Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ben Kinchlow really needs to stop copying and pasting into his columns what he sees in Internet chain emails.
Kinchlow did this a few months back. Now he's at it again in his July 3 WorldNetDaily column (italics his):
It has been proven scientifically that a vacuum cannot exist in nature. If American citizens do not participate in their political system, a republic, then a vacuum is created and government of the people will be replaced with government over the people.
More than 200 years ago, it is asserted that an historian named Alexander Tytler bemoaned the fact that the “American way of life” might not long endure. His reasons were chillingly accurate: “[P]eople will invariably hand over their sovereign responsibility and freedom to the government that promises the most benefits…”
He continued, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority only votes for candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result, a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.”
Does any of that sound familiar?
Why, yes, it does, Ben. It's been floating around right-wing chain-email circles for years. Heck, we wrote about it back in 2004, and it had been around since 2000.
Kinchlow didn't repeat most of the falsehoods around this purported quoting, getting it correct that the statement is attributed to "an historian named Alexander Tytler." Had Kinchlow bothered to dig a little deeper -- say, a visit to Snopes, which we made in 2013 when CNS columnist Alan Caruba repeated it -- there's no evidence Tytler actually wrote such a thing.
A little more digging from someone who actually dug into it (Loren Collins, the guy who also discredited Joel Gilbert) shows that the quote appears to date back only to 1943, when industrialist Henning Webb Prentis Jr. said it in a speech.
Nevertheless, Kinchlow goes on later in his column to repeat the cycle of society quote typically attributed to Tytler -- "from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual fate to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency again into bondage" -- and attributes it directly to him. But this too apparently is also from Prentis' speech.
If WND cared anything about editing, they would have alerted Kinchlow to his error. But they don't.
