Topic: WorldNetDaily
John Aman has the four-month-old breaking news in a Dec. WorldNetDaily article:
David Barton critics beware: There’s now a price to pay if you want to defame the popular historian, author and speaker with false and outlandish charges.
Barton won a $1 million defamation judgment in August against two left-leaning candidates for the Texas State Board of Education. The pair, Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Judy Jennings, charged in a 2010 campaign video that Barton, a consultant to the Board, was “known for speaking at white-supremacist rallies.”
That highly charged claim stems from two 1991 speeches Barton gave to groups linked to the racist and anti-Semitic “Christian Identity” movement. Barton, recognized as a strong friend of Israel, acknowledges speaking to the groups but said in court filings he did not know in advance about the racist ideology of his hosts.
Aman goes on to quote Barton lamenting being called a liar and suggests that he'll sue to get his good name back:
A favored target of the secular left for decades, Barton considered a lawsuit 20 years ago “on some very easy to disprove lies.” However, as a public figure, he needed to do more than show that truth was on his side. He also had to demonstrate economic harm to prevail in court. And that, he said, meant hiring an economist for $100,000 to document financial damage.
“We dropped pursuing anything at that time,” Barton recalled, “but over the last 20 years, it has continued to grow and snowball and one unrebutted, uncontested lie – because nothing happened – became bigger and greater, so people added more as they repeated themselves.”
Examples abound. Blogger Fred Clark labels Barton an “outrageous liar” in a 2013 Patheos post. A Crooks and Liars blogpost from 2012 calls Barton a “Liar and a Rat Fink.” Unnamed Barton critics launched their own Facebook page, “David Barton and WallBuilders Are Liars,” and atheist Ed Brayton vented on Nov. 28, “David Barton is simply one of the most shameless liars in this country.”
All that has taken an economic toll.
Barton’s books have been met, he said, by a “cottage industry” of critics rehearsing old claims about his alleged lack of truthfulness and supposed racist and anti-Semitic connections.
“There were concerted efforts on Amazon book reviews and elsewhere to repeat those types of things, and that hurt sales,” Barton said.
Embedded in the article, and otherwise unremarked upon by Aman or Barton, is this promo:
As we've detailed, there's a reason Barton's book was "spiked" by its publisher: the book contains numerous inaccuracies. Barton purchased 17,000 copies of his withdrawn book, and presumably it is out of that stash that WND is selling it. WND's online store page for Barton's book mentions nothing about the book being withdrawn, let alone explain why WND is selling a book its publisher thought was too inaccurate to be sold.
Perhaps WND might want to address the issues of Barton's veracity before further portraying him as a victim.
