LETTERS RECEIVED BY A CANADIAN

I keep being sent, and encountering in the wilds of the internet, essays from social commentator and professor of American history Heather Cox Richardson. She has a Substack with millions of subscribers, titled Letters from an American, a daily newsletter, and the requisite podcast, too. All those deliver her scholarly, history-informed take on current events to a nations-worth of inboxes and feeds. My first real encounter with the professor was some years ago when I was compelled to read her essay and listen to a related interview she gave on PBS about gun control in America, or rather the lack thereof. Despite being on the same page about the wild overabundance of firearms in the US and the nation’s lack of discomfort with such easy and regular public executions, I was positively shocked to find her putting into writing a whole menagerie of, frankly, silly anecdotes and explanations. In paragraph after paragraph she misread aspects of popular culture and misrepresented whole political movements and major historical events all while reframing the origins and implementation of gun legislation. That’s a lot of revisionist history in one document, even for a historian. And so I went and spelled all that out in my own essay, titled She Loves Her Guns.

In my evaluation of her former essay on guns I found nearly every example she gave to be, in reality, the opposite of how it was presented. And none of it was subtle or confined. Her arguments were maximally broad and attacked almost indiscriminately and without verification or qualification. (In this way I see her work as the scholarly equivalent to, and providing academic endorsement for, mobs accosting diners, engaging in mass looting, or crushing people's skulls, launching rocks and bricks from overpasses and roadsides or burning down buildings and even whole communities…) For example, to point to the popular love for and supremacy of the lone male and his firearms, she says has overtaken the American mind, she argued the first Star Wars trilogy were Westerns from the ‘80s celebrating a single, untethered male protagonist using his guns apparently, in her mind, to take on a just and good government and coerce the whole galaxy to his will. I hope you’ll agree that’s quite the misreading, almost like she had never encountered the films. Don't we all know those movies were Samurai flicks from the ‘70s, closely borrowing from Akira Kurosawa's body of work, about a kid never taking up guns or his own personal vendetta but instead finding a higher calling, learning the most challenging sacred wisdom and code of ethics (with the help of a league of peace-preaching, nature-worshiping monks whose primary tools are meditation, introspection, feeling, and telekinesis), all while gathering together an extraordinarily diverse community to take on a repressive and genocidal empire? I think so.

From there — having missed the part where, bare handed, the female protagonist singlehandedly takes down the most gruesome gangster in the galaxy (who is also ten times her size) with the very chains of her bondage — the professor goes even further down the sexism line, rewriting history as she does, by focusing on actual cowboy films. In this professor's gonzo version of reality, women were dominant in the remote frontier towns of the Old West. She, a scholar of 19th century American history, insists those primary figures go unrepresented or severely underrepresented in all popular Westerns. And yet to read any history or look at any film example that comes to mind fails to find any sense in her bizarre historical revision and wacky movie review. One is left to wonder if she has ever seen a Western? Too, why has she not written the book, or merely cited one, about how ladies were actually living at parity with gentlemen everywhere west of Chicago?

But, because that wasn’t enough and because almost 600 race-flavoured riots recently broke out in every corner of her nation (largely manifest out of absurdly false and indefensible claims, resulting in untold billions in damages, countless serious injuries, and many lost lives in dozens of US cities), the professor decided to do what she was able to also fan the flames and tack onto her deeply silly sex-based premise a whole racial framing. Rather than offering something plausibly true, and without citing even one film, once again she imposed the same revisionist reversal on some of the best known and widely viewed films of our time. She demanded these films were all devoid of any people of colour or, if those folks were present, that they were depicted only as the enemy. Thereby, to her, these movies infected the minds of generations of Americans with such terrible notions. The problem being, of course, that none of that was true of any of the dozen or more of the most popular such films, or any I could find, within her late 20th century framework.

But she doesn't stop there. The professor also goes on and rewrites the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, the history of the NRA and US gun legislation, while erasing the Black Nationalists and Malcolm X. The fictions she loves weaving are just this comprehensive in their make-believe. Why? Doubtless she is perfectly well-aware her audience loves her message dearly and even needs it, too. As such she has no concern that anyone will ever question a word of it, never mind go and verify her abundant absurd assertions. And with the example of Claudine Gay, the not-really-disgraced former Harvard dean and president (oh, and career plagiarist) who remains a respected tenured professor, she likely has no worries at all...

So, in light of the above and all her past work, what are the chances her latest offering is of an entirely different nature and quality, essentially violating all precedence and her whole business model?

