BY HANK REICHMAN

If you’re an academic on Twitter, especially an historian, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered and perhaps even followed Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse.  As the Pacific Standard put it introducing an interview with him, “Over the last few years, Kruse and other experts have been bringing evidence and expertise to well-curated public Twitter threads that rebut lies and historical misinformation. This year, Kruse vaulted to new levels of visibility (and gained around 150,000 Twitter followers) when he took on Dinesh D’Souza’s claims that the Republican Party had never pursued a “Southern strategy” to attract racist white voters away from the mid-century Democrats. With humor, animated gifs, screenshots of primary sources, and lots of references to the work of other scholars, Kruse dismantled D’Souza’s ahistorical argument piece by piece.”

Here are some brief excerpts from the interview:

When did you start this kind of historical fact-checking on Twitter?

[In 2015] Joe Scarborough called Obama the “most partisan president ever.” I did a long thread on that [and realized], wait, people pay attention to this stuff?  My Twitter account had maybe 10,000 followers, probably less than that.  Normally I just yell at Scarborough on the TV.  This was like yelling at the TV, but he hears me, and other people hear me too. . . .

This medium is really useful.  There’s a ready-made audience out there listening, including journalists. People were happy to have this historian pop up to provide context. . . .

D’Souza clearly isn’t interested in facts, so what kind of effect do you think you can have?

I’m under no illusion that I’m going to get him off Twitter.  He’s got a very profitable con—I assume it’s a con.  I do it for people on the sidelines, [for] people who aren’t already his fans but are confronted with people pushing his work directly or his arguments indirectly.  It’s a way to serve as counterbalance.

Are you worried that you’re just giving him more oxygen?

Both D’Souza and Trump have a much bigger audience than I have.  The millions of people who follow them are already going to see [their tweets].  It’s important to not just let them go unchallenged. D’Souza’s schtick was to say that no historians ever objected to what [he says].  So our lack of fact-checking was taken as at least our tacit approval.  If we don’t speak up and challenge these untruths, then they have the floor.

Historians have the same kind of duty that scientists have to climate change deniers, that doctors have to anti-vaccine folks.  It’s not fun.  It’s not good for me to do this stuff.  It’s not the best use of my time.  I don’t get paid for it.  I get flooded with hate mail and angry replies, but somebody’s gotta do it.

Why you?

By the nature of who I am and where I am—I’m a white straight man, a full professor at an Ivy League university—I catch 1 percent of the crap that is thrown at other scholars out there.  I have the security to do this.  I have no excuse not to do this, other than that I don’t want hate mail or it’s a drag on my time.  Those are not good excuses, as far as I’m concerned.

I believe that we, as scholars, have a duty to engage with the public.  As much time and energy as I put in my scholarly books and articles and teaching, we have a duty to these larger audiences that will never read one of my books.  They don’t have [my books] on my desk, but they’re going to see one of these Twitter threads.  And that’s good.