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What do these people have in common: Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, Alex Haley, Rigoberta Menchu, and Michael Bellesiles? They are all celebrities who had a tremendous influence on American culture and on what is taught in U.S. universities, but they were frauds. Walter Duranty was the New York Times reporter whose false news stories in the 1930s covered up Stalin's massive murders in Russia. Herbert Matthews, another New York Times reporter, helped Castro to power by denying he was a Communist. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring has been exposed as full of falsehoods. Influential books by anthropologist Margaret Mead and others have been proven to be fabrications. Alfred Kinsey's famous book about male sexuality was based on data collected from the gay underworld of Chicago and college students, skewed to promote his notion that homosexuality is more common than it actually is. Kinsey's research included the sexual abuse of hundreds of children. Yet in spite of various exposés, the liberal elite continue to paint Kinsey's work as scientific, and Hollywood recently made a favorable movie about him. This and other cases of academic dishonesty, including the works of Margaret Mead and Ward Churchill, fill the pages of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture. The stories share a common theme - the willingness of the liberal intellectuals to condone mass deception in order to promote their agenda. (Nelson Current, 2005, 273 pp., $24.99) |
Some pretended to be scientists, some academic researchers, some investigative journalists, but their books were filled with lies, often masquerading as scientific discoveries. Nevertheless, they all had a major influence on the course of events in the United States.
