"New Ideas"

The virtue most ubiquitously claimed by modern liberals is "open-mindedness" or being receptive to "new ideas." I've got no quarrel with this practice unless, as most modern liberals do, you fail to accompany it with discrimination. Indeed, postmodernism has made 'discriminate' a bad word, equating it with racism.

An example of the importance of discrimination, between actual history and perceived or fabricated history in this case, is the Michael Bellesiles book "Arming America." This Michael Moorish hatchet job on the Second Amendment has been effectively discredited by his peers, exposing factual errors and undocumented research claims and resulting in negative career consequences for the author.

Today, Opinion Journal's Kimberley Strassel informs us that Bellesiles has found sanctuary in the arms of the appropriately named "Soft Skull Press" (I'm not making this up) who agreed to reissue the book and also published a 59 page pamphlet in which Bellesiles answers his critics. In his conclusion, Bellesiles states, "There are those who rest their very identity on the notion of a certain, unchanging past. The vision that society is unalterable is not just incorrect, it is dangerously undemocratic, and as such should be of concern to every modern historian."

So the "new idea' that Bellisiles implores us to accept is that not only the future can change, but the past can too. In the interest of democracy, every modern historian should be concerned with altering society's future through his revelations drawn from the "uncertain and changing past."

This emperor has no clothes, folks. Not only are his ideas wrong, they aren't even covered by the deceptive language traditionally employed to prevent lay persons from recognizing that the speaker is a kook. This speaker is a kook. All one has to do to see this is to LOOK.