Historical Response #7: Ellen Brown's Research Policy: "Primary Source Documents? I Don't Need No Stinking Primary Source Documents!"
Ellen Brown loves to use bogus quotes from famous Americans. She thinks they are real because Greenbacker sites quote them. She does not consult primary sources to verify them. She admits this.
7. A bogus quote from John Adams on debt as a means of conquestI responded to this earlier. Here is what my text says:
"President John Adams is quoted as saying, 'There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.'"
He IS quoted as saying that, by many people. Bing returns 1,870,000 results when queried with that quote, all of the earliest results, at least, attributed to John Adams.
If you think, "this woman has publicly painted herself into a corner. She now looks silly," you think what I think.
It does not matter that John Adams is said to have said something. What matters is that Ellen Brown has documentary evidence that he actually said it. She offers none.
Harvard University Press has published The Papers of John Adams. This is available in any university research library. These volumes are well indexed. She does not refer to this collection.
Then there is the online collection of his papers. This is hosted by the University of Virginia. This data base is searchable. The search page is here. As a favor to my readers, I conducted a search. Here was the result:
Search for "One is by the sword. The other is by debt." (in notes & documents; all languages) + relevance order > No results
The phrase no results is a way of saying at least one thing: (1) this site has no record of this phrase; (2) the phrase is bogus.
Until Ellen Brown provides a footnote showing when and where John Adams said this, and until I verify this reference, I will continue to assert that the phrase is bogus.
Here is my response to her response: Don't refer to a million links with no documentary evidence. Just offer a single link to the original source document where Adams said it.
What astounds me is that she would regard her response to my accusation as anything but an admission of failure. She thinks that her response is an effective one. I do not. She thinks that an unverified quote, if cited by enough links on a search engine, becomes valid. I do not. How about you? What do you think?
She offers bogus quotes throughout her book. She obviously thought that these quotes helped her case. She thought that they made her case for fiat money more plausible. Yet, bogus quote after bogus quote, I have caught her in errors that no academic historian would have made -- and had she done so, she would be fired, even if she has tenure. Using bogus quotes is correctly regarded as either a violation of professional integrity or proof of incompetence. Either will get an historian fired. But she is not in academia. She is in the Greenbacker propaganda business, and these people have been offering bogus quotes for generations.
She is either putting the shuck on the rubes -- her readers -- or else she is a rube that her Greenbacker predecessors put the shuck on. In either case, you would be wise to distrust everything she writes. Keep this thought in mind as you read Web of Debt: no results.