When President Donald Trump announced he was going to issue a “major pardon” earlier this week, Americans were eagerly left in suspense.
Some suspected it would be either Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, but that wouldn’t make sense — neither are in U.S. custody, and Snowden hasn’t actually been charged with anything. Others expected it would be one of the many figures implicated in the Democratic Party’s “witch hunt” into Russian-connected Trump associates, but that wasn’t the case either.
Instead, Trump took a more symbolic approach, and issued a very late pardon for Susan B. Anthony, a 19th century feminist icon whose activism was instrumental in the recognition of a woman’s right to vote in America.
“She was guilty for voting,” the president said during a statement on Tuesday. “We’re going to be signing a full and complete pardon.”
So, the left should actually be happy with this one, right? After all, we’re talking about a feminist hero who was wrongfully charged and discriminated against by a patriarchal state bent on making women subservient to a male-dominated system?
You should know how this goes by now.
In the immediate aftermath of the posthumous pardon, suddenly Anthony is vicious racist. All that activism she did for women’s rights — as well as her earlier advocacy for abolition — counts for nothing now. CNN and other outlets were quick to publish the hot takes on why Anthony’s pardon is “perfectly Trumpian”, and that a Republican president has no place honoring figures the left likes to claim for itself.
Oh, by the way — Susan B. Anthony was a Republican.
Here’s Carl Benjamin to sort out all of this madness.
