I agree with what you say as far as it goes. What I can’t understand is the ones who support the Biden administration and so many other Democrats.

Some say they are grifters and it’s all about money, but that’s not the way I had perceived people like Bill Kristol or Joshua Goldberg previously. If they never cared about conservative principles, they certainly gave a good imitation of it before Trump came along.

Or maybe their conservative principles were something like: speak in academic terms and never enter the rough-and-tumble fray.

They are mission-driven, and, unless they’ve already defected to the Democrats, their commitment to saving the Party and the country is fanatic and lets them easily disregard facts and the authoritarian actions of those in power.

It’s not about the issues, it’s all about themselves and how they need to be regarded.

Obviously, people like the Bushes have staffs that, among other things, can search for writers of popular history (who probably did not even vote for the subject) who are willing to be paid (no doubt handsomely) to rehabilitate a moderate Republican president’s reputation in the eyes of at least the center-Left portion of the media and the book-buying pseudo-intellectual gentry. That seems to be what happened here.

The only significance of the question of whether Meacham was somehow a “conservative” is that, if he’s always been on the Left (even the “center” Left), it really makes no sense to call him a never-Trumper.

See my comment here.

Unlike the others, though, Beck later said he’d been wrong and apologized to Trump. See this.

The endless repetition of the same phrases in Biden’s speeches, and presumably in Meacham’s contributions to them — is that a rhetorical or propaganda device, or an indication that Meacham and Biden have very few ideas and very few arguments? Also, doesn’t the mixture of the pious and the militant appeal to both the better and the worse angels of his listeners’ nature? If the soul of the country is at stake, isn’t anything allowable to win the battle?

Which brings me to that long-time Hahvahd-based “presidential historian,” Doris Kearns Goodwin: she has been the subject of at least two plagiarism controversies, one of which led her to “resign from the Pulitzer Prize Board and to relinquish her position as a regular guest on the PBS NewsHour program.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Kearns_Goodwin#Plagiarism_controversies

As for politicized historiography– I doubt I’m the only one of Neo’s readers who remembers the 2001–2002 scandal about Michael Bellesiles’ book titled Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. The book was initially welcomed by a swarm of academic historians because it could be weaponized, so to speak, in opposition to the NRA and mainstream American gun culture. The book was awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2001– but after Bellesiles’ research was found to be wildly inaccurate in some areas and fraudulent in others, he lost his professorship at Emory, his prize was revoked, and he ended up working as a bartender– see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America