I have to confess, I am not a reader of the Slate online publication, so when I received an email from staff writer Molly Olmstead, I had to do a little research.
“These media sources are moderate to strongly biased toward liberal causes through story selection and/or political affiliation.
They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports and omit reporting of information that may damage liberal causes.
Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy.”
Ad Fontes Media“rates Slatein the Strong Left category of bias” and its Interactive Media Bias Chart lists Slatearticles as “Skews Left”; “Strong Left”; even “Hyper-Partisan Left.”
ZebraFactCheckpublished, March 21, 2024,“Slate helps spread PolitiFact’s false narrative,” which included maligning were Trump, Ben Carson, Lauren Boebert, Michele Bachman, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Newt Gingrich, and Tucker Carlson.
ZebraFactCheckadded: “As of March 19, 2024, Slatehas not corrected its twin boosts to PolitiFact’s misleading narrative.”
CBSNews.com,June 21, 2006, wrote:“Vanity Fair’sMichael Wolff: ‘Slate … is part of the opinion media” … National Review Online’sJonah Goldberg ‘Slate’s editors are so confident in their own superiority that they have rejected the practice of fact-checking.”
NewsBusters.orgnamed Slate in their article, September 1, 2024, “The Aggressively Anti-Trump Media STILL Insist They’re Not Biased”:
“In the last eight years, the mediahave left their biased fingerprints all over the news — starting with their coverage of Trump and his supporters.”
Wikipedia.comdescribed Slate: “the magazine is ‘not fundamentally a breaking news source’, but rather … witty and entertaining writing.”
With this understanding of Slate’s perspective, and since there was no request to keep it confidential, I have included the email I received from Slate.
On Sep 17, 2024, at 6:45 PM, Molly Olmstead wrote:
Hello Mr. Federer,
I’m a reporter for the online magazine Slate, and I am writing because you will be named in an upcoming story about the Courage Tour. I am writing with some fact-checking questions for an article.
In the article, I will be including the details that you presented in a powerpoint on U.S. history that contained misleading assertions, including that many historic lynchings targeted Republicans who had registered black voters. I will also mention falsehoods from the presentation, including that a 2023 reproductive health bill in California would have allowed people to kill babies 28 days after birth.
The focus of the story is my personal experience as an attendee at a stop in Michigan from May 19 to 21 and the political context of the Courage Tour—that it is a pro-Trump worship spectacle passing through key battleground states in advance of the upcoming election that mixes the religious and the political.
Please let me know if there is anything that needs to be corrected, clarified, or changed before Thursday Sept 19, at noon EST.
Since the Slatearticle is mentioning me, I feel it is necessary for me to respond before the deadline Molly gave me.
Dear Molly Olmstead,
Thank you for your email notifying me that your Slate publication will run an article on me in less than two days.
I have dedicated my life to accurate historical research so I am sure you will understand that your accusation of me making “misleading assertions” must be corrected.
First, I would like to point out that slaveholding was predominately a Democrat institution.
The first Democrat President, Andrew Jackson, owned slaves.
Democrat Senator Jefferson Davis from Mississippi became the President of the Confederacy. He stated: “African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing.”
Southern Democrats had passed Black Codes, also called “Jim Crow Laws,” referring to a 1828 New Orleans riverboat song called “Jump Jim Crow.”
Democrat state legislatures passed Black Codes, such as The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia, 1819:
“Be it passed: That all meetings of slaves, or free negroes or mulattoes mixing with such slaves, at any meeting-house or school for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, for any reason, shall be deemed an unlawful assembly.
And any officer of the law may have permission to enter the house to arrest or send off such slaves, and to punish them with up to twenty lashes.”
In 1854, a Virginia white woman, Mrs. Margaret Douglass, was imprisoned in the common jail of Norfolk for a month for teaching black children to read.
When Sophia Auld began to teach young Frederick Douglass to read, her husband yelled at her and ordered her to immediately stop.
Frederick considered this the “first decidedly anti-slavery lecture”‘ he had ever heard, causing him to be determined to learn to read all-the-more.
Frederick Douglass later became a Republican advisor to Lincoln.
North Carolina’s Democrat Legislature passed the Black Code in 1825:
“No slave shall go armed with gun, sword, club, or other weapon … (The) constable … (is) required … to give such slave twenty lashes on his or her bare back.”
Georgia’s Democrat Legislature passed the Black Code in 1833:
“The free person of color … carrying fire-arms, shall receive on his bare back, thirty-nine lashes.”
