This has inspired me today to follow up here with my response to Kenneth's article, and specifically as related to my ongoing concerns regarding Heather Cox Richardson. I also acknowledge and suspect that this will be triggering for some who read what I have to say, and it is obviously okay to disagree with me. I am very aware that HCR has a loyal following of thousands. I simply have a very different experience.
It has now been many years since I first read Heather Cox Richardson. It was a piece in which she was endorsing the neoliberal Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the run for the presidency. And I recall that she was attributing the single factor behind both the republican and also the fierce progressive pushback on Clinton as being rooted in misogyny. That was when I recognized that she was missing a much larger picture that was critical for us to be aware of, understand, and absorb. Yes, misogyny was definitely a factor. And there was so much more! And all my red flags went up. And my anger.
So I did a search on HCR and what she had to say about neoliberalism. I only found one piece by her at that time in which she attempted to explain and help us understand neoliberalism — which obviously demonstrated to me that she didn’t understand it at all. (If you already haven't, please see my piece here about neoliberalism: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2025/03/some-thoughts-on-why-it-is-so-important.html.) To this day, a vast number of Americans tragically do not know what neoliberalism is. And those like HCR have contributed to our ignorance.
And then, more recently, Heather Cox Richardson wrote about Joe Biden in a favorable light, including denying that he was a neoliberal. This truly made my stomach turn once again.
One other profoundly disturbing fact that is unjustifiable and totally unacceptable is HCR's complicity with Biden as related to the genocide of the Palestinian people that this administration has funded. She consistently refused to call out Biden's cozy relationship with the psychopath Netanyahu and the corporate democrats for participating in ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the horrors taking place everyday in Gaza. She also failed to condemn Biden's harsh responses to protests on college campuses by those who were demanding their universities divest from the systems responsible for funding genocide. This collusion by Heather Cox Richardson with Biden and his administration and their total failure to stop Netanyahu's genocidal war of annihilation, for me, makes this woman not worthy in any way of our trust or support.
What I am illuminating here that I see in HCR is a very disturbing pattern that I've witnessed in which the Democratic Party is painted as always being in the right, thus adding to both our ignorance and the poisonous polarizations and propaganda which run rampant in our society. How can we expect republicans to be accountable when democrats aren't also modeling that behavior? (Not that all aren't — the progressives in the Democratic Party are absolutely calling out the neoliberals in their party along with the fascists in the Republican Party.)
HCR demonstrates to me that she does indeed want to keep history and all democrats “comfortable” and positive. And in doing so she fails miserably in pointing out the shadow side of the neoliberals in the Democratic Party who have played a major role in bringing us Trump. Twice. Added on to that is their support of Netanyahu's genocide of the Palestinian people. And it is these same corporate owned democrats who today are horrifyingly not standing up to the current fascist regime of Trump and his administration.
I am so exhausted and done with the comfortable, simplistic, polarizing, inaccurate, and dangerous narratives that say all republicans bad, all democrats good.
Heather Cox Richardson does some good work. Yes, this is true. That said, she is also severely compromised. Time and time again she has failed to bring us the truth of the larger pictures that are so vital for us to know. And it is the elements of truth combined with historical misinformation, polarizing political propaganda, and collusion with atrocities that makes her dangerous.
Knowing who to trust for our information is critical. Absolutely vital to the welfare of us all. As Chris Hedges has said, "We cannot change the world if we cannot understand it." May we all be passionate seekers of truth, wherever it may lead.
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