If you missed last night’s brief post, please do read the interview of Paul Krugman by Greg Sargent that I wrote about there if you haven’t already.
Today the New York Times had a front-page article headlined Trump Faces the Complicated Reality of a Costly, Unpopular War in Iran, by Zolan Kanno-Youngs. (I decided to not burn one of my limited number of gift articles for the month on it. but if someone can contribute one, please do.) What really struck me was the headline. Trump isn’t “facing” anything. He wants to hold out until he can find something he can call a win. But none of the options he wants are viable now, and he’s refusing to accept reality. As Krugman said yesterday, “A guy who can’t admit that he lost a presidential election to Joe Biden is not going to be able to admit that he lost a war to the mullahs of Iran.” but he really has lost.
And now for something completely different — I had found an online U.S. history forum that appeared to be interesting at first. Then someone posted a question that in effect asked which of a group of politicians would have been the best person to serve as president during the Cuban Missile Crisis. John Kennedy was one of the choices, but so was Richard Nixon. And to my astonishment, one respondent after another chose Nixon. Nixon was, in fact the “obvious” choice, they all said.
This was disorienting, I thought most of the die-hard Nixon supporters were dead by now. These appeared to be young people. And at one point I actually asked, is there some kind of right-wing propaganda push going on to rehabilitate Richard Nixon?
And yes, folks, there is indeed a right-wing propaganda push going on to rehabilitate Richard Nixon. I found a news story about it. See The Campaign to Make Richard Nixon Great Again at NBC News, from November 2025. This effort has some of the usual suspects behind it, such as Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, but they’ve actually gotten some of their disinformation into real public schools. It’s a real assault on history.
In the right-wing alternative history universe Nixon was a rock of unwavering defiance against the nefarious forces of Communism. John Kennedy — who actually did handle the Cuban Missile Crisis pretty well, as I remember — was a pretty boy fluff head compared to Nixon. Watergate was a setup by the Deep State; Nixon didn’t do anything wrong. Oh, and Nixon won the Vietnam war, according to the group participants. I’m serious; he won it. News to me, and I remember the Vietnam war pretty darn well.
I knew you’d want to be advised. Oh, and at some point I was blocked from that forum. Works for me.
You have to be able to control access to records and the media on the scale of North Korea to pull it off in the US. Yes, there's a segment of the population that wants to demonize democracy and free thought. I don't want to incarcerate people who would deify Nixon. I would not let them teach in school. Schools should never be a forum for falsehoods. Nixon signed the EPA into existence. In his tenure, black people who worked in the White House got equal pay. (I base that on the movie, 'The Butler', which I think was historically accurate.) Nixon abused the power of the presidency in a time when most republicans were loyal to the Constitution. The voters were better educated about what the USA stood for and had a higher expectation of the people they elected.
I hope I made the difference clear. You can have your own opinion, even based on lies. Institutions, like law, government, history, and science, must be based on truth, the best facts we have. What we know will change, new facts will come to light. Higher education must allow new ideas to be presented, but they can be challenged and must be validated.
Here in FL, censorship is a real thing. Books, including some classics. Teachers are subject to termination if they don't adhere to the script written in Tallahassee. This is a move to suppress thinking and knowledge about historical facts regarding race and discrimination, and human sexuality. This is just so wrong because it validates the power of the state to legitimize bigotry and criminalize sexuality outside the mainstream. And I'm tolerant of bigotry if you keep it to yourself – acting on it is when it becomes criminal.
The thing is – the culture has changed in the last 30 years. People don't live in the bubble of the 60s. We know people who are gay and lesbian, married, with kids. They are so much like hetro people. They were around before, but hiding their lifestyle. Straight people, for the most part, do not want them persecuted. I'd write a line about the proliferation of interracial marriage – it's the same deal. The stopper was loosened 60 years ago – the genie is fully out of the bottle and not going back.
Nixon was bad in many ways, but he was supportive to some extent of civil rights. He appointed a black man, Arthur Fletcher Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment Standards in 1968. Fletcher, renowned as the "father of Affirmative Action" implemented the Revised Philadelphia Plan, the nation’s first federal affirmative action program, which required federal contractors to meet specified goals in minority hiring for skilled jobs in the notoriously segregated construction industry.
Fletcher had major qualms about serving in the administration of Ronald Reagan. He supported George Bush in the primaries and worked hard to get the black contingent at the 1980 convention to support Bush as Reagan’s running-mate (they unanimously did). When Reagan offered Fletcher chairmanship of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he demurred, as it was already becoming clear through the activities of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights William Reynolds that the Reagan administration would do even less for the cause of civil rights than that of Richard Nixon. The appointment subsequently went to Clarence Thomas. (that figures)
The year 1989 saw the inauguration of Fletcher’s friend George Bush as president. The following year the new president appointed Fletcher chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR). Here Fletcher again proved that his first loyalty was to the cause of civil rights rather than Republican political goals. Early in his tenure on the commission, President Bush vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of 1990 and then subsequently signed virtually the same bill in 1991. Throughout this process Fletcher was unsparing in his criticism of his friend’s administration and yet lobbied to get Bush to change his stance. In 1995 Fletcher resigned from the USCCR and ran a brief campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, primarily to protest the party’s turn from the cause of civil rights and specifically in opposition to frontrunner (and eventual nominee) Bob Dole’s public disowning of affirmative action, Fletcher’s signature policy contribution.
Not only could Reagan not be a republican today, Nixon might not either, having committed the unforgivable sin of supporting "DEI."
Not really, but it's complicated. Look up Nixon's "southern strategy" for the 1968 election. He did a whole lot of racist dog whistling over issues like crime and school desegregation busing in order to play on fears of white racist voters and bring them into the Republican party. But he did this without using explicitly racist language, unlike some other politicians of the time.