Last week I highlighted the excellent work that Chris Rodda is doing in exposing the pseudo-history that David Barton has been peddling for years and which has recently turned him into the most important person in America, according to Glenn Beck.
Today, Rodda is back with yet another excellent article on Barton’s shoddy history and I wanted to highlight this passage in particular about how Barton’s pseudo-history takes on a life of its own while Barton has no interest in correcting the record:
Barton is on the advisory board of the [National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools], but apparently his “advice” doesn’t include stopping this curriculum from using bogus quotes that even he himself advises his followers not to use.
Quite a few years ago, after being called out on some of his bogus founders’ quotes, Barton put out a list of “Unconfirmed Quotations,” and advises the readers of his website to “refrain from using them until such time that an original primary source may be found.” And yet six of these bogus quotes from Barton’s own “Unconfirmed Quotations” list, among them the infamous James Madison Ten Commandments quote, appear in the NCBCPS curriculum. So what, exactly, is NCBCPS advisory board member Barton advising this organization on? How to promote his lies and get them into our public schools?
And, just last week on Glenn Beck, John Hagee repeated one of these bogus quotes that Barton put out there, but now advises his followers not to use: the one about George Washington saying, “It’s impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible,” while fellow guest Barton just stayed silent and listened to someone spread a quote that he knows is bogus to millions of gullible Americans.
I sometimes get criticized, even by those who think that Barton is a complete charlatan, for coming right out and calling him a liar. They ask me how I can be sure that he’s intentionally lying, and not just a really crappy historian. Well, it’s moments like that one with John Hagee that expose him as the liar that he is, and that is exactly what I will continue to call him.
As usual, Rodda made a video to accompany this piece and posted it on Vimeo, but noted that previous installments in the series have been removed “citing copyright issues, although these videos were well within the limits of ‘fair use.'”
Now just whom do you supposed complained to Vimeo about Rodda’s use of footage from Beck’s show to expose the lies Beck and Barton are spreading and got those videos yanked down?