Alabama’s Democrat Legislature passed the Black Code in 1833:
“No slave shall keep or carry any gun, powder, shot, club, or other weapon whatsoever, offensive or defensive … Every such offender shall receive … any number of lashes not exceeding thirty-nine, on his bare back.”
Mississippi’s Democrat Legislature passed the Black Code in 1865:
“No freedman, Negro, or mulatto shall carry or keep firearms or ammunition.”
Florida’s Democrat Legislature passed the Black Code in 1865:
“It shall not be lawful for any negro, mulatto, or other person of color, to own, use or keep in his possession or under his control, any Bowie-knife, dirk, sword, fire-arms or ammunition of any kind … Any negro … so offending, … shall be sentenced to stand in the pillory for one hour, or be whipped, not exceeding thirty-nine stripes.”
In 1850, the Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress passed the infamous Fugitive Slave Act, pushed through by Democrat Speaker Howell Cobb and Democrat Senate President William King, and signed by Democrat President Millard Fillmore.
The Fugitive Slave Act mandated if a runaway slave escaped to the North, citizens must capture him and return him to his Southern slave owner.
The Fugitive Slave Act imposed severe penalties on those who aided escaped slaves with food or shelter on their trek to Michigan or Canada.
It made it a federal crime to interfere with the slave catchers’ recovery of runaway slaves.
A person could be criminally liable, fined $1,000, and imprisoned for six months if they failed to report a neighbor suspected of helping slaves.
Some states defied the federal government by passing “personal liberty laws,” effectively nullifying it, and other communities insisted on jury trials before an alleged fugitive slave could be taken by federal authorities.
Some juries refused to convict those indicted.
Other communities forbade local law enforcement officials from using local jails to hold the accused.
In 1854, a slave named Joshua Glover ran away from his master in St. Louis, Missouri, and fled to Racine, Wisconsin, where he worked at a sawmill.
In March of 1854, authorized by the Fugitive Slave Act, police from St. Louis traveled across state lines to Racine.
On March 11, 1854, they bribed an acquaintance of Joshua Glover with $100 to open the cabin door. They stormed in and ambushed Glover.
Taking him by surprise, they hit him with the butt of a gun and St. Louis Police Deputy Marshal John Kearney clubbed him several times in the face.
The bleeding Glover was thrown in the back of a wagon and taken to the Milwaukee jail.The kind jailer treated his wounds. The next day, word of Glover’s arrest spread through Racine.
The largest crowd ever in the town’s history gathered in the square.
Over a hundred residents rushed to Milwaukee. There they joined a crowd, which by evening had grown to 5,000, assumed to be predominately white.
They grabbed lumber and pickaxes from a nearby construction site and broke through the jail wall, freeing Glover. He was quickly put in a wagon and whisked out of town.
The Racine Daily Morning Advocate printed March 12, 1854:
“Imagine a crowd of four to six thousand persons smashing in the jail, releasing the negro and then running as they could the distance of a mile, and every man in town running too—windows open, handkerchiefs waving.”
The Sauk County Standard in Baraboo, Wisconsin, printed the Glover story, Wednesday, March 22, 1854.
After nine stops on the Underground Railroad, Joshua Glover made it to the Racine harbor where he was smuggled onto a boat headed across Lake Michigan to Canada.
Racine citizens printed a resolution in the Daily Morning Advocate, March 12, 1854:
“Resolved, that inasmuch as the Senate of the United States has repealed all compromises heretofore adopted by the Congress of the United States, we as citizens of Wisconsin, are justified in declaring, and hereby declare, the slave-catching law of 1850 disgraceful and also repealed.”
A historical marker in Milwaukee’s Cathedral Square Park is titled “The Rescue of Joshua Glover”:
“Joshua Glover was a runaway slave who sought freedom in Racine. In 1854, his Missouri owner used the Fugitive Slave Act to apprehend him.
This 1850 law permitted slave catchers to cross state lines to capture escaped slaves. Glover was taken to Milwaukee and imprisoned …
Word spread about Glover’s incarceration and a great crowd gathered around the jail demanding his release.
They beat down the jail door and released Joshua Glover. He was eventually escorted to Canada and safety …
The Glover incident helped galvanize abolitionist sentiment in Wisconsin. This case eventually led the state supreme court to defy the federal government by declaring the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional.”
A few days after Joshua Glover was freed, the same anti-slavery Wisconsin citizens met on March 20, 1854, in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, to form an anti-slavery party.They named it the Republican Party.
