarm? I usually write it off as someone sitting on their keys and squishing the panic button.
Sometimes you must use hyperbole to get attention.
To paraphrase Dementia Joe, “This ain’t hyperbole.”
I am going to ask you to read through what follows with the following in mind: the 1/6 “insurrection”, BLM and ANTIFA riots, Critical Race Theory, censorship in social media, de-platforming of conservatives, the Democrat rhetoric about vaccinations, masks, and lockdowns, the complicit and compliant leftist media, the Biden administration’s war on “misinformation”, the Psaki Bomb admitting the White House is telling social media what they want deleted, and the corruption of our military leadership.
Think about this real history and simply replace “Germans” with “Conservatives” or “Republicans” and you will see what I mean when I say Biden is Woodrow Wilson.
I do compare Biden to Woodrow Wilson a lot – there is one big difference, of course. Wilson was mentally incapacitated at the end of his terms and Biden is incapacitated at the beginning of his, but other than that, if there is a parallel to be drawn it is more accurate to compare him to Woodrow Wilson than FDR.
Wilson was a lawyer who never held a real job outside academia and politics – just like Biden.
Biden also exhibits the same disdain for the Constitution that Wilson did and he shows the same distaste for dissent that Wilson did when Wilson pushed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 through Congress to suppress anti-British, pro-German, or anti-war opinions.
Over 2000 anti-war citizens and pacifists were rounded up and imprisoned under these two statutes for crimes consisting of actual espionage to simply speaking favorably of Germany in front of the wrong people.
Biden only wishes that he could round up his opposition like Wilson did in the Palmer Raids. The Palmer raids were a series of violent, abusive, and unconstitutional law-enforcement raids resulting from a bombing that took place inside the Capitol boundaries in front of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C. The anarchist planting the bomb, Carlo Valdinoci, was the only casualty of the explosion.
World War I was very unpopular in the US and even Wilson ran for his second term based on the slogan that he had “Kept us out of war”, but his real agenda was a little different, he looked to engage in the war, so he could not afford weak public opinion toward such an action, so Wilson tapped noted journalist George Creel to mount an unprecedented media blitz aimed at marketing the war to ordinary citizens.
The Missouri newspaperman was named head of the newly formed Committee of Public Information (CPI), a vast government propaganda bureau staffed with spin-doctors, copywriters and Madison Avenue advertising executives, many of whom would later go on to establish the burgeoning field of public relations. They even established a cadre of “4 Minute Men”, an all-volunteer society that fanned out across the country to stump for the war effort.
The speeches were not exceeding four minutes – because this was the guestimated as the attention span of the average American. Speakers were selected to invoke “trust”, so they were typically middle-aged males that were too old to fight, but who had experience working crowds. Ideal candidates were typically lawyers, doctors, preachers, and small-town politicians.
But there was also “fake news”, the CPI was front and center in creating images of the Germans as bloodthirsty brutes, often using the imagery of a rampaging ape carrying a blood-soaked club or bayonet in one arm and a dainty damsel with exposed breasts in the other. Government artists in the Division of Pictorial Publicity cranked out 1438 unique poster designs, many of them depicting German people as bloodthirsty monsters.
The CPI was the Facebook/Twitter/YouTube of the day. They issued 6,000 press releases. There were 75,000 four-minute men who delivered 7.5 million speeches in front of an estimated 300 million people. The CPI sent periodicals to more than 600,000 teachers for their use in their classrooms. Trusted and venerated organizations like the Boy Scouts of America were used to deliver Wilson's addresses door-to- door. The CPI was also responsible for making movies. There was an official newspaper delivered daily to 100,000 people.
Of course, this level of gaslighting lead to vigilante violence and while Creel and Wilson publicly deplored the violence, they never did anything to stop it.
History dot com notes:
“Even the most casual expression of doubt about the war could trigger a beating by a mob, and the humiliation of being made to kiss the flag in public. Americans who declined to buy Liberty Bonds (issued by the Treasury to finance the war) sometimes awoke to find their homes streaked with yellow paint. Several churches of pacifist sects were set ablaze. Scores of men suspected of disloyalty were tarred and feathered, and a handful were lynched. Most of the violence was carried out in the dark by vigilantes who marched their victims to a spot outside the city limits, where the local police had no jurisdiction. Perpetrators who were apprehended were rarely tried, and those tried were almost never found guilty. Jurors hesitated to convict, afraid that they too would be accused of disloyalty and roughed up.”
Even state and local governments and countless private institutions got into the act, firing German aliens, suspending performances of German music, and banning the teaching of German in schools. The Department of Justice created lists of “dangerous people”.
Not really that surprising, this was Obama’s playbook. Such brazenness got knocked down after WWII but came back, inch-by-inch, beginning with Johnson. Clinton took it a little farther but was generally kept in check by Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, a supposed Republican, set the table for Obama with the Patriot Act and the expansion of both the Deep State and the surveillance state, which Obama promptly weaponized to his benefit. It is so pervasive now, that Biden can say the silent part out loud and nobody cares.
The Wilson presidency is getting a remake in the Biden White House - and as remakes go, they are almost always worse than the original. This one promises to be a doozy.