In our previous post we noted that the American Family Association spent two hours promoting the new WallBuilders “Building On The American Heritage Series” DVD program and that, during the program, David Barton took calls from listeners in the AFA audience.
During the Q&A, one of the listeners expressed hope that the next president would give Barton a Cabinet-level appointment, maybe as Attorney General, but that was a notion that Barton quickly shot down by admitting it would never happen because he is “radioactive.”
But Barton then went on to reveal that because he is so radioactive, he has been forced to help school boards draft state history and/or government curricula in secret so that people on the Left don’t find out about it:
For me, I am radioactive in so many areas. I got a call from US News and World Report and they said “did you know the ACLU just spent a million dollars to discredit you?” There are four law schools I know that have entire websites dedicated just to me. Soros-type people get paid to find my name every time it pops up and they will start blogging about how stupid I am, how I don’t know anything, how I make up my history. And so if you Google me, you’re going to find a lot of negative stuff about me.
Now, having said that, I get appointed by a lot of states, by state boards of education to do the history and government standards in those states, public schools, etc … Now, when these guys find out that I’m there, I become the target of their attempts. So in Texas, I was one of six guys appointed by the state Board of Education to do history and government there and suddenly I’m up on Wall Street Journal, MSNBC is doing specials on how terrible I am, all these things are going after me. And that’s fine; I understand that I’m radioactive.
So, this is a lot of fun: I had a national textbook publisher come to me and said “hey, you helped write these standards, why don’t you help us do textbooks to reflect those standards?” I said “sure, but just keep my name out of the textbook, don’t put me down as one of the editors because if you put me down, they’ll go all over the nation talking about how terrible this is.” So they kept my name out. Guess what? That public school textbook is now the best-selling public school history textbook in America.
So this history is good. People want this history, they want to get this stuff but what happens is there’s a political movement that will try to marginalize us by making us radioactive. I currently now am working with multiple states in doing their history and government standards – I’m not going to say what those states are because they’ve kept it silent, I’m going to keep it silent.
