We’ve documented how WorldNetDaily continues to sell David Barton’s book “The Jefferson Lies” — presumably from the stash of 17,000 books Barton himself bought from the publisher after it removed the book from the market for its numerous factual inaccuracies, all the while blatantly lying that the book was pulled because it was “so hot and so politically incorrect.”
Well, WND is going one better in helping out the so-called historian Barton: It’s publishing a new edition of “The Jefferson Lies.”
The new edition is posted on WND Books’ website, with release set for Jan. 12. WND’s promotional copy for the book sounds a little defensive:
In 2012 prominent historian David Barton set out to correct the distorted image of the once-beloved Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in the best-selling book The Jefferson Lies. Despite the wildly popular success of the original hardcover edition, a few dedicated liberal individuals and academics campaigned to discredit Barton’s scholarship and credibility, but to no avail.
Barton responds to his critics in a lengthy preface to this new paperback edition in which he takes to task his former publisher and directly answers with thorough documentation the main issues his detractors registered, while also providing numerous academic endorsements of his work. This paperback version, to be released by WND Books on January 12, 2016, certifies that Barton’s research is sound and his premises are true as he tackles seven myths about Thomas Jefferson head-on and answers pressing questions about this incredible statesman including:
- Did Thomas Jefferson really have a child by his young slave girl, Sally Hemings?
- Did he write his own Bible, excluding the parts of Christianity with which he disagreed?
- Was he a racist who opposed civil rights and equality for black Americans?
- Did he, in his pursuit of separation of church and state, advocate the secularizing of public life?
Actually, Barton’s “scholarship and credibility” have been thoroughly discredited. It’s been more than three years since Barton’s book was pulled from the market (everywhere except WND, anyway), and the long gap, along with Barton’s silence on the issue in the interim, is suspicious.
WND has a long road ahead in promoting a new edition of a discredited book. It will have to do much more than empty PR blather to sell it to anyone beyond its usual clientele of gullible WND readers. For starters, how about making that “thorough documentation” widely available for all to see?
P.S. We couldn’t help but notice that the promotional blurb on the cover of the WND edition of Barton’s book is from Glenn Beck, who’s not exactly a paragon of truth himself.
(h/t Warren Throckmorton)