“I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along — where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony”. (emphasis added) 

“These people who claim to be progressive … have been far more vicious to me than any southerner…” (ABC News: Part I: My Grandfather’s Son) 

For progressives, who conceal their racism with the false piety of multiculturalism, this accusation is a serious breach of their camouflage.  

But progressive racism is not just a modern phenomenon. President Woodrow Wilson, the darling of progressives for his internationalism, was also a racist. As Charles Freund wrote in an article sub-titled ‘The menacing Mr. Wilson’, 

“Domestically, however, Wilson was a racist retrograde, one who attempted to engineer the diminution of both justice and democracy for American blacks—who were enjoying little of either to begin with.  

Wilson‘s racist views were hardly a secret. His own published work was peppered with Lost Cause visions of a happy antebellum South. As president of Princeton, he had turned away black applicants, regarding their desire for education to be “unwarranted.”…. 

One legacy of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy was that Washington‘s large black populace had access to federal jobs, and worked with whites in largely integrated circumstances. Wilson‘s cabinet put an end to that, bringing Jim Crow to Washington.  

Wilson allowed various officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments. One justification involved health: White government workers had to be protected from contagious diseases, especially venereal diseases, that racists imagined were being spread by blacks. In extreme cases, federal officials built separate structures to house black workers. Most black diplomats were replaced by whites; numerous black federal officials in the South were removed from their posts; the local Washington police force and fire department stopped hiring blacks. Wilson’s own view, as he expressed it to intimates, was that federal segregation was an act of kindness.” (Reason Magazine – Dixiecrats Triumphant)  

Of course, modern progressive racism is more subtle than the Jim Crow mentality of Woodrow Wilson. Justice Thomas asserts that liberal whites have created a system of ideological segregation which keeps blacks inferior. He notes,  

“People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same. My grandfather always said that, ‘The water’s exactly the same.’ But those same people are extremely comfortable saying I can’t drink from this fountain of knowledge”   

“It’s similar to what you had in the South, you know: ‘you’re stupid because you’re black,’ that ‘you smell bad because you’re black.’ I mean, it’s all the same thing”.  

“Whites can think anything they want, and we can have opinions about frivolous things, like I could be a (Washington) Nationals fan, as opposed to being an (Baltimore) Orioles fan, Oh, that’s ok. But if it’s important, if you’re black, you all have to think the same thing”.  (emphasis added) (ABC News: Part I: My Grandfather’s Son) 

While progressives may dismiss Justice Thomas’s allegations, he is not the only black person to see the true face of progressive racism which is hidden under their false proclamations of multiculturalism and political correctness. 

Just ask Michael Steele, Condoleezza Rice and Juan Williams how quickly, and viciously, the mask of racial tolerance disappears from the progressive face when a black person strays from the ideological plantation.  

Columbia University’s invitation (Ahmadinejad to Speak on Campus) to Iran’s Ahmadinejad to speak at its World Leaders Forum is simply the latest in a long line of elite, progressive universities’ ties to oppressive dictators. In the 1930’s, both Columbia (No Excuse for Columbia’s Nazi Links ) and Harvard (Harvard’s Nazi Ties) welcomed  Nazi officials on their campuses and participated in exchanges with Nazi universities.  Since Ahmadinejad and the Islamo-fascists are the heirs of Hitler, it is not surprising that they are so popular with progressive academia. 

The progressives invoked the principle of free speech to justify their fondness for tyrants. Columbia’s president said,

“It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices” 

Too bad that Columbia’s devotion to free speech does not apply to Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist’s right to speak. (Columbia Student Union Nixes Speaker )  

In regards to Ahmadinejad’s invitation, John Coatsworth, interim dean of the School of International and Public Affairs said,

“Opportunities to hear, challenge, and learn from controversial speakers of different views are central to the education and training of students for citizenship in a shrinking and still dangerous world”.   

Hey John, I hear Donald Rumsfeld is available.

1) “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” 

2) “Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.” 

3) “Whereas the hereditarily healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children, countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community.” 

4) “In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents… society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” 

Sound like pieces of Nazi propaganda? In fact, only one of the above quotes is from the Nazis. Can you guess which one? And, would you believe the other three are from two prominent American progressives writing in the 1920’s? 

If you find it difficult to identify the Nazi quote, it is because the science of eugenics  was very influential in the thinking of both the Nazis and American progressives. In fact, something liberal historians won’t tell you, the Nazis used American laws passed by American progressives to justify their own eugenics program, which was ultimately transformed into the Holocaust.  

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. “I have studied with great interest,” he told a fellow Nazi, “the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”  (Eugenics and the Nazis — the California connection)  

Eugenics is one aspect of the dark side of “progressive’ thought.  

Oh, for those still wondering, the third quote is from a Nazi pamphlet written in 1933. Quotes 1 & 4 were written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the case of Buck v. Bell, 1927, upholding Virginia’s involuntary sterilization law. Quote 2 is from the book The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922) written by Margaret Sanger. (Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood Founder)