So, I turn on Fox News just to see what the Glenn Beck Comedy Hour’s topic for the day is, and here’s Beck ranting about the need for more religion in government, in front of two blackboards covered with pictures of the founding fathers — who are no doubt rotating at high speed in their graves to see Beck denigrating the separation of church and state, a principle that was extremely important to them.

Beck’s show today featured a full hour promoting the agenda of extreme fundamentalist/creationist/theocrat David Barton of Wallbuilders, one of the main forces behind the recent outrageous historical revisionism perpetrated by the Texas State Board of Education.

And here’s a little more information about David Barton; in the 1990s he gave speeches at two events organized by outright neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, then claimed he didn’t know who they were.

In 1991 Barton addressed the Rocky Mountain Bible Retreat of Pastor Pete Peters’ Scriptures for America, a group that espouses the racist “Christian Identity” theology. Advocates of this bizarre dogma insist that white Anglo-Saxons are the “true” chosen people of the Bible and charge that today’s Jews are usurpers. Aside from being a virulent anti-Semite, Peters has advocated the death penalty for homosexuals. According to the Anti-Defamation League, other speakers at the event included white supremacist leader and 1992 presidential candidate James “Bo” Gritz, a leader of the radical and increasingly violent militia movement, and Malcolm Ross, a Holocaust denier from Canada. In November of that same year, Barton spoke at Kingdom Covenant College in Grants Pass, Oregon, another “Christian Identity” front group with ties to Peters.

Asked to explain these actions, Barton’s reply amounted to a not very creative “I didn’t know they were Nazis” dodge. In a July 1993 letter, Barton assistant Kit Marshall wrote, “At the time we were contacted by Pete Peters, we had absolutely no idea that he was ‘part of the Nazi movement.’ He contacted us for David to speak for Scriptures for America. The title is quite innocuous. In all the conversations that I personally had with Pete Peters, never once was there a hint that they were part of a Nazi movement. I would also like to point out that simply because David Barton gives a presentation to a group of people does not mean that he endorses all their beliefs.” An excuse like that might have washed one time, but it stretches the bounds of credulity to accept that Barton was twice duped by innocuous-sounding extremist organizations.

Glenn Beck and David Barton — two of the very worst people in American politics, brought to you as usual by Fox News.