Contrary to the 1619 Project’s historical revisionism, slavery was not a black versus white issue, it was a Republican versus Democrat issue.
The first National Republican Convention met in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1856, calling Americans to: “resist and overthrow the present National Administration (of Democrat President Franklin Pierce) as it is identified with the progress of the slave power to national supremacy.”
The original Republican platform was adopted June 18, 1856. It was the first ever political party in history to have abolition of slavery in its official party platform. It stated:
“This Convention of Delegates … are opposed to … the extension of Slavery into Free Territory … With our Republican fathers, we hold it to be a self-evident truth, that all men are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons …
Our Republican fathers … abolished slavery in all our National (Northwest) Territory … It becomes our duty to maintain this provision … against all attempts to violate it for the purpose of establishing Slavery …
We deny the authority of Congress … to give legal existence to slavery … It is both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy, and Slavery.”
Prior to the Civil War, America was divided into five categories:
1 Radical Republican North: whose attitude was, slavery is wrong–end it now.
2 Moderate Republican North: whose attitude was slavery is wrong, but the country should transition out of it gradually over time.
3 Amoral Neutral: who did not care about the value of human life, but were more concerned with financial issues such as wages, jobs, pocketbook, economy, taxes, and tariffs.
4 Moderate Democrat South: whose attitude was slavery is wrong, but it is settled law, the nation should just live with it, just have it be rare and few, and treat your slaves nice.
5 Extreme Southern Democrats: whose attitude was slavery is good and should be expanded into new territories.
They wanted Northerners, who were morally opposed to slavery, be forced to participate in it with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court, with 7 of the 9 justices being Democrat, issued their infamous Dred Scott decision.
Chief Justice Roger Taney, who had been appointed by Democrat President Jackson, wrote that Dred Scott was not a citizen, but property and belonged to his owner, writing in his decision that slaves were: “… so far inferior … that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for their own benefit.”
Instead of settling the slavery issue in hopes of averting the Civil War, the Supreme Court precipitated it.
Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, declared in Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857:
“Two weeks ago Judge Douglas spoke here on the … Dred Scott decision … He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes ALL men, black as well as white … He boldly denies that it includes Negroes … I protest against that …”
Lincoln continued:
“Chief Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, admits that the language of the Declaration is broad enough to include the whole human family, but he and Judge Douglas argue that the authors of that instrument did not intend to include Negroes …
I think the authors of that noble instrument intended to include all men … Dred Scott, his wife and two daughters were all involved in the suit … Judge Douglas is delighted to have them decided to be slaves …”
Lincoln added:
“How differently the respective courses of the Democratic and Republican parties … Republicans inculcate … that the Negro is a man; that his bondage is cruelly wrong …
Democrats deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible, crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him.”
Lincoln became the first Republican President in 1861. Shortly after, Democrats fired upon Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War.
A major turning point in the Civil War was the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, the bloodiest day of fighting in American history with over 23,000 casualties.
The North was able to replace its fallen ranks by drafting European immigrants from crowded northern cities, but the South was agricultural and did not have the population base from which to draw new recruits. It was a war of attrition.
Lincoln met with his cabinet to draft the Emancipation Proclamation. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Portland Chase recorded Lincoln explaining:
“The time for the annunciation of the emancipation policy can no longer be delayed. Public sentiment will sustain it, many of my warmest friends and supporters demand it, and I have promised God that I will do it.”
When asked what he meant, Lincoln replied:
“I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee were driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.”
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation stated:
“I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief … do, on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three … publicly proclaim … that … persons held as slaves … are, and henceforward shall be, free …
And upon this act … I invoke … the gracious favor of Almighty God.”
Lincoln addressed the Indiana Regiment, March 17, 1865:
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
Lincoln proclaimed in his Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
General Ulysses S. Grant, who later was a Republican President, recalled in 1878 his thoughts when he heard the Civil War had started:
“As soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt … that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.”
Booker T. Washington wrote in The Story of My Life and Work, 1901:
“So far as I can now recall, the first knowledge that I got of the fact that we were slaves, and that freedom of the slaves was being discussed, was early one morning before day, when I was awakened by my mother kneeling over her children and fervently praying that Lincoln and his armies might be successful, and that one day she and her children might be free.”
Lincoln supported the Republican Congress passing the 13TH AMENDMENT, which added abolished slavery to the U.S. Constitution, effective December 6, 1865.
