The Guardian contests the stereotype that Americans are ignorant of history but, the English paper believes, contemporary conservative movements do appropriate the past for political gain. “There’s a fine line between using historical references as educational tools and using them as propaganda devices. Increasingly, the faux-historical movements of modern-day conservatism are crossing that line. Their rallying cries are historical in timbre, yet scrutinise them closely and they belie a startlingly shallow, incomplete, vision of both past and present. They are, to history, what reality TV is to reality: a carefully constructed charade, an exercise in audience manipulation.”