As a historian who listens fairly regularly to @bdomenech on the Federalist Radio Hour (for research purposes only!), I can say that his understanding of history and philosophy is pretty shallow. This stunningly uninformed tweet of his is just the latest example of that.
A couple receipts to flesh out this claim. The most recent book to explore the connections between the Enlightenment and the history of racism is @DrIbram's Stamped from the Beginning. g.co/kgs/ukkjQo
We may forgive @bdomenech for not being up to date with the latest scholarship. So we might also point to Winthrop Jordan's book, White Over Black which was published in 1968, several years before Ben was born. g.co/kgs/KaMqLU
Jordan was the book I read in college in the 1980s, and that was when I first encountered the argument that the Enlightenment was a key turning point in the history of racism. My professor was Gordon Wood, hardly the most "woke" prof out there on issues of race.
So for @bdomenech to scoff at the Englightenment/racism connection as somehow silly, he should know that he's scoffing at almost the entire historical profession, even fairly conservative figures like Gordon Wood.
One final receipt. Chapter 5 of "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs" by @agordonreed (Harvard) and Peter Onuf (UVA) offers a wonderfully subtle analysis of the complex relationship between Jefferson's enlightenment values and his ideas about race and slavery. g.co/kgs/T3m17n
If @bdomenech took 30 minutes to read this chapter by Gordon-Reed and Onuf, I think he would see just how embarrassingly ignorant that snarky tweet of his was.
