With hundreds of thousands of soldiers returning from war with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an obvious result of the horrors of having to kill and possibly be killed, David Barton and televangelist fraud Kenneth Copeland have a solution: Just stop feeling it because God thinks you did great.
This is just a weird exchange between David Barton and televangelist con man Kenneth Copeland. Barton says that if you put your kids in public schools, God will not bless you or your children. How would you tell if someone is “blessed”? When something good happens to them? Do good things never happen to those who go to public schools? Oh, and something about “Babylonian education.” Whatever the hell that means.
David Barton is not a historian. He’s also not a climatologist, a seismologist or a meteorologist. But he’s got a simple explanation for earthquakes, hurricanes and extreme weather patterns — it’s all because of abortion, which leads to God’s judgment.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before (about Ron Paul, David Barton and many others). A far right Republican candidate for public office associates himself with white nationalist groups and speaks to their conferences. This time it’s Chris McDaniel, a Tea Party type challenging Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi.
The Family Research Council is holding its annual Values Voters Summit in a couple weeks and when people sign up to attend the event they are sent an email from Tony Perkins. But as my friend Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State points out, most of that email consists of this pretty famous fake quote from James Madison:
David Barton has some really bizarre positions on all sorts of issues, but when it comes to the second amendment he takes a position that even the most extreme gun rights activists don’t: That it protects an individual’s right to own not just guns but tanks and fighter jets too.
After David Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies was pulled from the shelves by its publisher, Thomas Nelson, because it was full of false claims and distortions, he got Glenn Beck to publish it and now the Worldnetdaily is pushing it on their website — and predictably telling lies about why it was pulled.
I’ve always been greatly amused by the contradictory claims on the far right about America’s founding. On the one hand, you’ve got the David Barton crowd which claims that the founding fathers were all Christians who intended to create a Christian nation. On the other hand, you’ve got those even further to the right with their loopy freemason conspiracies who say the Illimunati was behind it all and that America is part of a grand conspiracy to control the world and pave the way for the Antichrist. The Worldnetdaily promotes both of those ideas, as long as they can make money from them. At the moment, they’re pushing the second one.
I wrote recently about Glenn Beck’s ridiculous interview in which he did his best Rodney King impersonation, saying, “Can we stop dividing ourselves? Do racists exist? Yes. Do bigots exist? Yes. But most of us are not. Most Americans just want to get along. Why can’t we do that? What has happened to us?” GLAAD points out, as I did, that Beck is responsible for a lot of those divisions, especially when it comes to LGBT issues.
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In