Wallbuilders

In honor of all the attention that David Barton's shoddy scholarship is currently receiving, we thought we'd take some time to pull together a list of some of the demonstrably false statements that he has made in just the last several months alone.

Keep in mind, these are not simply crazy things that he has said - like life begins before conception or that Jesus opposed the Minimum Wage or that the government should regulate gay sex - but rather verifiably false claims that can be easily refuted with a basic Google search.

• The Southern Poverty Law Center called him a "domestic terrorist." Nope.
• There are no grocery stores within the city of Detroit. Wrong.
• An elementary school student was yelled at for praying before lunch.  Didn't happen.
• Mentions of Jesus were banned at military funerals.  Not quite.
• Hate Crimes legislation was designed to imprison pastors. Please.
• Abstinence will make you richer.  Guess again.
• God created our system of elected government. Nice try.
• The Constitution quotes the Bible "verbatim." Huh?
• Again claiming the Constitution quotes the Bible "verbatim."  Still not true.
• Many of the clauses in the Constitution are "direct quotations out of the Bible." Are you seeing a pattern here?

Those are just ten examples we pulled together from recent months, though there are several others we could have also included.

It is too bad that Barton refuses to engage in debates because it would be nice to see him defend his own claims instead of always just complaining that people are attacking him because of his Christian faith.

Pseudo-historian David Barton has been receiving significant criticism from conservative and evangelical historians who are aghast at his numerous and deliberate misrepresentations of American history, and yet Barton continues to claim that the only people who find trouble with his work are members of the liberal, secular, anti-American elite who just don’t like him exposing the “truth” about the founders. Barton said that he is like Jesus and chooses to ignore his critics, even though he usually attacks or sues them.

But as Barton’s star continues to rise in right-wing media and the Republican Party, his work has received even more scrutiny.

Today the evangelical publication WORLD Magazine ran a story about how a leading conservative Catholic became “increasingly troubled about Barton’s writings,” finding them to be full of “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.” The activist was none other than Jay Richards, who this year co-authored a conservative polemical with televangelist (and Barton-ally) James Robison and has also spoken alongside Glenn Beck, one of the top endorsers of Barton’s work. Richards even shared the stage with Barton at the Religious Right rally Beck and Robison co-hosted in Texas last week, Under God: Indivisible.

Richards said he spoke to ten “conservative Christian professors to assess Barton’s work,” and the responses were not good, as many criticized Barton for not only his much criticized book on Thomas Jefferson but also his sweeping claims about the founders at large.

Jay W. Richards, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and author with James Robison of Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late, spoke alongside Barton at Christian conferences as recently as last month. Richards says in recent months he has grown increasingly troubled about Barton’s writings, so he asked 10 conservative Christian professors to assess Barton’s work.

Their response was negative. Some examples: Glenn Moots of Northwood University wrote that Barton in The Jefferson Lies is so eager to portray Jefferson as sympathetic to Christianity that he misses or omits obvious signs that Jefferson stood outside “orthodox, creedal, confessional Christianity.” A second professor, Glenn Sunshine of Central Connecticut State University, said that Barton’s characterization of Jefferson’s religious views is “unsupportable.” A third, Gregg Frazer of The Master’s College, evaluated Barton’s video America’s Godly Heritage and found many of its factual claims dubious, such as a statement that “52 of the 55 delegates at the Constitutional Convention were ‘orthodox, evangelical Christians.’” Barton told me he found that number in M.E. Bradford’s A Worthy Company.

…

A full-scale, newly published critique of Barton is coming from Professors Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter of Grove City College, a largely conservative Christian school in Pennsylvania. Their book Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President (Salem Grove Press), argues that Barton “is guilty of taking statements and actions out of context and simplifying historical circumstances.” For example, they charge that Barton, in explaining why Jefferson did not free his slaves, “seriously misrepresents or misunderstands (or both) the legal environment related to slavery.”

…

Richards emphasizes that he and the scholars he consulted about Barton are politically conservative evangelicals or Catholics. They largely agree with Barton’s belief that Christian principles played a major role in America’s founding, but Richards argues that Barton’s books and videos are full of “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.”

On today's episode of "WallBuilders Live," David Barton and Rick Green hosted Kay Wyma, author of the book "Cleaning House: A Mom's Twelve-Month Experiment to Rid Her Home of Youth Entitlement" to discuss how to raise more responsible children.

