This Is News to Me

I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m continually surprised by the intellectual dishonesty of some American conservatives. I was leafing through a publisher’s catalogue of forthcoming books today, when I came across a page devoted to something called 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School), by Larry Schweikart. In the write-up about this book, we’re told that

Students learn, for example, that the Founding Fathers were elitists who drafted the Constitution in order to protect their economic interests. … That Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation only because he needed black soldiers. … That racist groups such as the KKK represented our society in the early twentieth century. … That the failures of capitalism caused the Great Depression. All false, as readers will discover.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I never heard any of these statements made during my many years of education. Not a single one. Schweikart, who claims to be a professor of history at the University of Dayton, has simply concocted these straw-man teachings in order that he can debunk them and then blame liberals for spreading such misinformation.

It doesn’t take my buying this book to know who’s lying to me.