Right Wing Watch has a clip from Glenn Beck taking about David Barton:
David Barton is on his way over to one of the former Soviet states… because the Soviets, the former Soviets, called him up and said “uh, hey, you know more about the underpinnings of your Republic than anybody else, and we would like you to help us put those underpinnings together. Because while your country and the west is running from your Constitution, we need to understand it more, because that’s the solution. So, he’s on his way over to the, to former Soviet states, to help them. Is that not incredible?… I think it’s the main people in the government are saying “help us, please, or we will lose our way.”
Barton, of course, is a notorious pseudo-historian, famous for re-writing America’s past to suggest that the Founding Fathers of the USA were all right-wing evangelicals. In 2012, the conservative evangelical publisher Thomas Nelson chose to pulp a Barton tome on Thomas Jefferson after numerous misrepresentations were brought to its attention (in particular, the book was accused of ” glossing over Jefferson’s real record on slaveholding, and minimizes Jefferson’s racist views”). Beck has puffed Barton’s teachings on numerous occasions; in return, Barton promotes Beck to the Christian Right by explaining away Beck’s Mormonism.
So, assuming Beck isn’t simply making it up, and ignoring his boastful slippage from one state to “states”, which “former Soviet state” does he mean? We can probably discount Azerbaijan and any of the -stans (despite Barton’s strangely ambiguous views on Shariah), and it’s unlikely that the Baltic states would have much interest: Estonia is reportedly the world’s least religious country. Belarus, meanwhile, remains under the tight control of a dictator who is hardly going to ask someone like Barton for advice.
I suppose it’s possible that some group in Georgia or Armenia might want Barton’s wisdom, but the most likely candidate is Ukraine. Although some US religious right figures admire anti-gay authoritarianism in Russia, there are longstanding links between Ukraine and American conservatives and evangelicals – and earlier this month saw a government “Prayer Breakfast” in Ukraine organised by the Fellowship. Beck’s phrasing of “on his way over to the, to former Soviet states” may indicate that he was about to say “the Ukraine“, then stopped himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1llnOjHVd1o
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