Her recent essay starts by noting some dramatic details from a federal immigration raid that took into custody 37 people, people that agents said were involved in serious crimes. The good professor suggests the criminality of those folks is totally unfounded and that the Department of Homeland Security offered no real evidence supporting their claims. Naturally, the professor (with her status, access, resources, and national profile) makes no attempt to verify or refute what is offered by the department or its agents. She also mysteriously leaves out the simple context that almost 40 people, said to be criminals, were extracted from just one tiny apartment building that also happened to be right next to an elementary school. Instead of anything sensible, she goes and cites some random folks who provide no evidence of any kind to support their own claims about what was done or said. Of course, she also offers loads of eyewitness invective, like “We’re under siege. We’re being invaded by our own military.” Cox Richardson’s whole essay, in just this way, is nothing more than a set of unfounded, context-free proposals. In fact, as is typical for the professor (and as if she never read Naomi Klein), the whole episode is presented as if everything to be found, anywhere you look, particularly around immigration, is shocking and unprecedented rather than what it is: perfectly normal and preceded by more than three decades of identical raids. So it all just seems like noise. And it could be written off as such. But the professor does, of course, have a purpose with her daily barrage of anti-historical rantings.

After a summer of immigration-related riots in dozens of cities, two assassination attempts against the president, and the public execution of the president’s biggest supporter and leading organizer, and much more, the professor assures her millions-strong audience that these events — immigration agents conducting legal immigration actions endorsed by most Americans and initiated by the government they voted in — are further evidence of the nation’s “rapid advance toward authoritarianism”. She assures her readers they have an administration “rotting from the inside” headed by an “unstable” president, both of which she insists are illegitimate and forwarding only a series of deeply unpopular, radical far-right plans. Would it have been any less hyperbolic or any less of a call for direct action and mob violence if she had offered, just one more time, just like the majority of the popular press and talking heads on television, that the elected government is literally a party of Nazis and their leader literally Hitler? I would submit that she, in the “words are violence” camp, the “guns are bad [unless they're being discharged at our political enemies]” crowd, knows exactly what she is doing.

Is the lack of any historical context because she doesn't know it or can't look it up? Or is it because offering any at all would shatter her whole narrative? With one Google search and ten seconds of browsing I find that every Democratic administration in my lifetime, from Clinton to Obama to Biden, built the whole mass deportation program starting in the ‘90s (in response to Regan’s amnesty program, it might be noted) and all expanded capacity and legal frameworks for home and workplace raids of the sort Trump is enacting. Even in recent memory you have Obama taking office, with Biden at his side, and his government making mass immigration raids perfectly commonplace. Those raids weren’t just seen as essential but were explained by everyone in leadership as entirely reasonable and just. And in carrying out such investigations and raids, federal agents found instances where entire factories of hundreds of people (in places like Iowa, for example, which is to say deep in the country not adjacent the southern border) operating entirely by employing folks with no work permits, to say nothing of permission to be in the country. That one Iowa instance alone resulted in 9,300 misdemeanor charges, alleging the business didn't just operate on illegal labour but also endangered the lives of the Mexican and Guatemalan children who they had operating dangerous equipment, exposed to dangerous chemicals, and labouring excessive hours. When discussing these raids, along with his fortification of the southern border, Obama would ask why someone in Mexico City had to submit paperwork and wait a year for a permit while someone else takes it upon themself to jump the queue, endanger people's lives at every step along the way, and then experience no repercussions but, in fact, get rewarded for cheating the system? Not a crazy question. He and everyone else in the party would also note what Cox Richardson does not, that all too commonly people who don’t want to have a background check and who never show up for their immigration hearing have nothing good to offer and carry on their anti-social behaviour as guests of the US. (You might note the parents of the children labouring in meat packing plants, and the hundreds of other adults who knew what was going on, saw no problem, likely lied to enable their employment, and were also not charged or convicted of failing to protect these children.) Also left out is that, at its height, Obama's deportation regime saw the removal of around 400,000 people in a single year, something Trump praised and publicly promised he would try to emulate if he won in 2016. Even with all that left out, why not at least acknowledge that what was truly unprecedented were the numbers of folks pouring over the border from all over the planet? Where is the error in any of this and why leave all of it out?

