When people say “Make America Great Again,” a not insignificant number of them are longing for the America they heard about from Paul Harvey on his daily radio broadcast “The Rest of the Story” from 1976 to 2009.

Before there was talk radio, before there was FOX News, before there was Prager U, and before there were an almost infinite number of ultra-conservative propaganda social media and internet sites on the worldwide web; there was Paul Harvey, giving us white folk a daily dose of whitewashed history to make us feel good about the power and privilege we forcibly possessed.

Most of the time Harvey was subtle in his whitewashing of American history by simply focusing on the positive aspects and accomplishments of White America and lifting up the myth of American exceptionalism while ignoring the negative – such as our genocidal and enslaving past. The casual listener could be easily taken in by his humor and storytelling ability. The casual listener may also not have not known that Harvey was a friend and supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy (though eventually critical of his excesses), the one who expressed no shame in his lives-ruining hunt in the 1950s for the communists among us.

But there were moments when Harvey, who had the ear of millions of daily listeners, did not hide his adherence to white supremacy. There were times when he slipped and said the quiet white supremacy part out loud for all to hear.

One such time was in 2005, when Harvey defended our use of nuclear weapons, the genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of millions of African persons all in one broadcast. Harvey’s words were so shocking that if he were still alive and said them on the radio today, one might question whether they were generated by AI, but they were not. They were his real thoughts and his real words, and here they are in print for us all to see:

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill said that the American people–he said, the American people, he said, and this is a direct quote, “We didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy.”
And that reminder was taken seriously. And we proceeded to develop and deliver the bomb, even though roughly 150,000 men, women and children perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With a single blow, World War II was over.

Following New York, September 11, Winston Churchill was not here to remind us that we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

So, following the New York disaster, we mustered our humanity…and we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in our silos.

Even now we’re standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive, because we’ve declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies–more moral, more civilized.

Our image is at stake, we insist.
But we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.

And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.

So it goes with most great nation-states, which–feeling guilty about their savage pasts–eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.”

– The Rest of the Story, June 23, 2005 broadcast

When Paul Harvey died on February 28, 2009, he was lauded by many persons, almost exclusively white persons, as one of the greatest storytellers and radio broadcasters in American history, but the story he was telling was not the whole story or the whole history. The story he was telling was the white story of America, told in a way to make white people feel good about themselves and to make white people feel good about their ongoing power and privilege. Paul Harvey told the white supremacy story. He told the story with humor and wit, but in the end it was still a racist story.

For some reason, there is still a myth around Paul Harvey as being this wonderful person and great American, praised by white people across the political spectrum, but “now you know the rest of the story… Good day.”