Revisionist history can have serious implications, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t, from time to time, be delightfully entertaining. Prime example: the brand spankin’ new Republican National Committee website GOP.com, which claims on its “Heroes” page that several prominent black figures were Republicans.

One of these people is Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who broke the color barrier.  While black Republicans are not an unheard of group, it was a curious choice.  Especially since the only real evidence for the claim is that Robinson once supported a Republican governor.

But he also had extremely harsh words for the Republican Party. Commenting on the shift towards Barry Goldwater-style conservatism by the Republican Party, Robinson said that he had “a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” That’s quite a statement coming from a party “hero.”

Regardless of Robinson’s role, any Republican “hero” before 1964 shouldn’t really count at all. In 1964, the United States went through the largest political shift since the Whig party dissolved.  The Great Society was passed that year, and in it was a large and powerful civil rights act.

Prior to 1964, today’s traditional party roles were reversed.  The Northern Liberal party with relatively heavy black leadership was the Republican Party, while the Southern Conservative Party was the Democratic Party. Which is to say a Republican today would have likely been a Democrat prior to 1964, and vice-versa.

So really, any Republican hero before 1964 should be re-branded a Liberal hero.

Which leaves the new GOP.com with Reagan and… Nixon?

So whenever you hear Sean Hannity say that the Republicans are the “Civil Rights” party because they passed the first civil rights bill, just remember this bit of inconvenient history.

This is what happens when conservatives take over school boards, and textbooks need to pass “patriotism panels” real science goes first, and history is always sure to follow.

Right now, in Texas, the Board of Education is attempting to remove civil rights leaders from the history books, to be replaced with more information about “real American” heroes like Christopher Columbus (who was neither the first explorer to discover the Americas, nor an American for that matter).

As the saying goes, “those who fail history are doomed to revise it.”

Showing its support for the growing craze of paranoia and absurd conspiracy theories being touted by the right-wing, The Patriot has gone straight off the deep end in a section entitled “The One Party Classrooms” in which the author, (mysteriously named “the Patriot”) took it upon him/herself to root out nefarious left-wing propaganda in our school.

That's funny, I don't remember Mother Nature endorsing anyone in the 2008 electons.

In what can only be described as a strange fusion of McCarthyism and Michelle Bachman’s political ideology, the article attempts to find all the classes available this semester that “advance some sort of left-wing oriented agenda” by searching through the course catalogue and apparently picking any class that talks about racism, homosexuality, environmental science, multiculturalism, and history that happens to deal with Karl Marx (a historical figure) or Communism (a historical political system).

Besides the massive amount of Straw Man defeating going on at the Patriot on a regular basis, one has to wonder why The Patriot is so afraid of classes like “Weather and Climate,” and “U.S. Class Structure” being taught on campus.Apparently they are threatening enough to warrant an urgent warning to all the good conservatives on campus to avoid classes about scary things like “researched opinions” or “facts” or “undeniable scientific consensusthat human beings pollute the environment, poison water, and are speeding up global warming.”

The most telling (and generally humorous) bits of information come from The Patriot’s little editorial paragraphs about how apparently even talking about inequality means that the teacher is a Marxist “stuck in the Bolshevik revolution” or that Stony Brook University is saying that “Capitalism BADD!! Money is the root of all evil!!”

Also, mentioning homosexuality gives a course a spot on the list, as “Intro to Queer Studies” is on here, but with no explanation as to why.Apparently learning about gay people is something only liberals would ever do.Conservatives learn all they need to know about gays from Glenn Beck.

Even more hilarious is how the Patriot summarily dismisses the class “Politics and Religion in Israel and the Middle East” with the great little one-liner “We can only imagine what goes on in here…” Then, to PROVE that the right wing is being downtrodden and defeated, they point out the “History of the American West” is cancelled, with the witty retort of “I wonder why…” I’m not entirely sure why this is a right-wing class, apparently information about Manifest destiny and guns is a good old fashioned “Real American” class, but alas! It was cancelled! Meaning that the cruel Liberal/Socialist/Fascist/Marxist establishment must have seen its support for real America and canceled it while laughing maniacally and taking away all our money to give to gay black crack addicts.

Of course, The Patriot never mentions why it was cancelled, and I couldn’t find out why either, but I would hazard a guess that it didn’t have enough enrollment, and not because of a vast Left-Wing conspiracy.

Finally I need to point out something that struck me. Every course on their scare list had a few things in common: one, they were bound to upset anti-science people, as evident in their labeling nearly all classes about the environment as anti-Capitalist, anti-Human propaganda.And second, any class encouraging diversity was immediately placed under suspicion.If a class even mentioned that race has had an impact on society in any way, it earned a spot on the list.If a class deals with homosexuality, it’s on the list.Any class that talks about multilingualism as a good thing earns a place as well. Care about “Sustainability of the Long Island Pine Barrens?” Congratulations, you tree hugging commie, you’re on the list too.

I am amused by this, but equally worried. When people are this terrified of opposing viewpoints, or in some cases any viewpoints at all about certain topics, its hard to imagine them being able to make informed decisions about anything.If The Patriot proved one thing to me, it’s that its biggest fear is information that it may disagree with, or information that dares to discuss issues like class or race in an inquisitive light.