On CNN, conservative commentator Scott Jennings exposed that vulnerability in real time when he dismantled Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky’s attempt to smear Republicans with the sins of the past, according to Western Journal. Roginsky, like many on the left, tried to weaponize the civil rights era against today’s conservatives — and instead ended up reminding viewers of her own party’s long and troubling record.
“These are the same people that defended opening fire hoses on protesters in the Sixties on the Selma Bridge,” Roginsky claimed, suggesting that Jennings and Republicans would have stood with those who brutalized peaceful civil rights demonstrators in 1965 as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The charge was not only inflammatory; it was historically illiterate.
January 20, 2026
Jennings immediately corrected the record. “I think those were Democrats, Julie,” he replied. “Just FYI. Those were Democrats.”
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That simple factual rejoinder undercut Roginsky’s entire narrative. She then tried to pivot, insisting that people like Jennings support the suppression of peaceful protests today, but the damage to her argument had already been done.
Jennings pressed the point, highlighting the uncomfortable truth Democrats prefer to bury. “That was your party,” he said with a chuckle. “But thank you for reminding everybody that Democrats were against civil rights.”
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At that stage, Roginsky became visibly irritated, ostensibly because Jennings interrupted her, but more plausibly because he had exposed the historical reality behind her talking points. Jennings did not let up, underscoring that Roginsky herself had opened the door to the discussion.
“You’re the one that brought up Democrats,” he reminded her, twisting the rhetorical knife. “I agree with you. Democrats shouldn’t have been against civil rights.”
The record is clear: Southern Democrats did, in fact, lead the opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Yet that chapter is only one part of a much longer and darker story about the Democratic Party’s role in American history.
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In the 19th century, when white supremacy was not a slur tossed around on social media but a real and codified system, Democrats worked relentlessly to preserve it. Under President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, Democrats became the party of Indian Removal, backing policies that drove Native Americans from their ancestral lands.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, Democrats in both North and South demanded the expansion of slavery into the western territories. By contrast, the Republican Party was founded in 1854 for the explicit purpose of preventing the spread of slavery into those same territories.
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Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, won the 1860 election after pledging to stop slavery’s westward expansion and voicing moral revulsion at the institution. Southern Democrats responded not with debate but with suppression, removing Lincoln from their state ballots to keep voters from even having a choice.
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That pattern of trying to control who the people are allowed to vote for has echoed through Democratic tactics ever since, from ballot games in the 19th century to modern efforts to sideline disfavored candidates through lawfare and procedural maneuvers. When Democrats lost the 1860 election, they did not accept the will of the electorate; instead, seven Democrat-controlled Southern states seceded from the Union before Lincoln took office, with four more soon joining the Confederacy.
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After the Civil War, Democrats waged a long campaign to undo the gains of emancipation and Reconstruction. They ignored new constitutional amendments and constructed a regime that relegated freed black Americans to second-class citizenship through Jim Crow laws, intimidation, and violence.
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The Democratic Party of that era was dominated by authoritarian elites, including former slaveholders who, in the 1870s and 1880s, clawed back control of Southern state governments from Reconstruction authorities. Their political heirs — still Democrats — remained entrenched in Southern power structures well into the 1960s, resisting civil rights reforms at every turn.
Today, the rhetoric has changed, but the instinct toward control and elitism remains embedded in the Democratic Party’s DNA. The same movement that once defended segregation and ballot suppression now cloaks itself in the language of “equity” and “democracy” while seeking ever-greater power over speech, elections, and everyday life.
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Roginsky’s failed attack on Jennings inadvertently served as a useful reminder of that continuity, exposing how far Democratic operatives will stretch history to avoid owning their own party’s legacy. Thanks to her misstep — and Jennings’ willingness to confront it — Americans were reminded not only of who Democrats once were, but of how much of that old authoritarian impulse still shapes who they are today.
