September 27, 2021) Most academic Civil War historians are not biased, they are corrupted. Unfortunately, corrupted is the right word. They became corrupted when they turned into social activists instead of truth-seeking historians. It left them invested in a social movement that demands a fixed interpretation of the War. One that demonizes Confederates and demands the removal, destruction and vandalization of their statues. Such historians cannot change that opinion without betraying their political movement.
Consequently, they put their academic effort into buttressing their fixed opinions to the Nth degree. They give us character assassinations of honorable men like Robert E. Lee whom they accuse of whipping slaves, resisting reunification, and being an overrated commander. They will no longer publish books and papers that question their viewpoint. To do so might reveal that they made an irrevocable mistake when they failed to defend Confederate monuments. Their own self-interest serves to keep their opinions unmovable and to censor anything to the contrary. The academic press will only publish books and papers that support their corrupted conclusions.
According to a 2016 article about the political affiliations of college faculty members for the “Econ Journal Watch,” Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a 12-to-1 margin. The situation in the history departments was even worse because the Democrat-to-Republican ratio was 34-to-1, which made it the most lopsided distribution of the seven academic disciplines surveyed. Given the maxim: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” it should not be surprising that academic bias has evolved into corruption.
One reason corruption is bad is that it undermines the authority of the institution. Corrupted professors at the Ivy Leagues and other venerable schools steal that authority. They exploit the institutional reputations that have been built up over 100 years or more with outrages such as Critical Race Theory, which divides the country racially into two factions: victims and oppressors. Regardless of their behavior, whites are assumed to be the oppressors and blacks the victims. America’s obsession over so-called systemic racism threatens to destroy our country. Any disagreement with the significance of systemic racism results in attempts to silence the critic by labeling him a racist.
Here’s a recent example:
The NAACP and other agenda-driven organizations are compiling lynch statistics. Of course, lynchings are evil, but I have been curious to know how many of them during Reconstruction were politically motivated as compared to those that had other motivations. I sought the answer at an online Reconstruction Era chat room. Merely for asking the question I was accused of seeking to “mitigate” the evil of lynching.
I just wanted to know how many of the Reconstruction Era lynchings were designed to keep blacks from voting and defeat carpetbaggers at the polls as compared to the others. Nearly everyone seems to assume that all era-specific lynchings were politically motivated. When everybody believes something without providing evidence, it is appropriate to question it.
Presently the only evidence I have is tenuous and comes from the online “Encyclopedia of Arkansas,” which is shown on the accompanying video. It excludes an alleged Mass Lynching of 24 blacks that the “Equal Justice Initiative” includes. The Arkansas encyclopedia states that the only evidence that it ever happened is a single letter to Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens.
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