Neither tub nor man

Conservatives on social media more or less agree: Harriet Tubman was a badass (and a Republican!!1) who used guns and stuff, and Andrew Jackson was an douchebag Democrat who ruled like a dictator.

Sounds about right I guess. I’m personally A-OK with Jackson getting the boot, because he gave us now-deified mob democracy and represents the worst of the Imperial Presidency.

But my gut tells me that this can’t be the end of the story, because Republicans contorting themselves to act as though Democrats Are The Real Racists never actually scores them any points; they are here to serve as the court jester for progressives to compare themselves to, playing the loser from the backwater province known as the past. Someone way less smart and cool than progressives must be outraged at history moving forward, right?

I haven’t seen any specific examples yet, but before even writing this sentence I assume that there’s a practical cottage industry of “look at these 12 Twitter accounts who said racist things about Harriet Tubman!” articles. Let’s check:


Mariani does it again! Or maybe it’s not that I’m clairvoyant, but that the media is always willing to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find a few people with double-digit follower counts on Twitter to confirm something that we’re all already supposed to believe: that there’s a powerful racist conspiracy controlling America. Is the tweet from @whitepower12345, a 7-hour-old account with 6 followers and an egg avatar, seriously not enough to convince you?

Is there a white supremacist ideology dominating society’s powerful institutions? I don’t know. But there’s some evidence that that this isn’t the case. Exhibit A: the government just opted to replace a white man with a black woman on the twenty-dollar bill.


  1. This article is such horse shit. The ‘exhibit’ that is used is a throw-away Twitter account with 9 tweets (at the time of this comment), which all center around the subjects of this article. The account was created THE DAY BEFORE THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED, April 20, and stopped posting April 22nd. Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break.

    This is a hit piece and doesn’t represent the views of Republicans. Robert Mariani, you should be ashamed of yourself.


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