He rushed the 13th Amendment through Congress before the war ended, as he knew his Emancipation Proclamation was issued using Presidential war powers which expire once the war ended.
Lincoln also feared that after the war, the southern states readmitted to the Union may block the Amendment’s ratification and re-institute a form of slavery.
The 13th Amendment was passed by the U.S. Senate on April 8, 1864. All 30 Republican Senators voted in favor of it, joined by 4 Democrats.
The U.S. House passed the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865. All 86 Republicans voted in favor of it, joined by 15 Democrats, 14 Unconditional Unionists, and 4 Union men.
Voting against the 13th Amendment were 50 Democrat Congressmen, joined by 6 Union men.
Though not necessary, Lincoln added his signature to the 13th Amendment after the words “Approved February 1, 1865.”
Lincoln said in his Second Annual Message, December 1, 1862:
“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free … We shall nobly save — or meanly lose — the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain … a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”
Nearly a half-million died fighting in the Civil War which freed four million slaves. In Charleston, South Carolina, a mass grave was uncovered of 257 Union soldiers who had died in a prison camp.
On May 1, 1865, former slaves organized a parade, led by 2,800 singing black children, in which they prayed, read Bible verses, sang spirituals, and reburied the soldiers with honor as an act of gratefulness for their ultimate sacrifice which gave them freedom.
News of freedom from slavery finally reached Galveston, Texas, June 19, 1865, resulting in that date being celebrated annually as “Juneteenth.”
On November 22, 1865, Republicans denounced Democrats as their Black Codes were institutionalized racism.
On February 5, 1866, Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens introduced legislation to give former slaves “40 acres and a mule.”
Democrats opposed it, led by President Andrew Johnson.
On April 9, 1866, Republicans in Congress overrode President Johnson’s veto and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, conferring rights of citizenship on freed slaves.
Many Black Codes in the South required former slaves to be “apprenticed” to “employers” and be punished if they left.
In many cases, this resulted in the fate of sharecroppers being little better than slavery.
To force Southern States to extend the rights of State citizenship to former slaves, Republicans passed the 14TH AMENDMENT, May 10, 1866, in the U.S. House, and June 8, 1866, in the U.S. Senate.
One hundred percent of Democrats voted against it. The 14TH AMENDMENT was adopted by the States on JULY 28, 1868.
Republican Congressman John Farnsworth of Illinois explained, March 31, 1871:
“The reason for the adoption (of the 14th Amendment) … was because of … discriminating … legislation of those States … by which they were punishing one class of men under different laws from another class.”
Ulysses S. Grant became a Republican President. After thousands of pages to testimony of discrimination and persecution of blacks in the Democrat South, Grant started the Department of Justice and signed the Klu Klux Klan Act of 1871 to stop it.
Robert Cottrol, a professor of law at George Washington University, stated:
“Some of the earliest gun control legislation was in fact being aimed directly at black people …
Immediately after the Civil War the southern states in 1865 and ’66 passed the Black Codes and among other things the Black Codes prohibited the newly freed black population from having weapons …
In fact, that was one of the principal reasons for the passage of the 14TH AMENDMENT, it was basically to attack the Black Codes and also to apply the Bill of Rights and specifically the Second Amendment to the states.”
Republican Congressman Burgess Owens, who played in the NFL for the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, stated in the article, “Rep. Burgess Owens Uses History, Facts to Counter the Gun Control Push” (TTAG, 3/18/21):
“I grew up in the deep South at a time when African Americans were unable to defend themselves. After the Civil War, Black Codes and Jim Crow laws prohibited people of color from owning firearms …
As a child my father witnessed an altercation between his father and a Southern white man who thought my grandfather was being disrespectful and threatened to teach him a lesson.
But my grandfather was prepared … without firing his gun on another human being, my grandfather’s rights to own a firearm ensured his rights to protect his life, liberty and property.”
To free the slaves in the Civil War, an estimated 360,000 Union troops, a majority of whom were Republican, were killed fighting Confederates, a majority of whom were Democrat.
Molly, why is it so hard to conceived that after the war, the same Democrats who lynched freed slaves would want to lynch those who freed them?
“From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S. … Black people were the primary victims of lynching: 3,446, or about 72 percent of the people lynched, were Black. But they weren’t the only victims of lynching. Some white people were lynched for helping Black people or for being anti-lynching.”
