How to lie like Howard Zinn

 

Howard Zinn appears to have started a pattern of new intellectual dishonesty in America.
It is an infection worse than the covid-19 pandemic in that it has spread to almost every Institution we used to rely on as honest – media, science, even the medical profession.

Under Zinn’s model, it is legitimate to distort facts, plagiarize other people’s scholarship, even make up or take out of context facts as long as you have a moral purpose for doing so.

His questionable scholarship has become so pervasive it is nearly required reading in most colleges and has infected the curriculum of public schools even when it is not official sanctioned.

Zinn appears to have invented the concept of leaving out inconvenient facts in order to promote his woke agenda – a model that has been duplicated in many other areas of scholarship, in particular global climate change science.

Zinn’s advocates like Zinn do not dispute this distortion of facts; they claim objective fact is not real or valid and is drenched in racism and exploitation of the masses – in other words, if Zinn said something is true, then it is true, even when it isn’t.

While Zinn’s influence is massive – a Bible for the Woke Movement, Black Lives Matters, Antifa, the New New Left, and Climate Change advocates, not everybody agrees with his shoddy, dishonest scholarship – even some scholars on the left who would otherwise agree with his objectives.

Several good studies have shown how Zinn misrepresented facts, especially in his signature work on Christopher Columbus, where he claimed he had done research, but actually based much of his conclusions on work he stole from a close socialist associate who was anti-Columbus in the 1960s, who in turn stole his work from an extremely biased, but better respected historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, from whom Zinn stole directly as well.

Zinn’s lack of ethics did not stop him from becoming one of the most popular historians in modern times, an influence that has completely perverted history and is largely responsible for the perverted history we see being taught in nearly every college. He is the orchestrator of the cancel culture movement, and almost everything he said is either a distortion of truth or a down right lie.
What makes Zinn so dangerous is that his work has become the New Testament for the new woke movement and so has his methods.
The new green deal largely does exactly the same things Zinn does, repacking information so that it support climate change hypotheses even when there is clear information that contradict those conclusions.
Under the Zinn model it is okay to slice and dice up information and put it together in a manner that supports the conclusion, taking things out of context off and twisting facts to make them fit whatever conclusion Zinn or the new green deal wants.

This has become the scholarship standard in many colleges where Zinn’s work is taken as legitimate.

Still even more dangerous is how Zinn has infected media and reported where it has become common to distort facts to create stories that are just simply not true.

This may be a result of modern journalists having gone through universities where they have been exposed to Zinn’s work, and so have adopted Zinn’s methodology, thus doing to journalism what Zinn has done to legitimate studies of history.

We have seen the new breed of journalists who has been trained in Zinn mythology college and high school and twist fact in stories which now become so-called fact.

This has become most obvious in the misreporting by the Washington Post and the New York Times during the Trump era, when these news organizations quoted some of what Trump said, but taking statements out of context, or as in the case of the Jan. 6 protest or the Georgia runoff election, completely fabricating fact.
The fact that many major media Outlets including see and then the Washington Post the New York Times and others have been forced to retract stories suggest that Zinn’s model has become the standard operating procedure for journalism as well as science.
Most recently the January 6th protest in Washington has become the perfect example of misrepresentation of facts for political purposes as is the current conflict in Israel and Gaza
Howard Zinn became notorious for cutting paste history as even some of his admirers admit.
His history has become the supporting documentation for various socialist movement in the United States from black lives matter to antifa and is responsible for project 1619 as well as critical race theory – all largely using Zinn’s work as their starting point and using his tactics for distortion as well -- which is  to cut out anything that disagrees with the intended conclusion and therefore becomes dishonest.
The problem is dead Zinn supporters have been pushing this agenda into the schools and into people's lives even though most of the information that is in produced its flawed if not complete lies.
Most notorious of course he has his conclusions on Columbus which left out and doctored some of Columbus's diary which Zinn never actually read but quoted from other sources without actually checking see original documents.
When legislators seek to stop Zinn misinformation from spreading through  public schools , his army of zealous rise up and use political connections and even other tactics to prevent it.
Zinn has become the foundation of most college studies of history, as lesser intellectuals seek to carry on his cancel culture legacy, using him as justification for their own misinformation campaigns, even though in most cases, Zinn did very little actual research, and came to extremely flawed conclusions based on very little legitimate information.

He made up what he could not prove or changed his source material to support his lies.

Al Gore – who rose to fame with “An inconvenient truth,” followed this model – although he largely repeated what United Nations climate change scientists were doing in the Zinn traditional, leaving out or outright banning any information that disagreed with their foregone conclusions.

Since it's now become a standard practice for journalism, you have to think that the Zinn model will it continue to spread like an incurable disease since journalists will rely on Zinn as a legitimate historian when he is largely a hack. Worse, will be the belief by kids who are now forced to accept Zinn as actual fact without having the means to understand just how inaccurate his version of history is.

Zinn and his advocates are reinventing history, not from bottom up, but from inside out, twisting it into what they believe is true rather than what is factually accurate.

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