Right Wing Reading Rainbow I: The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

It's like that, and that's the way it is.

It doesn’t take much to be more informed than the average person. Reading a single book on a topic beyond that required in school will makes you more informed on it than 80% of people. Two books, 95%. Three books, 99%.

You will be amazed at the encyclopedic knowledge you can seem to have if you have read three to four books. You’re practically a world-class subject-matter expert. Even those with advanced degrees will hesitate to debate someone has read three or four books.

There are people who have used this power, reading three or four books, for evil purposes. These pied pipers dazzle midwits by the thousands. They posture as (dark) enlightened pioneers in dissident thought. What they want is to trick disaffected right wing youth into buying back in to neoconservatism.

So this is the start of an article series. I will introduce you all to good, entry-level books. I will equip you for high level discussions on topics relevant to history and right wing thought. The second half of each article will list three or six more books for you to read if you would like to “specialize”. Do you want to dog-walk your enemies? I will give you the leash.

So let’s start Week One with Tom Wood’s Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.

The Book

I have to admit, I scoffed and rolled my eyes when I first saw The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History on the shelf at the Mises Institute.

Who put this boomer-bait in my Paleo-Libertarian bookstore? Ah, Tom Woods wrote it? Well, that makes sense, Tom Woods is super prolific, but I guess he must have been slumming it in his early days.

And the blurbs on the back didn’t fill me with hope, either. “The American ‘revolutionaries’ were actually conservatives.” “Puritans didn’t steal Indian lands.” “The War on Poverty made poverty worse.”

What’s next? Democrats are the Real Racists?

Come on, Tom. I don’t need to read this garbage.

I was totally, hilariously wrong. What Dr. Woods has created here is the academic equivalent of a roadside IED. A revisionist artillery charge packed into a Republican gasoline can, blasting a hole through the lightly armored transport of mainstream historical consensus.

Even the Wikipedia page gives the game away. Two paragraphs summarizing the book, and six paragraphs of attack. And who are these attacks coming from? Adam Cohen. Max Alexandrovich Boot. Yekaterina “Cathy Alicia” Jung. David Greenberg. Eric Muller.

Obviously, each and every one of these people is a bloodthirsty, warmongering, neoconservative zombie.

The book is split into 18 chapters, starting with “The Colonial Origins of American Liberty” and ending with “Clinton.” Each chapter is split into around five sections of two pages each, each one exploding some myth you were taught in your history book, or else expounding on an incident or principle about which you were never told at all.

For example, Tom Woods explains how the American Revolutionaries, fighting to retain their traditional rights as British subjects, really cannot be compared to French revolutionaries, who despised everything traditional and imposed new provincial boundaries, a new religion, and a new calendar.¹

Woods lays out in plain terms why yesteryear politicians of both parties thought that states had the right to nullify laws, which is today taught as a self-evident absurdity. He lays out, again in plain terms, how the 14th Amendment has been weaponized against states even to this day, for example to strike down a 1994 California ballot initiative which denied taxpayer funded social services to illegal aliens. He lays out, in plain terms, why the sinking of the RMS Lusitania failed to inspire contemporary Americans to die for the right to travel through war zones on belligerent ships.

Woods also explains how the “Red Scare” was not an unjustified bout of paranoid civic repression. Walter Duranty of the New York Times actually covered up Stalin’s strategy to starve Ukrainians. Intercepted Soviet intelligence messages reveal that at least 350 Americans had secret relationships with the Soviets. Senator McCarthy had nothing to do with investigations into Hollywood, which were carried out by the House of Representatives; he was concerned with Communists or Communist sympathizers in government. I will discuss a more in depth book on that last subject in a later article.

Importantly, Tom Woods gives digestible summaries of some foundational texts in our movement, including:

• Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer

• The South During Reconstruction by E. Merton Coulter

• Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace by Harry Elmer Barnes

• Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in

  Contemporary America, by Jared Taylor

These are high-level cognitohazards under layers of boomer clothing.

If you want an excellent, broad-based crash course in right-wing American historical revisionism, this is where to start. And by reading this book, it will help you decide which part of history, now properly understood, you want to explore even further.

The book is not a standalone history textbook, though, and assumes at least a high school understanding of American history. For example, the word “Appomatox” does not appear, nor does the Boston Tea Party. If you want to re-up on your American history, you can take the AP US History course for free at Khan Academy, linked here.²

Tom Woods has also delivered an excellent lecture series on the book, which can be listened to here. Other books by Tom Woods you should check out are “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization” (plus the Lecture Series) and “We Who Dared to Say No to War.”

