Jack Henneman operates an excellent podcast called “The History of the Americans.” In his latest installment, he varies from his usual format to give us an editorial on the topic of the corruption of American history scholarship. Regular readers here would assume that I would approve, for Ethics Alarms has been deploring the ethics rot among American history academics for many years. Introducing his podcast, Henneman explains that he recently attended the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. “I learned a lot,” he writes, “especially how transparently politicized so many professional historians seem have become.”

“This episode recounts some of what I saw and heard, and concludes with my many thoughts on the greatest benefit of learning history, whether history should be ‘useable,’ and,” he adds, “why deploying history for partisan political purposes, as is now happening widely and overtly, corrupts history absolutely.”

The podcaster/historian does an excellent job, and it is work enhanced by his keen understanding of ethics. I listened to the podcast yesterday, and today read the truly nauseating partisan propaganda spewed on Bill Maher’s HBO show by once respectable historian Jon Meacham. Meacham wrote, among other celebrated tomes, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” (I don’t know why I’m promoting this traitor to his profession’s book, except that it is excellent, and he wrote it before he jumped the ethics shark, in 2008). He has since become a partisan Democrat to the point where I would view it as a conflict of interest, and one that he has not been forthcoming in disclosing.

It takes a lot for MSNBC to punish anyone for being unethical, that being one of the far, far left network’s missions, but Meacham was fired as a paid MSNBC contributor after he failed to disclose to the network that he was a Biden speechwriter. Before he was caught playing the role of objective scholarly analyst who was secretly being paid to endorse one party, he had made such obviously slanted claims as asserting on MSNBC that the Clinton impeachment process was wholly partisan, while Trump’s first impeachment was not. That’s not just biased, it’s counter-factual: Clinton’s impeachment had a bi-partisan House vote of 258-176, with 31 Democrats joining the Republicans. No Republican voted for Trump’s first impeachment. This is in the same category of dishonest historical analysis for partisan gain practiced by CNN’s pro-Democratic “Presidential scholar” Michael Beschloss, who just makes stuff up now.

Meacham is always described as a “Pulitzer Prize winning historian,” so it is prudent to recall that Nikole Hannah-Jones also got a Pulitzer for the fake history in her “1619 Project.” But when he’s being a pundit, which is apparently most of the time lately, Meacham just skips the facts as it suits him. He tweeted, for example, in 2019, that Trump’s mean tweets about “the Squad” meant that he “has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist President in American history.”

This isn’t just bad history—Trump took no actions as President that were racist by any fair analysis—it’s absurd. I’ll defend the Founders who held slaves on the grounds that racial enlightenment was slow to dawn, but actually owning slaves is more racist than impulsive tweets. Is there an argument to be made against that statement? Andrew Johnson opposed slavery: how can he possibly be the “most racist”? Now Andrew Jackson, who was a slave-owner, was also dedicated to clearing out as much of the Native American population as he could, authoring “The Trail of Tears.” John Tyler joined the Confederate Cabinet. Woodrow Wilson supported the KKK and Jim Crow, and if FDR’s locking up Japanese American citizens because their ancestry made them inherently untrustworthy as Americans in his eyes wasn’t more racist than a nasty tweet, then I guess I don’t know what “racism” means to Meacham. In fact, Mandy has asked for the floor…

Oh, yes, I was about to tell you Meacham’s latest campaign work for his patron, Joe Biden, before I got distracted. He told Bill Maher in part:

“…there is a patriotic duty to support President Biden against Donald Trump, for this reason. Patriotism is allegiance to an idea. It’s not just an allegiance to your own kind. That’s nationalism. Trump is a nationalist. President Biden is a patriot and I’m lucky, in that I don’t have particular policy passions, particular issues. I want the constitutional order to continue to unfold and President Biden is devoted to that constitutional order. Donald Trump is self-evidently not and I would say to my Republican friends — and I live in Tennessee, so that’s redundant — that it is in fact a moral question…the interesting thing about the Republican Party is, if you are, in fact, going to put partisanship, as your central organizing principle, if reflexive partisanship is the most important thing — I would argue that you need to read George Washington’s farewell address, you need to read the Founders that otherwise, you know, they love. You know, they love the Founders when they can move it around to agree with them. It’s very clear that if party spirit became the organizing principle, that, that was going to be fatal to the Constitution… [Lincoln} said if we have a fall, it’s not going to be from a foreign foe: It’s going to be from someone internally rising up and mastering those passions and those passions about partisanship, that’s what is ruining us.

I can rebut this fantasy with one picture—this:

The President whom the esteemed historian says is devoted to the constitutional order has used his Justice Department to prosecute political foes. He has embraced discrimination in the workplace and in the government. His Education Department, aping Obama, has directed universities to eliminate due process protections from those accused of sexual harassment on campus. His administration has attempted to censor political speech; facilitate indoctrination in the schools, and limit First and Second Amendment rights, while reacting to Supreme Court decisions by questioning its authority to do its Constitution-defined job. Meanwhile, Biden has ignored his presidential duty to see that the laws of the land are faithfully executed, by, for example, allowing, indeed, encouraging,  unvetted and unauthorized aliens to pour over the southern border. How can Biden be a constitutionalist when his own Presidency is substantially a sham, with him and his policies being manipulated by unelected extremist bureaucrats, in the manner of the Politburo in the old Soviet Union?

Meacham, and as Henneman correctly warns, he is far from alone, is abusing his perceived authority to persuade largely ignorant, poorly educated and civically illiterate Americans to support the political party he is allied with and has profited from, based on assertions that should be the product of scholarship, but are not. He represents dishonest punditry, rotten integrity and corrupted expertise, and he is supposed to be one of our best historians.