Even if the professor despises all of this, why not at least be honest and explain that her position is extremely unpopular? Why not point out that none of what is happening is unusual and that Trump has a mandate from the overwhelming majority of the population, by some polls 80% of the population? Why not spell out how, as Pew Research tells us, “nearly all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (96%) say at least some immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported, compared with 71% of Democrats and Democratic leaners”? Why not mention how it would be impossible to track down all of the many millions of folks who snuck across the border in the recent decades and that offering a pathway to citizenship for most “illegals” is desirable to the most Americans? 

Why not just consider the logistics of such a popular undertaking and what that would look like. If the number of unauthorized and undocumented folks in the US is between 10 and 16 million, as most recent studies seem to converge around, then even a very small portion of that population will be a rather large number. Just 2% of 12 million would be the entire population of Buffalo, New York (or Richmond, Virginia; Scottsdale, Arizona; or Spokane, Washington). 6% of 14 million would be 840,000 (Indianapolis or San Francisco). Effectively everyone in America is supportive of figuring out who those folks are, tracking them down, and removing them. Still, if only the tiniest fraction of that “small” cohort of evictees, ones that nearly all Americans want out of the country, put up a fight against federal agents then you’re talking about something like 10,000 ugly confrontations, or 200 in each state, or 10 every single day for the rest of the Trump administration. So, if amnesty was extended to nearly everyone and only the smallest number of people, those violent criminals, human traffickers, and egregious fraudsters that everyone agrees should be ineligible to stay are kicked out, you would surely still be left with so many accounts and so much footage of truly ugly arrests (of people’s family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbours) that it would amount to something like a decades-long TV series. I suppose that’s why, if she wants to frame a single scene as she does (as the climax to a horror film, the rise of and take-over of most monstrous fascism) the history professor has to so comprehensively decontextualize every bit of this.

Of course, you can look at it from the other side. Surely we all can and do. Cox Richardson seems to imply that it is an absence of empathy, rather than by way of it, that folks disagree with her. Well, who cannot imagine their local or national economy going sideways and the government falling apart or just some crazy war finding them? But then who, having crossed the planet to get out and to sneak into Liberia or Laos, after years in the country and with years of warning to turn yourself in, to get out or be removed, would then blame local authorities or residents for your situation and then not only make a wild scene or even have a stand-off when they show up at your place of work or residence to ask questions or take you in but also risk the well-being of everyone in your proximity at the same time? That, if only to me, is a truly supreme level of selfishness. And those who encourage it look to me to be taking empathy to the level of blind stupidity. They’ve gone from the absurdist “trust all women” to “trust all men who paid human traffickers to smuggle them to America and then deliberately evaded border and immigration rules while continually lying to everyone they meet.” They've gone from calls for police/prison and immigration reform to arguing that non-citizens should be immune to any aspect of the US legal system, unable to be charged with or prosecuted for any crimes of any kind. The moral genius is so strong you can almost smell it. They, like Cox Richardson, won’t entertain the idea that even 1% of these arrests could be justified. They won’t ask why these millions of folks — nearly all of whom are in the country illegally and housed illegally while working illegally — don’t do the right thing and come forward or otherwise self-deport. They would rather laud these people for continuing to make terrible decisions, for never taking responsibility for anything, and for making life miserable for everyone in their vicinity. Why not ask why millions of people are hiding out in homes or apartment buildings full of folks, putting those innocents’ lives and that of their own and others’ children at risk all because they couldn’t or didn’t want to fill out some paperwork or stand in a line like everyone else? Why frame those who have, in addition to their multidimensional evasions and deceptions, tucked themselves under a blanket of civilian hostages in this way as inherently innocent and benign? Why not get into any of this? Why not ask any obvious questions of those folks or their supporters?

Well, without any real argument or disagreement to articulate about these (very popular) policies, and without any consideration of who is being dealt with or why, the professor is left to go silly and to chastise Donald Trump, a couple of times, for, of all things, speaking to the country’s top military brass “for 70 minutes”. This much facetime between the head of the military and his officers, she says, is evidence that the man is unhinged and unfit to continue running the country. Yet she, the historian, offers this knowing every reader and listener of hers was witness to years of the last president (and even his top brass) going totally AWOL, unable to be located and unable (or perhaps not allowed by his puppeteers) to speak publicly, providing far less, shockingly less, time with reporters than any modern president... and that all of that absence arrived before his catastrophic debate and total disappearance from the public eye.

I don’t know. To me it looks like the professor is convinced her audience, so many millions of them, are idiots. She wants to teach them nothing, if she knows anything at all, and she is confident they want to learn the same. I just don't see room for an alternative. What could that be?