One of my favorite bands, Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, have a song whose chorus goes “The world ain’t gone crazy, baby, it was born that way.” To prove that statement, I offer the fact that the David Barton School of Political Science is now a thing that actually exists.
I troll the right wing fever swamps every day, so I’m rarely left astonished anymore. Stupidity is pretty much the only currency in use there. But every once in a while someone will come up with something that leaves me in a state that combines laughter with amazement. That’s your cue, Bryan Fischer.
Now that the Worldnetdaily has republished David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies, a book that is indeed full of lies about Jefferson, he’d like you to know that you should ignore all of those hoity toity “historians” with their “knowledge” and “facts” because he has a whole bunch of “important academics” who have endorsed his book. Like this one guy who never graduated from college.
When several Republican presidential candidates started saying that we should only let in Christian refugees from Syria, President Obama responded forcefully, and correctly, saying that it is a violation of American principles to put a religious test on which people we show concern for when considering refugee questions. David Barton rather blatantly pretended he said something entirely different:
The Bryan Fischer Award is given to those who show a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, accusing their opponents of engaging in their own worst sins. And this may be the most jaw-dropping example in history. David Barton has managed to psychologically project all the way to the moon by declaring that conservatives, unlike liberals, “don’t want to speak until they feel like they’ve mastered the facts.” You might want to sit down for this one.
I know, I know — dog bites man. But it’s still good to chronicle all of the instances where David Barton tells a lie (I somehow manage to find time to sleep while doing this, believe it or not). The latest lie is about a poll that the Barna group took that was almost exclusively made up of conservative Christians, which Barton dishonestly pretends was a poll of all “churchgoers.”
Warren Throckmorton is again taking David Barton to task for his ubiquitous lies. This time he’s focusing on Barton’s claim that John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government contains more than 1500 references to the Bible. It’s a claim that Barton has made over and over again, in books and videos and interviews. It’s completely false. But Throckmorton has figured out how Barton does the math.
Professional liar David Barton is making yet another monumentally idiotic argument against the jailing of Kim Davis. Warren Throckmorton flagged this one, which I’d missed. His argument is that because Judge Bunning ordered the U.S. Marshals to take Davis into custody to enforce his contempt order, he violated the Constitution’s separation of powers because they’re part of the executive branch:
I reported last week about David Barton repeatedly lying about child porn prosecutions. On his radio show he said, “the last I knew, there has not been a single prosecution of child pornography under this administration. There were many under previous administrations; this administration just shut it down.” Warren Throckmorton managed to quantify just what a huge whopper of a life this is by asking the DOJ how many such cases they’d prosecuted.
An old classmate of mine from high school posted a link to this article by some guy named Ken Harding, one of the seemingly endless supply of bombthrowing atheists who suffer from a serious case of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The title alone — Our Founding Fathers Were Not Christians — is the first tipoff that you’ve just wandered into a morass of oversimplification, half-truths and ignorance. And so we have. Let us fight our way through the thicket.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu took part in a ceremony at the American ambassador to Israel’s residence to celebrate the 4th of July and he went full-on David Barton, making false claims about the founding fathers and their reverence for the Old Testament.
We all know that Glenn Beck just loves David Barton. He has him on his show constantly and lavishes him with praise. Given their mutual penchant for lying, that seems predictable enough. But Beck has now done what no university has ever done, bestowed Barton with a PhD.
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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