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When I read Kentucky State University professor Wilfred Reilly’s, “American History Has Been Captured by the Left, Not the Right,” I thought, “Well, duh.”
As a former history student, such was obvious to me—all my professors leaned left.
“We often, bizarrely, hear the claim that American history is taught mostly from the political right—and that it presents our nation as bucolic,” Reilly continued. “But, in fact, many of the best-selling social-science books of the past few decades focus on the idea that the ‘real’ history of the United States was a virtually unending bloodbath.”
Many popular history books, such as Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” for instance, emphasize American history from the perspective of so-called oppressed groups.
The left’s grip on history is a familiar fact to regular readers of Minding the Campus, but perhaps a less familiar fact is that left-leaning authors receive significantly more media attention than right-leaning authors, especially by the New York Times (NYT).
When Elon Musk tweeted, “The New York Times is pure propaganda,” for excluding Rob Henderson’s “Troubled”—a book on the hypocrisy of America’s elite—from its bestseller list despite its high sales, he struck a nerve.
Scott C. Johnston commented, “This has long been known inside the publishing industry. Their list is best described as ‘reasonably well-selling books that we think you should read.'” J. Michael Waller, interviewed earlier this year by my colleague Mason Goad, whose book “Big Intel” exposes how the CIA and FBI went woke, also remarked, “That must be why ‘Big Intel’ will never make the NYT bestseller list.”
Musk and his followers weren’t merely spouting nonsense.
A recent report by The Economist corroborates Musk’s tweet, revealing that books from conservative publishers face an uphill battle to make the NYT bestseller list compared to those with similar sales from other publishers. This bias is starkly apparent in books selling fewer than 5,000 copies per week, which are 22 percentage points less likely to secure a spot.
NYT denies any political bias—ok.
But does anyone doubt that being listed on NYT’s bestsellers list helped Zinn sell over two million copies of “A People’s History of the United States,” thereby shaping the study of history through the lens of marginalized groups? Imagine if Henderson’s “Troubled” had been given the same visibility. Perhaps then, more people would realize that “social justice rhetoric is the new Birkin bag: It’s not meant to lift the vulnerable up; it’s designed to keep them out.”
I doubt NYT will ever change its ways, but if it did, D.C.’s coffee tables might feature more copies of Jarrett Stepman’s “The War on History” and fewer of Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste.”
Photo by JavierDo — Wikimedia Commons
Zinn’s book sold over two million copies because it was on the assigned reading list of a whole lot of undergraduate professors.