Barton, for his part, declared that the entire concept of adolescence is unbiblical and was utterly foreign to the Founding Fathers since it is nothing but a modern, progressive liberal phenomenon:

Green: Isn't that the difference between the Founding Era and ours today in terms of expectations? They expected you to do a lot while you were young. You didn't wait until you were 40 to figure out what God had for you in your life.

Barton: They didn't know what the word "adolescent" meant. And, by the way, I checked with Rabbi [Daniel] Lapin, he says that is not a word that appears in Hebrew because it's not in the mind of God. God wasn't into adolescence, He was in to having you become productive, having you be fruitful, having your produce and so that's why there was no adolescence in the Founding Era; that's a modern phenomenon, that's a progressive liberal phenomenon is adolescence. 

Right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton, who compares homosexuality to smoking and celebrates the fact that there isn’t a cure for AIDS, said today on WallBuilders Live! with co-host Rick Green that same-sex marriage is much like letting people marry horses or dogs. Discussing the Defense of Marriage Act, Barton warned that marriage equality proponents may try to “evangelize” their belief that “marriage shouldn’t be between a man and a woman” since “that’s unfair for two men who want to be together, or two women, or a horse and a dog, or whatever it is.”

Barton: Other courts, other areas started saying ‘well you know we can’t really justify this position anymore, marriage shouldn’t be between a man and a woman, that’s unfair for two men who want to be together, or two women, or a horse and a dog, or whatever it is,’ so at that point as it looked like the states were starting to mess around the problem you have is the contracts in one state are supposed to be honored by another. So if I make a business contract with you in Texas and we move to Oklahoma, that contract is going to be recognized in Oklahoma. Well on marriage, that’s a contract. So if one state suddenly says we want same-sex marriage and in Texas we say we don’t, just because you got married in Vermont and moved to Texas doesn’t mean we have to recognize your contract.

So that ability of saying one contract is going to be forced on another caused Congress to act in 1996 and say look the federal government and the states both have to deal with marriage, now here’s what we’re doing, on the federal level we are telling you marriage is a man and a woman and everything that deals with marriage on the federal level is going to be considered a man and a woman. They said as far as the states, you states are not going to be bound by the marriage decision of another state. Green: You do it the way you want to do it and don’t expect to be able to export that to another state.

Barton: Don’t use that to try to evangelize the other forty-nine states.

Green: And we won’t let the other states force it on you.

Barton: That’s right.

Ed Meese, who served as attorney general under Ronald Reagan, told Barton and Green that the legalization of same-sex marriage in several states “just shows how the culture has deteriorated over two centuries,” and asserted that same-sex marriage is an attempt to “defy nature.”

Green: It’s almost like they are making it up on the fly, the actual language of the Constitution doesn’t matter; it’s what these judges that happen to be on the bench at the time think it should mean.

Meese: The founders, we go back to the founders, the reason that they didn’t put something in the Constitution to say that marriage is the union of a man and a woman is nobody would have even thought at that time that there could be any other. It just shows how the culture has deteriorated over two centuries.

…

Green: You also mention that the Defense of Marriage Act should control what’s happening on the military side of things. How have they managed to push through so much with the military in the Obama administration on this issue working around DOMA?

Meese: Well that’s still an open issue and that’s why DOMA is very important. For example, whether chaplains should be required to participate in a homosexual marriage ceremony; whether that would be required as part of their duties, that’s where DOMA is a very important statute. This idea that somehow there is some obscure right in the Constitution to defy nature, as they do in homosexual marriage, is just ludicrous.

It  has become quite clear by now that David Barton does not particularly care about the accuracy of the things he says and will flagrantly misrepresent just about anything if it serves his purpose.

Last week, we posted a clip in which Barton claimed that the Southern Poverty Law Center had placed him on a list of the "25 greatest domestic terrorists in America" simply because he loves God and loves America.  As we pointed out, the SPLC did nothing of the sort, but rather simply included him in a report highlighting "30 New Activists Heading Up the Radical Right."

So it is undeniably false for Barton to claim that the SPLC ever called him a domestic terrorist or anything of the sort ... but Barton doesn't care and went ahead and repeated the claim on his radio program today:

Barton: The Southern Poverty Law Center now has me as one of the thirty terrorists to be watched in America because I combine God and country and they said that really makes you a terrorist. So I'm on the list of thirty that need to be watched as domestic terrorists because I think God and country go together ... Isn't this nuts?

Green: These guys are so off-track. The people that want to save the country, they're worried about and not worried about the ones that want to destroy it.

