Christian Right Historian David Barton in Freefall Over ‘Jefferson Lies’

[salvorhardin]

I didn't know about Barton's early history.

Barton’s history around race is complicated. As I’ve previously written, he got his start on the racist far right. In 1991, the Anti-Defamation League has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a Christian Identity group. A fringe creed, Christian Identity holds that Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, while Africans are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. That fall, Barton was featured at another Christianity Identity gathering, in Oregon.

As Barton went mainstream, however, he distanced himself from outright racism. Instead, he’s sought to prove that liberals have exaggerated the scale of black oppression in early America, and to paint contemporary Republicans as the champions of African-American freedom. In one document on the WallBuilders website, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s 1964 break with the Democrats to the senator’s “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation rather than civil rights.

Full article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/11/christian-right-historian-david-barton-in-freefall-over-jefferson-lies.html

[xchrom]

1. ...

cannot stand that man.

[rurallib]

2. couldn't happen to a more deserving person

but he has already caused a lot of trouble.

[salvorhardin]

3. Oh yeah

Barton mainstreamed far right revisionist history, especially once Glenn Beck started pimping him. Those myths are never going away now.

[tanyev]

4. Sweeeeet.

[bemildred]

5. Good. nt