In 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of David Barton, one of the co-authors of the 2012 and 2016 GOP Platforms, and a conservative historian/exposed fraud. That’s right, an Evangelical Republican who teaches history from an alternative timeline that never existed was allowed to lead a group prayer at the 2012 Republican National Convention, and then go in and be one of the bigger influences upon writing the party platform. This, in spite of the fact that he wrote “The Jefferson Lies”, a book that falsely claimed Thomas Jefferson intended America to be a Christian nation and was opposed to gay rights. for example. It was such a load of bunk that less than three months after it was released, his publisher had it yanked from bookstores around the country.
But none of this has stopped the GOP Fundamentalists from continuing to disseminate whatever falsehoods Barton writes amongst their members, when they should have lanced him like a boil from their ranks before he did further damage to their reputation the past few years of, y'know, rejecting facts. The conservative media has folks like Glenn Beck and the Family Research Council still proudly welcome David Barton as a guest, not just swallowing the tripe he serves up, but lying on his behalf and claiming he has scholarly credentials he doesn’t actually have. I mean, it might seem plausible to hear our Founding Fathers were opposed to the theory of evolution, because it was a radical concept when Charles Darwin presented it to folks… but the Founding Fathers were sort of dead by the time Darwin was writing about evolution. (If you believe Barton, though, the theory has been around since 500 B.C.)
We noted, though, that David Barton doesn’t just present an alternate history of America… he’s apparently living in an alternate reality of the present, where military chaplains are forced to perform gay marriages against their will, that gays are being allowed to “evangelize” to children in schools, that the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling also legalized pedophilia and would outlaw the Bible, that the average American household on welfare gets $61,000 a year (far, far less, actually), that the Bible forbids all government debt and says we will never be able to make an AIDS vaccine (missed that passage, myself), that President Obama aids the Muslim Brotherhood, that Ruth Bader Ginsberg can be impeached for falling asleep during the State of the Union Address (Gee, if Rep. Joe Wilson didn’t get anything more than admonished for the crap he pulled…), that the concept of retirement from employment is a “Pagan Concept”… the nuclear treaty between the United States on Iran, claiming that it would force the United States to fight Israel, and bring about “God’s Wrath”.
In February 2016 Barton went on Glenn Beck’s show (again) to talk about Black History Month, and asks why whites don’t get more recognition for their part in it, because “Blacks were not able to free themselves, whites did” or that “being a True Christian” is a surefire way to avoid getting AIDS, which you get if you “violate God’s standards of sexuality” (Tell that to Ryan White’s mother, you ***hole.), and that there are literally demons running parts of the American government.
Nothing is beyond this man’s notice to be manipulated for ideological purposes… in April 2016, after the release of Disney’s Zootopia, he suggested Disney movies feature anthropomorphized animal characters is an attempt to bring back pagan Gods, because, and we quote:
“If you look back at the time of the Bible, a lot of the idols back then were actually animal. Dagon was the fish God…I love Disney, I’ve got all of the collections of Disney, but Disney’s the first one to make animals seem human, and that’s what animation does. Bambi seems human, ‘Lady and the Tramp,’ a nice romantic dinner for dogs over at an Italian restaurant—I don’t think so—'Beauty and the Beast.’ And I love these stories but what they do is they elevate animals to mankind’s status… The Bible tells us that you are to be kind to your animals but you don’t worship your animals, you don’t make a Dagon god out of them and that’s what we’ve now done.”
In our 2017 review of Barton’s activities, we noted that he started claiming that the Founding Fathers put two clauses in the Declaration of Independence that condemned slavery (which is amazing considering all of the Southern delegates OWNED SLAVES), that during World War II, the United States warned Japan which cities we were going to drop atomic bombs on (which of course, is not actually what happened because that bomb was, y’know, TOP SECRET until it was dropped), that “Dixiecrat” Strom Thurmond switched parties because he “had a change of heart on race issues” (Thurmond was opposed to integration, and Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s opposition to segregation was the reason Thurmond left the Democratic Party), and in April 2017, talked about visiting historical sites of the Holocaust, and how those same evils are manifesting today to assist the “homosexual lifestyle”, before claiming that the Nazis were also pagans (Hint: They were mostly Protestant, some Catholic).