Barton: When you look at groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, when you look at the Obama administration we've know all along that Communists and Secularists hate God and they hate country. There's nothing new about that. And the fact that they may have an old traditional name or the fact that they may have the name of a government agency doesn't change the philosophy of the people are are in it. And the people that are in it right now in the Southern Poverty Law Center, I mean you got just a ton of communist-thinking people in there and they've always hated God and they've always hated country, so I'm glad to be on the anti-communist list, which is what it amounts to.

As we noted in our earlier post about David Barton today, he has a rather serious problem with accurately presenting information, especially in situations where misrepresenting that information better suits his religious/political agenda.

Case in point, during last Friday's program, Barton went off on his new favorite topic about the ways in which know-nothing government bureaucrats are interfering with the lives and work of average Americans in cumbersome and absurd ways.  To prove his point, Barton cited a supposed situation in which the Department of Agriculture shut down shows featuring Tennessee Walking Horses solely because these government bureaucrats thought "it looks strange to us" and must be damaging the horses, even though they had no idea how to actually check a horse's hoof in the first place:

That is Barton's version of the story, which you can compare to the real version of the story involving undercover video filmed by the Humane Society showing trainers routinely beating and torturing horses in order train them to walk in this distinctive manner: 

The Humane Society of the United States released undercover video Thursday of a Tennessee Walking Horse trainer abusing the animals in order to accentuate their well-known high leg kick.

The practice, known as “soring,” involves using chemicals on the horses ankles as a way to force them, because of pain, to lift their legs higher when they walk ... Soring has been illegal under the federal Horse Protection Act since 1970. But Keith Dane, director of equine protection for the Humane Society, said it has “continued unabated for the past 42 years.”

The video, shot over seven weeks last year by an undercover humane society investigator, shows trainers at a Collierville, Tenn., farm applying the chemicals to the horses, whipping them, shocking them in the head and hitting their legs with wooden sticks. At points, horses in the video struggle to stand up.

The USDA responded by mandating that inspecting organizations levy fines on those who violate this law; a move that prompted a lawsuit from the industry.

So it was not just a bunch of DC bureaucrats shutting down a legitimate business operation because they just thought the whole thing was kind of weird but rather an order to impose fines in response to leading trainers being caught engaging in illegal practices that injured horses.

As we have said several times before, if Barton cannot be relied upon to accurately relate information pertaining to situations that anyone with access to Google can easily check and verify,  how can anyone trust the arcane claims he makes about early American history?

As we have noted several dozen times before, David Barton has something of a problem with telling the truth.  And we have not been the only ones making note of it, especially since the release of his "The Jefferson Lies" book has prompted Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter to write an entire book questioning his claims while other Jefferson scholars have criticized Barton's shoddy scholarship.

Now it appears that Barton has gotten fed up, as he posted a response to his critics on the WallBuilders website in which he basically says that all his snooty academic critics are just jealous that he has written a bunch of best-selling books while nobody reads their boring works:

I have penned numerous best-selling history works, and characteristic of each is a heavy reliance on primary-source documentation ... Not many individuals in America have read more original works (or fewer modern ones) than I have; and the general public has responded enthusiastically to this history based on original documentation... [T]ypical history works by modern elitist professors generally sell very poorly; and seeing their own influence wane, they often lash out and condescendingly criticize the more popular documentary works.

...

A common mantra for today’s academics is “Publish or die.” Believing that if they are not publishing something new that their academic career is regressing, they therefore regularly “discover” something they believe to be a new revelation on some obscure micropoint of history, and then, as if having received an earth-shattering revelation, write an article or book giving their personal opinions about it. Significantly, however, the public does not respond well to these works, for publishers claim that with few exceptions most academic scholars’ books sell only two hundred or so copies a year.

Barton is particularly angry with those smug "academic elitists" who dare to suggest that he is not an actual historian: 

After The Jefferson Lies, rose to a New York Times best-seller, similar attacks were launched against it from academic elitists. I will address three of these attacks below, but first, I must tackle their oft-repeated talking-point that I am not a qualified historian – a claim they make to cast a shadow of doubt over all the facts I present. However, this charge, like their others, is completely false. After all, I am:

• Recognized as an historical expert by both state and federal courts;
• Called to testify as an historical expert by both the federal and state legislatures;
• Selected as an historical expert by State Boards of Education across the nation to assist in writing history and social studies standards for those states;
• Consulted as an historical expert by public school textbook publishers, helping write best-selling history texts used in public schools and universities across the nation.

