Here’s an excellent article by Will Bunch on the dishonest historical revisionism being quite successfully pushed by Glenn Beck, with the help of a cottage industry of extreme right wing religious fanatics determined to recast American history as a white Christian fable: Glenn Beck rewrites civil rights history.

More recently, Beck has featured on Fox, at several well-attended “American Revivals” and on his web-based “university” a new right-hand man — David Barton, a key figure in the recent right-wing rewrite of Texas school textbooks — to teach his viewers the much-debunked idea that America’s creation was rooted in Christianity.

Barton’s machine-gun-paced spewing of 18th-century God references and black-robed revolutionary preachers gives less than short shrift to the real achievement of the Founders in separating church and state. In April, Barton told Beck’s 3 million TV viewers that “we use the Ten Commandments as basis of civil law and the Western world [and it] has been for 2,000 years.”

The results of this re-education campaign have been nothing short of phenomenal. A mere on-air endorsement by Beck of any obscure book — such as “Sacred Fire,” on the spirituality of George Washington — will propel it to the best-seller list. Now, thousands of fans have signed up for a paid “insider” package that includes an online Glenn Beck University with lectures by Barton and others.

But pseudo-history is having a real impact on current events. In Texas, the new school curriculum downgrades democracy-minded Thomas Jefferson as well as 1960s civil rights. In the political arena, some activists are pushing to repeal the 17th Amendment that allows people to elect U.S. senators directly — largely because the measure was enacted during Wilson’s progressive era.

While all these histories are too important to lose to revisionism, none represents more of a risk than the civil rights era. In 1963, King understood that his dream of equal rights for black Americans would never happen without intervention from the federal government, a concept that’s such an anathema to the Tea Partiers, the Beck-sponsored 9/12 movement and the other right-wing radicals who’ll occupy the Mall this Saturday.

Read the whole thing.