Misleading Claims in American Educational Curricula (w/Wilfred Reilly)

Before we talk about this episode, we hope you didn’t miss the latest research from the Connors Institute on the gender pay gap. Check it out now!

We talk quite a bit on this podcast about some of the things that many liberal and conservative Americans believe that just ain’t so.

In fact, we just released a free online documentary about this titled The Poisoning of the American Mind. 

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Wilfred Reilly, political scientist at Kentucky State University, to talk about misleading claims that have made their way into educational curricula in the U.S. Friend of the show Jacob Mackey joins the conversation as a special guest cohost.

Our guest, Dr. Reilly, is the author of several books, two of which are particularly informative in this discussion:

• Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About (2020), which addresses such things as:
  • The fact that, contrary to many current claims, men and women are different.
  • There is no epidemic of police murdering unarmed Black Americans.
  • “Pay gaps" between big groups, when several important variables are controlled for, are very small.
• Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula (June 2024—preorder now!), which includes the following chapters:
  •  Lie #1: “Brutal ‘True’ Slavery Was Virtually Unique to America and the West”
  •  Lie #2: “The ‘Red Scare’ Was a Moral Panic That Caught No Commies”
  •  Lie #3: “Native Americans Were ‘Peaceful People Who Spent All Day Dancing’”
  •  Lie #4: “Hippies Were the Good Guys, the Sexual Revolution Was Great for Women, and the Vietnam War Was Unpopular and Pointless”
  •  Lie #5: “The Founders Counted Slaves as Three-Fifths of a Person and the Only Victims of Lynchings Were Black”
  • Lie #6: “European Colonialism Was—Empirically—a No-Good, Terrible, Very Bad Thing”
  • Lie #7: “American Use of Nukes to End World War Two Was ‘Evil’ and ‘Unjustified’”
  • Lie #8: “Unprovoked ‘White Flight,’ Caused by Pure Racism, Ruined America’s Cities”
  •  Lie #9: “‘Southern Strategy’ Racism Turned the Solid South Republican”
  • #10 Bonus Lie: The Continuing Oppression Narrative

Enjoy the conversation, and don’t forget to subscribe in just one click to our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

The Utterly Moderate Podcast is the official podcast of Connors Institute for Nonpartisan Research and Civic Engagement at Shippensburg University.

The core mission of the Connors Institute is to disseminate high-quality nonpartisan information to the public.

Utterly Moderate is hosted by Lawrence Eppard, a researcher, university professor, and director of the Connors Institute. On each episode, Eppard is joined by a guest (or two or three!) who helps listeners understand important topics by focusing on just the weight of the empirical evidence and none of the unneeded opinions or political agendas. We are aggressively nonpartisan in our approach.

Be sure to visit us at ConnorsInstitute.org to learn more about all that we do!