Jonathan Capehart's Frantic Jim Crow Delusions

Tim Graham on May 28, 2025

MSNBC host and PBS pundit Jonathan Capehart has a new memoir out. It's titled "Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man's Search for Home." It sounds like the first lesson is this: a "Black Man" gets to dictate history, and no one is allowed to offer a "reality check" or else they're "robbing his humanity."

Capehart is still a Washington Post columnist, but he reveals in his terribly troubled tome that he quit the Post editorial board in 2023 over his colleague Karen Tumulty arguing it was "hyperbolic" for President Joe Biden to describe the Republicans passing Georgia's election reform law as "Jim Crow 2.0."

When he read this H-word in the Post, "I was a tornado of emotions, eye-popping rage, and disbelief. I couldn't stay." Beware the tornado of rage when Republicans aren't comparable to the ardent Democrats who were the Ku Klux Klan.

Georgia shattered records in 2022 for the percentage of registered voters who participated in a midterm election -- 82% -- and 54% of black Georgians voted.

"How could it be voter suppression if all these people are coming out to vote?" Tumulty said "with a tone of amazement" in a meeting. She dared to speak these words to Capehart: "I have a rule. No one should be called a Nazi unless they were an actual Nazi. So for President Biden to call the Georgia voter law 'Jim Crow 2.0,' that's an insult to people who lived through Jim Crow."

It's not just an "insult" to the victims of segregation. It's a lie that smears people who never segregated anyone. The "fact-checkers" wouldn't check Biden or anyone else preposterously positing "Jim Crow 2.0," even after the myth of "voter suppression" crumbled into dust.

But Capehart was frantic in his delusion. "I sat frozen, gripping the armrests of my chair as I stared at her in disbelief. With that one comment, Tumulty took an incident where I felt ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity," he recounted. "She either couldn't or wouldn't see that I was Black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit it different from hers, was equally valid."

This is the state of journalism on the Left. They claim to love the "truth," to be the arbiters of "facts," but often emotion cancels facts. When you're black, vicious lies about Republicans being "Jim Crow 2.0" are "equally valid" because of "history" or "lived experience."

Someone inside this liberal bubble dared to suggest Jim Crow was an invalid reference, and for Capehart, that was making race relations worse! "My mind reeled with what had just happened. In a time when people, especially white people, are so careful not to make racial situations worse, Tumulty seemed to have done just that."

Semafor.com reported that Capehart's tornado-of-rage story has been "the subject of internal recriminations at the Post in recent days," because Post staffers are supposed to avoid "publicly disclosing internal editorial conversations." Always laugh at the hypocritical journalists who insist on keeping their own testy deliberations secret.

Tumulty marshaled the facts, and Capehart fiercely advocated for divisive lies. Accusing people of being segregationists is just about the most damaging thing you can say about people today.

Feel free to laugh at the dust-cover blurbs for this man's book, like Henry Louis Gates describing it as "a story of curiosity meeting excellence. His seeking nature, for truth and understanding." Truth isn't Capehart's mission. Sometimes, truth causes him to clutch his armrests and boil over like an overheated gumbo.

======== Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.