On August 7, I happened to read a syndicated column at FrontPageMag by Walter E. Williams, a legendary conservative intellectual and the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University. One paragraph shocked me:
Leaders of ISIS and the Taliban have called the recent U.S. trend of angry mobs destroying statues “inspiring but a bit amateur,” and agreed to send advisers to Antifa and other far-left groups on how to erase historical artifacts. “Destroying all art, culture and history from previous eras is obviously constructive,” said ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi. “But they’ve got to do it in a more dramatic way. We beheaded statues with a sword. The Taliban blew up ancient Buddhas with dynamite. Tying a statue to a truck and dragging it down just doesn’t have the same dramatic effect.”
When I read this paragraph in Williams’ column, I immediately thought that quote can’t possibly be real. And a little bit of searching quickly brought me to the source: A parody website called the Mideast Beast.
Williams not only used a fake quote, he essentially plagiarized the whole parody paragraph, which originally began:
Calling the recent US trend of angry mobs destroying statues “inspiring but a bit amateur,” leaders of ISIS and the Taliban have agreed to send advisors to Antifa and other far left groups on how to erase historical artifacts.
Williams slightly rearranged one sentence and changed “calling” to “called,” but otherwise he copied the 100-word paragraph word-for-word from the parody website.
If Williams somehow missed the obvious joke in the “obviously constructive” work of destroying art, he could have found a hint in the rest of the story, which quotes a Taliban leader: “if they’re just into blowing shit up and cheering, we can get behind that.”
How gullible do you have to be to think that the world’s most wanted terrorist organization would publicly announce that it’s sending advisors to the US to help Antifa commit crimes? How full of venom and hatred toward the left do you need to be to imagine that protesters are working with global terrorists?
I can understand believing something from a clever fake news site (I’ve done it myself before, as most of us have). But this is a particularly egregious case where Williams plagiarized an obvious fake quote that shouldn’t fool any discerning reader, and almost no editors caught it.
What’s also astonishing is that Williams’ serious mistake might easily have disappeared from history. It turns out that by the time I read Williams’ column several days after it was first published on August 4, Creators Syndicate had already found the error and corrected it. Out of the many publications that corrected the grotesque error by deleting the paragraph, none mentioned that any correction took place, including the Creators Syndicate site with the column.
Williams made a terrible mistake, and none of the places that corrected the error mentioned that anything important had been changed in the column, including Freedom’s Journal Institute, Capitalism Magazine, CNSNews, Newsbusters, TownHall.com, WND, Patriot Post, and the Daily Herald.
Jim Slusher, Assistant Managing Editor at the suburban Chicago Daily Herald, and the head editor of the Opinion section, wrote to me: “The column was originally published in print and online with the quotes from the satirical website. We got a later correction from the syndicate that had removed that paragraph and we updated the web version with it. We should have also noted the nature of the correction that had been made and have since done so.”
Salvador Rodriguez of the Orange County Register wrote to me, “I cut the paragraph in question out before publishing. I thought it was either a joke by Williams or that he’d fallen for a fake news site. Looked into it, concluded it was latter and cut it out. Around that time Creators Syndicate put out a call to strike the paragraph.”
The Creators Syndicate call apparently went only out to a few of the more major newspapers and websites that use the column. As of this afternoon, dozens of online conservative sites (some very small, some quite prominent) continue to include the fake quote in the column: Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Winnipeg Sun, Toronto Sun, Edmonton Sun, Griffin Daily News, Times Examiner, LewRockwell.com, Northern Virginia Daily, Amarillo Globe-News, The National Interest, The New American, The Daily Signal, North State Journal, The Burning Platform, The World News, USSA News, Daily Journal, Daily Citizen-News, Sumter Item, Casper Star Tribune, Exponent Telegram, The Journal, Tyler Morning Telegraph, Denton Record-Chronicle, ArcaMax, Northern Virginia Daily, Jewish World Review, Leap Frog America, Political Bomb Show.
Interestingly, the error hasn’t been corrected on Williams’ own website or his Facebook page.
It’s quite possible that in the years to come, people searching for information about Antifa will think that ISIS and Taliban supported them, all because a distinguished professor made a dumb mistake and nobody cared enough to acknowledge the error.
Ironically, Williams’ entire column was about the danger of rewriting history. Williams wrote in the column, “A tyrant’s first battlefield is to rewrite history.” Maybe that’s also the battlefield of a gullible conservative pundit. In his column, Williams mockingly suggests a “Commission to Eliminate Bad Memories,” which he ended up needing for his column’s embarrassing mistake.
Crossposted at AcademeBlog.