Summer Book Review: Lies my Liberal Teacher Told Me 🎧📖

I listened to “Lies my Liberal Teacher Told Me” by Wilfred Reilly on audiobook. I don’t like it at all. “Lies my Liberal Teacher Told Me” discusses history from what the author calls a conservative point of view. The premise is that history is taught from a so called liberal point of view that is unfair to westerners and Europeans. I’ve seen points of view like this on social media. The author holds a Ph.D. and he also has a podcast. I wasn’t surprised that he was a podcaster.

“Lies my Liberal Teacher Told Me” is what I refer to as social media scholarship. The subject matter of this book is too broad and the statements are subjective. This book admits that it is pushing a narrative. It’s full of opinions and not solid facts. A historian should not be left or right leaning.

There is a saying that the victors write history however future generations will develop their own opinions. Considering as many viewpoints as possible is helpful. Each individual should have the opportunity to come to their own conclusion after exploring different historians.

Advanced scholarship is specific. Specific academic work demonstrates a knowledgeable scholar. Scholarship needs to be backed up by research or citations. Social media scholarship is broad, vague and presents opinions and narratives as facts.

Social media scholarship ignores facts that are inconvenient. Social media scholarship contradicts itself. The author of this book doesn’t understand the difference between correlation and causation. Critical thinking is not applied in this piece of work.

“Lies my Liberal Teacher Told Me” uses statistics to make it’s case. Social media pundits love statistics. The author presents statistics as if they are objective facts and then applies subjective qualifiers and variables to give the statistics that he quoted a different meaning to support his claim. Dr. Reilly has a Ph.D. from a university but he is a social media scholar who uses all the tricks of the trade.

Reilly seems to have the ability to only see issues from his own point of view. The inability to see things from a point of view other than your own is a deficit and possibly a personality disorder. This condition is common in present times. “Lies my Liberal Teacher Told Me” is social media scholarship.

For example “Lies my Liberal Teacher Told Me” takes the position that colonialism wasn’t that bad and it was beneficial in many ways. It is easy to agree that colonialism was beneficial to colonial nations. I’m not sold on Dr. Reilly’s opinion that things worked out well for Africa. He also states that there was violence in Africa before colonialism and that justifies European colonialism. It touches on many other topics such as European treatment of indigenous people in the same way.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53017188

The author stated that lynching in the American south wasn’t that bad and that Italians suffered more than any other group of people. Slavery wasn’t unique to the Americas therefore the Atlantic Slave Trade is insignificant. “Lies my Liberal Teacher Told Me” referred to as southern segregation as local customs.

Reilly even justified the use of nuclear bombs in WWII. Yes, you’re a libtard if a nuclear bombing make you sad according to the writer. Good grief. This book is a series of gaslighting word games. This is not academic work. This is propaganda.

History is not about ego or guilt. It’s about hindsight and trying to understand the times were live in currently. There is no need to be delusional. I didn’t enjoy this book. It’s intellectually dishonest. It’s scattered. It’s boring and exhausting at the same time. I can’t recommend it unless you hate read/listen to books like I do.