Here is a list of factual errors in Jonah Goldberg's @JonahNRO book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy. In no particular order: 1/
The United States does not have more forest area than the entire world (p. 367) 2/ 
The average worker in the world is not working 0 hours per year (361) 3/
The next number in this series is not zero: 2.35, 2.30, 2.25...(363) 4/
It is not true that, “Married men, controlling for all factors, make 44 percent more than single men” or that “the wage benefit of marriage is roughly equal to, if not greater than, that of going to college” (271). 5/
It is not true that, “We made traditional marriage normal through centuries of civilizational trial and error because countless generations of wise people figured out that it was a best practice for society” (266). 6/
It is not “a fact of math that there will always be a top one percent” (54). 7/
Global life expectancy at birth was not almost zero in 1960 (369) 8/
Social scientists do not define “familism” as “govern[ance] … through an intricate web of family alliances” (56). 9/
The English word “patriotism” comes from the Greek “patír” for father, not from the Latin “patria” (57). 10/
It is not true that “inequality has heightened in large part because the rich got richer and the middle class got much bigger” (308). 11/
It is not true that “young men from dysfunctional homes and atomized communities have fallen in with street gangs for thousands of years in every corner of the globe” (12). 12/
It is not “a cliché of the left to say that, ‘perception is reality’” (233). 13/
Global infant mortality was not almost zero in 2015 (370) 14/
Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is not “one of the most widely used texts in America” (16), and it is not “one of, if not the most, widely used textbooks in American high schools and colleges” (382). 15/
My full review: osf.io/preprints/soca…
He could just say, “look I think you’re an obnoxious prick, but you’re right I made some mistakes and I’m going to correct them so thanks.“ But no. Why do people have such a hard time doing this? If I ever made any mistakes I would definitely do that.
Self-image and self-respect are complicated. For you, which would be the the most painful thing to have publicly exposed about yourself?