The Montgomery Advertiser published September 25, 2017: “Many whites were lynched for fighting racism”:
“The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880-1950 states that, contrary to present-day popular conception, lynching was not a crime committed exclusively against black people.
Between the 1830s and the 1850s the majority of those lynched in the United States were whites. From 1882-1968, some 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States (not all lynchings were recorded).
Of these, 3,446 or 73 percent were black and 1,297 (27 percent) were white. In other words, whites were the victims of more than one-fourth of all lynchings in the United States …
Republicans often led the efforts to pass federal anti-lynching laws and their platforms consistently called for a ban on lynching.”
On December 3, 1906, in his Sixth Annual Message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt stated:
“A great many white men are lynched, but the crime is peculiarly frequent in respect to black men …
As Bishop Galloway, of Mississippi, has finely said … ‘The mob lynches a negro … very Christian patriot in America needs to lift up his voice in loud and eternal protest against the mob spirit that is threatening the integrity of this Republic’ …
There is but one safe rule in dealing with black men as with white men … that is, to treat each man, whatever his color, his creed, or his social position, with even-handed justice … Reward or punish the individual on his merits as an individual.”
Molly, you made the accusation that there were “falsehoods from the presentation, including that a 2023 reproductive health bill in California would have allowed people to kill babies 28 days after birth.”
I have a question for you, if California bill AB 2223 would not have decriminalized the killing of babies after birth, then why did they, after immense public pressure, amend its language by adding “causes that occurred in utero”?
California Family Councilposted May 20,2022: “Infanticide Bill” Amended After Huge Public Outcry, But Serious Problems Remain.”
“California Catholic Conference (CCC) Executive Director Kathleen Domingo released the following statement regarding amendments to Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ Assembly Bill (AB) 2223:
‘Today, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ AB 2223, which came to be known as the “infanticide bill,” was amended in the Assembly Appropriations Committee to confirm that a woman will not be investigated or charged for experiencing miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion, or ‘perinatal death due to causes that occurred in utero.’
‘This change definitely closes the door on potential unintended consequences of permitting infant deaths due to abuse, neglect, or abandonment, alleviating the concerns that the CCC brought to the author’s attention …
‘The California Catholic Conference is grateful to the Assembly Appropriations Committee, and to Assemblymember Wicks and her staff for working with us to clarify and narrow the bill language.’”
“Assembly Bill 2223 by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), is an abortion bill misleadingly labeled ‘Reproductive health,’ which actually seeks/sought to legalize infanticide to expand the killing of infants past the moment of birth up to weeks after, the Globe reported …
passed the Assembly Appropriations Committee in May after approval of an amendment that mostly removed the verbiage decriminalizing infanticide, the California Family Council reported
‘Legislators made the change after thousands of pro-life advocates came to Sacramento on April 19 to oppose the bill.’
‘The amendment confirmed the concerns California Family Council raised regarding the section that decriminalized ‘perinatal death.’”
Finally, Molly, as to your assertion that the Courage Tour was a “pro-Trump worship spectacle,” it was not.
I realized for those, such as yourself, who have been indoctrinated with left-leaning bias, find it is hard to understand those holding different views.
It is evident your publication has a left-leaning bias against Trump, resulting in your assignment to write an article putting his supporters in a negative light.
Millions of Americans support Trump because he stands up for the values they cherish, the most important of which is caring for innocent children. Indeed, when other candidates champion those views, they are supported with the same enthusiasm.
It may be difficult for you to understand, but there are people who believe a baby is precious and deserves life; that biological males should not compete with girls or be in girl’s locker rooms; that minor children are impressionable and should not be steered into life-altering surgeries, such as the heart-breaking stories of detransitioners attest.
Molly, as to your reference of us mixing “the religious and the political,” could it be that it is actually you who are mixing religious and political?
The definition of “religion,” according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, includes: “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.”
It seems you have a “a cause … held to with ardor.”
In the case of Kaufman v. McCaughtry, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (W.D. WI, 8/19/05) wrote:
“A religion need not be based on a belief in the existence of a supreme being … Atheism may be considered … religion … ‘Atheism is indeed a form of religion …’
The Supreme Court has recognized atheism as equivalent to a ‘religion’ for purposes of the First Amendment …
The Court has adopted a broad definition of ‘religion’ that includes non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as theistic ones …
Atheism is Kaufman’s religion, and the group that he wanted to start was religious in nature even though it expressly rejects a belief in a supreme being.”
Molly, I have enjoyed this opportunity to respond to you before your deadline and pray you have a future in journalism.