Finally, I will say that in broad terms, my initial instincts were correct. Regnery’s Politically Incorrect Guide series does indeed pull from a broad section of right-wing writers, of whom only a few are good. Vile neocons like Robert Spencer, William Kilpatrick, Kevin D. Williamson, and Dennis Prager, have made “contributions” to the series. On the other hand, respectable authors have also written Politically Incorrect Guides, like Brion McClanahan (The Founding Fathers and Real American Heroes), Kevin Gutzman (The Constitution), Bob Murphy (Capitalism), and Thomas Dilorenzo (Economics).

Follow Up Readings

For more alternative surveys of US history:

• Why American History is Not What They Say, by Jeff Riggenbach. It is hard to convey just how much of the history that the average person knows is completely fake. A big part of this is from the fact that most Americans are taught history by people who themselves do not know history. I mean this in the literal sense that most 7-12th grade history teachers do not have degrees in history, but rather in “social studies education” at best, or some other social science alongside a teaching degree. What they teach is not based on their own outside knowledge, because they have none, or their own research, because they do none. They teach what is in the textbook that they pick or, more often, are assigned. So if someone puts themselves at the informational chokepoint of writing, publishing, and approving textbooks, it is unbelievably easy to manufacture a consensus.

• A Renegade History of the United States, by Thaddeus Russell. Sort of a Right-Libertarian Howard Zinn. Mainstream history lionizes presidents, generals, and reconstructed dissidents like MLK. “Critical” history, most famously Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, counters this by deconstructing Jefferson as a pedophile rapist and lifts up left-wing social activists like Emma Goldman. In contrast, Russel’s book is history as told “from the gutter.” Slackers, drunks, nonconformists, lawbreakers, lowlives, and renegades. In his telling, America’s founding stock is fundamentally a chaotic people, who are either beaten into order by The Man, or else set loose on some new frontier to do the gritty and thankless work of taming it before being tamed themselves.

• Encountering American Pravda, by Ron Unz. A collection of articles that serves as an ideal introduction to Ron’s broader American Pravda article series. American Pravda is an article series now running into the dozens in which Unz synthesizes huge masses of material from leading scholars and respected journalists into self-contained, hour-long reads which summarize the state of counter-narrative and dissent on a variety of historical topics.

For more on the right-wing antiwar tradition:

• America First!, by Bill Kauffmann. Originally written in 1995, but with an updated preface and epilogue for the 2016 edition. Tells the history of populist antiwar sentiment and “America First” as a slogan and mindset. A book which hates the American Empire, but loves the American Republic.

• We Who Dared To Say No To War, by Murray Polner and Tom Woods. A fine collection of antiwar essays and speeches throughout American history, where each section is devoted to a different war. It is very much a “nothing new under the sun” sort of book. The lies that get us into war now aren’t much different from the lies that got us into war then. It’s particularly funny when you see in the book that yesterday’s peacenik is today’s warmonger. One sequence had Abraham Lincoln making a rock solid case against the Mexican-American war and speculating with almost perfect accuracy how Polk had provoked it.

• The Costs of War, by John V. Denson. Growing up, I was taught that America had never lost a war. Except, it was admitted, Vietnam, which didn’t “really” count for some reason since the US didn’t lose any territory or anything. Denson’s book lays out how the many “victories” America has won have taken something out of it. There are the obvious costs in taxes, debt, and inflation. But also permanent damages to the culture, institutions, and civil liberties.

And Something Fun

Dixie Victorious, by Peter Tsouras. An anthology of well-researched alt-historical fiction in which the Confederate States of America win a decisive victory over the Union. The scenarios go from interestingly plausible to hilariously and enjoyably contrived as the point of departure inches closer to Appmatox. In the first story of ten, the Trent Affair of 1861 pulls the UK into the war. The eighth story has Nathan Bedford Forrest create a colored regiment in January 1864.

---

This is the first in a series of eight articles on right-wing book recommendations.

The next article will look at histories of banking, capitalism, and globalized trade.

This series will be free for lal to read, and I encourage you to share this post and all others in the series.

If you want to be notified of my articles as soon as they are released, you are encouraged to subscribe to this Substack. Thank you.

1. This point is actually debatable, by the way. One could point out that the Constitutions framers were in large part Freemasonic Deists, who did seem to envision themselves creating something altogether new, rather than as restoring some lost Brittania lost to monarchist overreach. Not exactly progressive, but far from conservative. Further, American English spelling conventions, such as dropping the “u” from colour, were formalized by Noah Webster in the 1780s on explicitly anti-aristocratic, enlightenment-based grounds.

But to have the standing to debate that point, you need to read more.

2. I’d almost recommend doing this for its own sake, unless you’re still in High School or college and your memory is nice and fresh. Remember, this whole article is about giving you a revisionist history anyway, but it would be worth it to brush up on the Official Story, first.

I acknowledge that taking a whole course takes time, especially if you’re an adult. I suggest is taking the course “backwards.” Start with the Course Challenge, it will then survey your skills. Then do each of the unit tests. Then from there, fill in all of the gaps.