President Trump seems to have stirred up a hornet’s nest of opposition with his call for athletes who don’t respect the national anthem to be fired. Many NFL owners and players who were previously indifferent seem to have rallied to the Colin Kaepernick cause.

Kaepernick, of course, considers his protest to be a cry against slavery and racial oppression, for which he holds America to be the guilty party. Kaepernick’s allies seem to be standing—or rather kneeling—for the right to protest, in opposition not necessarily to America but certainly to President Trump.

So was Trump’s call to action a mistake? Trump seems to have acted instinctively, and yet here I propose to show his instincts are right on. Without drawing on either ideology or history, Trump senses that the Left and the Democrats are pushing a big lie. And he’s right.

Yet historically, this gets things upside down. Who is the actual party of racism and oppression? The Democrats. Who is the actual party that resisted oppression? The Republicans.

The Democratic Left, symbolized by Kaepernick, seeks to portray themselves in resistance to oppression. In this view, Trump represents the party of oppression (bad America) and they represent the party of liberation (good America). Kneeling at games is intended to convey a refusal to go along with American racism and oppression.

Yet historically, this gets things upside down. Who is the actual party of racism and oppression? The Democrats. Who is the actual party that resisted oppression? The Republicans.

Here are a few unassailable facts to consider:

--While the secession debate was between the North and the South, the slavery debate was between a pro-slavery Democratic Party and an anti-slavery Republican Party.

--Two of the three Democrats that Lincoln identified as the champions of slavery—Stephen Douglas and James Buchanan—were Northerners. Only one, Roger Taney, was a Southerner.

--Even after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Democratic platform in 1864 sought a treaty with the Confederacy that would most likely involve a restoration of slavery.

--After the Civil War, the Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the Thirteenth Amendment freeing the slaves, the Fourteenth Amendment granting equal rights under law, and the Fifteenth Amendment giving blacks the right to vote.

--Jim Crow is entirely a legacy of the Democratic Party. Every segregation law enacted in the South was passed by a Democratic legislature, signed by a Democratic governor, and enforced by Democratic officials.

--After Republicans shut it down in the late nineteenth century, the Ku Klux Klan was revived in the early twentieth century by a progressive Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, who screened a pro-KKK movie in the White House.

--For decades the Klan served, in the words of progressive historian Eric Foner, as “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.” David Duke is an anomaly; virtually every KKK leader for the past 150 years has been a Democrat.

--As historian Ira Katznelson shows, in order to get the New Deal passed, progressive icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt made deals with racist Democrats to block anti-lynching legislation and to exclude African Americans from most New Deal programs.

--More Republicans than Democrats proportionately voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Bill of 1968. The main opposition to the civil rights movement came not from the GOP but from racist Democrats.

So are Democrats who pull down Confederate statues and protest the national anthem admitting the historical sins of their party? Are these acts of honest public disclosure and humble contrition?

Not at all. They are actually part of the Left’s big lie. The big lie is to take the historical crimes of the Democratic Party and project them onto someone else. Let’s blame America. Let’s blame the South. Let’s blame the white man. Let’s blame everyone except the people who actually committed those crimes.

The reason for targeting confederate statues is to make the South, not the Democrats, carry the burden for slavery. The reason for kneeling during the national anthem is to pretend that America, not the Democrats, is responsible for racial oppression.

“America” didn’t do these things. Some Americans—namely Democrats—carried out that oppression and other Americans—namely Republicans—fought and eventually stopped them.

Why should the Republican Party, which ended slavery, fought segregation, shut down the Ku Klux Klan, and enabled the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s, feel an ounce of guilt for its honorable history?

The GOP, not the Democrats, are the true resistance to racial oppression. In 1860, Lincoln defined slavery as “you work, I eat.” Lincoln called the Republicans the party of opportunity and the Democrats the party of enslavement. Not much has changed. The central platform of the Democratic Party today is still, “You work, I eat.”

More adept at throwing a ball than reading a book, Colin Kaepernick may not know any of this. But the leaders of the Democratic Party certainly do. So they are using suckers like Kaepernick to pin the racist tail on the Republican elephant instead of where it truly belongs, on the Democratic donkey.