Wallbuilders’ Tim Barton released a video addressing the hot topic of the MAGA hat-wearing teens’ interaction with a Native American elder on the day of the March for Life, which was also the day of an Indigenous People’s March. Much of the right-wing media is focused on generating a response to the social-media backlash that arose over the weekend. But Tim Barton, like his more famous dad, right-wing activist and “historian” David Barton, wants to talk history:
It seemed like the only thing the media wanted to cover from [the March for Life] this year was a group of boys, many of whom were wearing these hats [holds up red MAGA hat] and they were accused of being racist and hurling insults at Native Americans. And actually, if you’ve watched any of the videos, it shows where they were actually accused of stealing land from Indians and they need to go back to Europe.
Now think about that for a second. Because I understand the accusation of ‘your ancestors did this.’ Those boys did nothing, so to attack them for something they didn’t do just seems ridiculous to begin with.
One of the things we have at Wallbuilders is a series of Indian land deeds [holds up old documents]. And these are deeds where Indians sold land to Anglo European settlers. Some of these were for hundreds of acres, some for thousands of acres, and some for hundreds of thousands of acres.
So if they sold the land, how did these Anglos steal the land from them?
Now, I’m not saying that land wasn’t stolen at some point. During the presidency of Andrew Jackson and really going forward there was a lot of abuses the Indians received at the hand of Anglos and it was terrible and there’s no excuse for that.
However, back up in the 1700s and 1600s, the vast majority of land actually was purchased, not stolen from the Indians by the Anglos. And, how did the Indians acquire territory from other Indians? Oh, yeah, they conquered them. So do Indian tribes owe other Indian tribes reparations? Or is that just what the Anglos owe the Indians?
Again, I’m not trying to change the narrative of history, although I do think before we start accusing boys of something they didn’t do, maybe we should see the rest of the story and get all our facts straight.
Getting facts straight is not necessarily a strong point for Wallbuilders. David Barton’s book about Thomas Jefferson was so roundly criticized by scholars that his Christian publisher took the book off the shelves.
Tim Barton’s video reminded me of Dinesh D’Souza’s explaining-away of the brutality in U.S. history. D’Souza has written that it was “too bad” that settlers and Indians “could not amicably work out a way to share and benefit from this vast country.”