The funny thing is that it is not only actual historians who don't consider Barton to be a historian, but Barton himself who just last year blatantly stated - and we quote - "I don't consider myself a historian; I just happen to know some things about it.":

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) appeared on WallBuilders Live today alongside hosts David Barton and Rick Green to discuss the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the health care reform law. The congressman maintained that the law “removes the very freedom and liberty that our founders fought for at its very core” and if it is implemented then America will no longer be “the America that you and I love” and that “our founders fought for.” Price went on to cite a sham, Tea Party study heralded throughout conservative media, to claim that “around eighty percent of the physicians surveyed would say if this comes to its full conclusion, that is Obamacare becoming fully implemented, they don’t see how they could practice.” He said that doctors following rules under the reform law will be violating their professional oath, representing the “subjugation of a free citizen, a formerly free citizen.”

Green: It’s allowing government to take over these very personal decisions.

Price: It removes the very freedom and liberty that our founders fought for at its very core. Nothing is more personal, as a physician I can tell you when I would treat patients they understood that it was either an insurance company or the state or federal government that were dictating to them what might be available to them in terms of treatment or diagnosis, they’d bristle, as would I. This is just turning that into the system for every single American and that is a system where Washington decides what you can get, what kind of treatment you can get for yourself and for your family. That’s not America, that’s not the America that you and I love, that’s not the America our founders fought for, that’s not the America that recognizes that our liberty and our freedom comes from God almighty and not from the federal government.

Green: Amen. It looks like as the White House begins to spin this it looks like we’ll be where we were in 2009 where both sides are trying to say whether or not this is a good idea as we go into the 2012 elections. It looks like a lot of doctors are actually saying, ‘If this thing goes forward I’m out of here, I can’t even practice medicine under this system.’

Price: You all have been following this very closely and there’s a recent survey that puts it at somewhere around eighty percent of the physicians surveyed would say if this comes to its full conclusion, that is Obamacare becoming fully implemented, they don’t see how they could practice. The reason is, it’s important for people to appreciate the reason for this, it’s not that things just get too difficult it’s that as a profession we take an oath, physicians take an oath, to provide the highest quality care they are capable of for their patients. If the federal government is going to come in and say ‘we know that you believe Mrs. Smith deserves this and needs this for her treatment but we don’t believe that that’s what Mrs. Smith needs and we will tell you what to give Mrs. Smith,’ that’s no longer a profession, that’s a subjugation of a free citizen, a formerly free citizen, that physicians will not tolerate and I think that’s why you’re seeing that kind of response that you’re seeing from doctors across the land.

It is no exaggeration to say that we have watched or listened to several dozen of the pseudo-historical presentations that David Barton delivers to church groups and political gatherings alike.  And we continue to watch them because Barton is constantly adding new unverifiable and downright false claims to his speeches.

But it turns out that even some of the claims that have long served as the foundation for his presentations are also problematic.  Over the last week, we have watched two recent presentations that Barton delivered in which made a point that, while today we may only know a bit about a handful of our nation's Founding Fathers, the Founding Fathers themselves regularly pointed to preachers as having played an extremely important role in the founding of this nation.

And to "prove" this, Barton routinely cites a letter that John Adams wrote to a man named Hezekiah Niles in 1818 responding to a question from Niles about which people were most responsible for the ideas and principles upon which the nation was founded. In Barton's telling, Adams' reply was that it was preachers like Samuel Cooper, Jonathan Mayhew, George Whitefield, and Charles Chauncy who must be placed at the top of any such list:

Of course, if you actually bother to take a look at the letter Barton cites, here is what you find:

This produced, in 1760 and 1761, an awakening and a revival of American principles and feelings, with an enthusiasm which went on increasing till in 1775 it burst out in open violence, hostility, and fury.

The characters the most conspicuous, the most ardent and influential in this revival, from 1760 to 1766, were first and foremost, before all and above all, James Otis; next to him was Oxenbridge Thatcher; next to him Samuel Adams; next to him John Hancock; then Dr. Mayhew; then Dr. Cooper and his brother.

That's it.  So not only are the individuals Barton's cites not listed "right up front," but two of the people (Whitefield and Chauncy) are not even mentioned in Adams' list, or anywhere in the letter, at all! 

We have heard Barton make this claim regarding this Adams letter several dozen time only to discover today that, like so much else that he says, it is fundamentally untrue; thereby proving once again that just about every factual assertion Barton makes needs to be checked simply because so many of them turn out to be undeniably false.