David Barton is the Evangelical Christian who tries to spread a warped version of American history where our founding is based entirely on Christian values, Thurgood Marshall is de-emphasized in our high school history curriculums because he’s apparently not very notable, and separation of church and state doesn’t exist.
Recently, at a “Rediscover God In America” conference, possible presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was introduced by Barton before giving a speech.
As a “thank-you” to him, Huckabee praised him… while scaring the shit out of every non-Christian out there (see the 0:56 mark):
… I just wish that every single young person in America would be able to be under his tutelage and understand something about who we really are as a nation.
I almost wish that there would be, like, a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced — forced at gunpoint no less — to listen to every David Barton message, and I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.
What the fuck…?
But there’s more! Chris Rodda watched the webcast of the event the next day and didn’t hear any of that. It seems the “gunpoint” statement was edited out by organizers United in Purpose…
I had watched Huckabee’s speech. How on earth could I have missed a statement like that? Well, I didn’t. It had been edited out of the webcast that I had watched.
Kyle Mantyla over at PFAW’s Right Wing Watch had recorded Huckabee’s speech when it was streamed live on Thursday, and posted the ‘forced at gunpoint’ clip on Friday. By Saturday, when I watched the webcast on the United in Purpose website, that part of Huckabee’s speech had been edited out.
The webcast that I saw showed Barton leaving the stage as he ended his presentation, then the screen going black for a moment, and then what appeared to be the beginning of Huckabee’s speech. What was edited out was Barton returning to the stage to introduce Huckabee, and the first two minutes and forty-five seconds of Huckabee’s speech, during which Huckabee made his ‘gunpoint’ comment and praised David Lane, the man behind all of the American “Renewal” and “Restoration” projects that have popped up across the country during the past few elections.
So if you were watching the webcast like Chris Rodda, you would’ve seen this:
It’s not like Mike Huckabee was a good candidate for president before all this… but after making a statement like that?! (What’s sad is that his Republican base won’t care at all and keep promoting his candidacy…)
Even without the whole “gunpoint” comment, this is still crazytalk. Listening to Barton at all means hearing about a fictional version of American that never existed. Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State rips Barton apart in this fantastic piece:
Barton makes a lucrative living traveling the right wing’s lecture circuit where he offers up a cut-and-paste version of U.S. history liberally sprinkled with gross distortions and, in some cases, outright factual errors. Crowds of fundamentalist Christians from coast to coast can’t get enough of it.