As if David Barton being a passionate Donald Trump supporter in spite of him boasting about sexual assault wasn’t enough to make him full of s*** on his supposed Christian morality, he yet again breaks the fifth Commandment to defend a sexual predator, falsely claiming that Bill O’Reilly was fired from Fox News for “complimenting a woman’s hair”, which really undersells the long, sordid history of reports from multiple accusers of O’Reilly making unwanted advances towards them, making grotesque sexual comments at them, and even calling some employees while apparently masturbating. Barton blames rising health care costs on homosexuals, complained in an interview with E.W. Jackson that “white people don’t get enough credit for ending slavery”, and whines that the separation of church and state doesn’t exempt anyone who goes to church from having to pay taxes. Oh, and in 2018, David Barton claimed he has seen nothing that would “indicate a lack of good morals” from anyone in the Trump administration. Y’know, other than the white nationalists who want to lock children in cages or all the people who resigned in disgrace for corruption.
Barton spent most of 2018 and 2019 continuing his revisionist history, homophobia, and of course, now that the electorate is turning away from right-wing Evangelical fascism, paranoid rants about voter fraud carried out by Democrats. Perhaps his worst moment of that stretch was in April of 2019 when he started spreading anti-vaccination conspiracy theories about there being pieces of aborted fetuses in vaccines. Still, he also referred to the Equality Act as “the greatest threat to religious liberty and free exercise of religion ever in American history”, completely misinterpreted the Madison v. Marbury Supreme Court ruling, and commended Donald Trump on his “biblical presidency”, and during his first impeachment, made the ludicrous claim that a president cannot be impeached for criminal behavior, which would ignore the literal part of the Constitution that discusses impeachment for high crimes.
What we’re getting at is David Barton needs to be put in a goddamned rubber room and the worst part is his brand of insanity is contagious, as he actively promotes it as reality to Evangelicals in and around government. If you’re still not convinced he’s nuttier than a jar of Planters (How could you not be, at this point already?), we have another year of David Barton baying at the moon to present, and would like to thank the website Right Wing Watch for keeping a close eye on him. We’ll spare you all his lunacy, and just give you his dumbest moments from the past 18 months:
- May 11th, 2020: Inexplicably, David Barton argues that “it’s not the role of the federal government to handle the Covid-19 pandemic”. (You see, it wasn’t that Donald Trump is doing a terrible job of stopping the outbreak, it’s that it’s not his job in the first place. Or so says David Barton’s deranged ass.)
- October 5th, 2020: Barton claims that the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments have all been violated by the government during the Covid-19 pandemic’s first nine months. It’s… almost like he has no understanding of the Constitution or reality as we know it.
- October 14th, 2020: David Barton continues misapplying the Third Amendment (which is about the right to not be forced to quarter soldiers in one’s home) to the Covid-19 pandemic, and also claims that ankle-monitoring systems for convicts are somehow a violation of the Third Amendment… which… MAYBE the Fourth Amendment would make more sense for that, but…? Anyway, at no point during the pandemic, have the military commandeered lodgings amongst the American populace.
- October 15th, 2020: Barton claims that any history book written about the Founding Fathers published after 1980 “cannot be trusted”, which is remarkable, because he himself wrote books about them after this date that included a hell of a lot of lies. So maybe… consider the source of the opinion.
- December 9th, 2020: Donald Trump responds to the 1619 Project by proposing a white-nationalist point-of-view in history called “The 1776 Project”, and Congressman Barry Loudermilk immediately thrusts David Barton’s name into the mix for who should be the chairman of the effort.
- June 21st, 2021: David Barton praises Hungarian strongman and Putin ally Viktor Orban for his crackdown on LGBTQ rights, saying that American Christians would do the same but “we’re too scared of getting beat up on by the media and others”.
And we again, remind our readers that David Barton, in spite of being factually wrong more often than correct on the topic he claims to be an expert on, history, is widely respected by Republican leaders, and that he is still not just allowed to help write the Republican Party Platform every four years, but can boast that his influence in the room can make it what he considers “the most biblically-friendly GOP Platform he’s ever seen”.