In case you missed it, Mike Johnson was re-elected Speaker of the House today. Watch his speech here: At the fourteen minute mark, Johnson said: …I was asked to provide a prayer for the nation. I offered one that is […]
bad history
Bonhoeffer family to Eric Metaxas: “We are horrified to see how the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is…being distorted and misused…”
Eric Metaxas’s use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s legacy has caught the attention of the Bonhoeffer family. We’ve covered Metaxas’s misuse of Bonhoeffer here: Charles Marsh unleashes a devastating assault on court evangelical Eric Metaxas’s misuse of Bonhoeffer as it relates to […]
Jack Hibbs says conservative pundits with big platforms, fame, and microphones should stop speaking on topics in which they have no expertise. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.
Here is Jack Hibbs on people “qualified” to speak on this or that topic in the news: Hibbs says: Jack Hibbs is the Christian Right pastor with a large following. He has a microphone. He is famous. And he has […]
Oklahoma announces a “complete overhaul” of its social studies curriculum. The state is relying on an “A-List Executive Review Committee” of conservative activists
Here is the Washington Examiner: Oklahoma’s top education official is overhauling the state’s social studies curriculum to emphasize American exceptionalism to combat what he says is left-wing messaging that teaches children to “hate America.” In a document obtained by the Washington Examiner, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction […]
Charlie Kirk at evangelical megachurch: Trump and MAGA are fighting against the “very same totalitarianism” Americans fought against in World War II when they “stormed the beaches of Normandy”
The other day someone asked me if I thought Trump and the MAGA crowd really believed their own rhetoric. I don’t know if Charlie Kirk really believes that Joe Biden and the Democrats are comparable to Hitler and the 1930s […]
More sloppy history from Tim Barton of Wallbuilders
In the video posted below, which appears to be a lecture at an Arkansas evangelical church called “The House,” Tim Barton of Wallbuilders claims that every founding father with an extant library had a copy of John Wise‘s sermons. And […]
Is bad history protected under the free speech clause of the First Amendment?
I mentioned this story in today’s Evangelical Roundup, but I thought it deserved its own post. In case you missed it, David Barton, the political activist who uses the American past to promote his Christian Right agenda, is suing the […]
Warren Throckmorton is now fact-checking David Barton on a podcast
The new edition of Warren Throckmorton’s Getting Jefferson Right is here! Current managing editor Jay Green offers a blurb: In Getting Jefferson Right, Throckmorton and Coulter provide a valuable public service to readers in at least two important respects. First, they expose some […]
If David Barton’s work has been widely discredited, why has he remained so popular and influential?
Journalist Jon Ward, the author of Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation, recently asked me the question in the title of this post as part of a story he is writing on David Barton for Yahoo News. […]
Vivek Ramaswamy: The United States won World War II because FDR got polio
Watch GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on the Jordan Peterson Show: I like to teach my students that two things can indeed be true at the same time. But not in this case.
Could Vivek Ramaswamy pass his own citizenship test?
I think the upstart GOP presidential candidate would get at least one question wrong. Here is College of the Holy Cross historian Ed O’Donnell: Here is the full context: See our take on Ramaswamy’s recent GOP debate performance here. George […]
Chris Rufo: “Intellectual historian” or “intellectual bully”?
Chris Rufo is a conservative activist whose claim to fame is an appearance on the old Tucker Carlson show on Fox News. That appearance caught the attention of then president Donald Trump. Since then, Rufo has become Ron DeSantis’s point […]
Jack Hibbs is still talking about American history. And it’s getting worse.
Last week I called your attention to megachurch pastor Jack Hibbs’s atrocious handling of the history of the Continental Army at Valley Forge. Now he is back with more. Watch: OK, let’s break it down: 1:10ff: Hibbs says, with no […]
Trump prophet reads a fake Jefferson quote and then says “take that and choke”
Hank Kunneman is a New Apostolic Reformation preacher and Seven Mountain Dominionist. He is part of the Dutch Sheets and Lance Wallnau crowd of “prophets” that we covered here. In this video Kunneman expounds on the history of church and […]
Jack Hibbs: “If we were writing the Bible today, George Washington would be included”
In this video, podcast the pastor of the Calvary Church-Chino Hill (CA) reveals just how the Christian Right manipulates the past to promote its political agenda. I can’t tell whether these pastors are just ignorant or they are deliberately lying. […]
Hey Josh Hawley, about that Patrick Henry quote…
In case you missed it, on July 4th Josh Hawley, the conservative populist U.S. senator from Missouri, tweeted some words on Twitter that he claimed belonged to Virginia revolutionary Patrick Henry: The problem with Hawley’s tweet is that Patrick Henry […]
“The Bartons are surrounded by tools but that fact doesn’t make them historians anymore than my tool collection makes me a mechanic.”Â
Warren Throckmorton on David Barton, Tim Barton, and Wallbuilders: I have tools and gadgets and parts that I don’t know how to use. Some of those tools are left over from my dad and some seem to have just appeared […]
Arthur Brooks: “Google isn’t grad school”
According to public intellectual Arthur Brooks, the internet has created “an explosion of nonsense.” He’s right. Let’s take my discipline of American history for example. If you read this blog, you know that there is a lot of bad history […]
Josh Hawley’s conservative populism was on full display at Road to Majority 2023
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley made a visit on Friday to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority 2023” conference. Watch: If you watched the speech you can see that Hawley wasted no time identifying with the crowd: I’m proud […]
Tucker and Kevin rewrite the history of January 6th
In order to justify his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin had to rewrite history. So did Josef Stalin. On Monday night, Tucker Carlson tried to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021. He got help from Speaker of the House […]