Liberals are masters of using rhetoric to make their worldview sound like reality, but history tells a very different tale. Here are 10 historical facts only a left-winger would believe.

1. Columbus was an imperial conqueror who committed genocide

As with many other problematic historical figures, liberals are intent on erasing Christopher Columbus from history. Progressive cities across the country have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, under the belief that Columbus was a greedy, conquering savage who murdered mass numbers of Native Americans in cold blood.

But the truth is much more nuanced than that.

First, as many Americans forget, in 1492 Columbus did not sail the ocean blue with the intent of discovering and conquering a new continent; his goal was to help finance the liberation of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire. Second, while Columbus did indeed treat the natives of the New World poorly, the vast majority of natives who died after his arrival succumbed to diseases. Columbus did not purposefully kill them, and he certainly did not commit genocide.

But liberals dont care about historical nuance or fact. Columbus was a white man who mistreated people of color, and for that, he is an incarnation of evil who must be struck from history. (RELATED: Christopher Columbus Continues To Be Under Assault From PC Liberals).

 2. The Puritans stole Native American lands

Continuing with the theme of white men disenfranchising people of color, liberals will tell you that the Puritans stole land from the Pequot people to establish the first settlements. However, that just isnt true.

As Thomas Woods writes in The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History:

[] while the king had issued colonial land grants, the Puritan consensus, evident in their words and their actions, was that the kings charter conferred political and not property rights to the land, which Puritan settlers sought by means of voluntary cession from the Indians.

In fact, Woods continues, The colonial governments actually punished individuals who made unauthorized acquisitions of Indian lands. Roger Williams obtained title from the natives before settling Providence, and even though Plymouth obtained title after settlement, natives gave immediate consent.

3. The Union is blameless in the Civil War

Liberals believe the Civil War was an ultimate battle of good versus evil, with the Confederacy being the decidedly evil party. However, while the South is to blame for the start of the war, it was the North who acted truly despicable during its course.

While the Confederate army largely left the civilian population alone, the same cannot be said for Lincolns forces. After establishing himself as military commander of New Orleans on May 1, 1862, General Benjamin Butler issued Order No. 28, which essentially gave occupying Union soldiers the right to rape. When news of the order reached Europe, the British prime minister was so disgusted that he condemned Butler of being guilty in cold blood.

General William Sherman also infamously employed a scorched earth policy in his march across the South, robbing and destroying homes and firebombing entire crops. The destruction was so bad in Mississippi that the residents had to resort to living in caves and eating rats, dogs, and mules. Indeed, in the case of Meridien, Mississippi, where no Confederate force existed at the time of his attack, Sherman bragged that he had wiped it off the map.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term War of Northern Aggression.

4. The revisionist history of the Ku Klux Klan

Today, the Ku Klux Klan is exclusively associated with right-wing extremism. However, the first incarnation of the KKK was actually formed in an effort to further the interests of the Democratic Party.

The original KKK flourished in the late 1860s and sought to overthrow Republican state governments in the South during Reconstruction. Specifically, Klan members targeted Republican politicians and voters, both black and white, and intimidated and threatened them into silence. As Eric Foner, a Columbia University history professor, said, In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy.

However, Foner then attempted to qualify the Klans actions: Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society.

Another scholar, James Marten, chairman of the history department at Marquette University, dismissed the founding generation of the Klan because it really only lasted into the 1870s before it was driven underground, and it was not an overtly political organization.

5. Republicans enforced Jim Crow laws and opposed the Civil Rights Act

Democrats claim that Republicans are responsible for embedding systemic racism in America, but history tells us the exact opposite is true.

Jim Crow laws were enacted and enforced by Democratic politicians (who were elected to office with a forceful helping hand from the KKK) in the former Confederate states beginning in the late 19th century. Nearly 100 years later, when Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the 1957 Civil Rights Act, it was Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson a Democrat who gutted the bill. Strom Thurmond, a Democrat senator from South Carolina and staunch segregationist, sustained the longest one-person filibuster in history in an effort to keep the bill from becoming law. John F. Kennedy, the greatest icon of the Democratic Party, voted against the bill. When the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act came to a vote, a higher percentage of Republicans voted for it than Democrats. Furthermore, Johnson, who was then president, switched sides and renewed the push for civil rights only because he believed doing so would secure the black vote for Democrats.

Just over 10 years later in 1977, Democrats elected former KKK officer Robert Byrd as their Senate Majority Leader. (RELATED: The Truth About Slavery and Civil Rights that Democrats Want to Hide).

6. Labor unions gave us the weekend

In an effort to undermine capitalism and free markets, unionism has long held that the trade union movement created the weekend. But that claim is, in a word, absurd.

The average U.S. workweek was 61 hours in 1870, compared to 34 in 2004. Thats a near doubling of leisure time and Americans can thank capitalism, not unionism:

The shorter work week is entirely a capitalist invention. As capital investment caused the marginal productivity of labor to increase over time, less labor was required to produce the same levels of output. As competition became more intense, many employers competed for the best employees by offering both better pay and shorter hours. Those who did not offer shorter work weeks were compelled by the forces of competition to offer higher compensating wages or become uncompetitive in the labor market.

The forces of competitive capitalism also effectively eliminated the need for child labor and helped to establish workplace safety standards both things that unionism claims to have done. In reality, the lobbying efforts of unions to further regulate and tax business has hampered the market economy, thus making everyone worse off economically.

7. Minimum wage laws help minorities and low-skilled workers

Once again, the exact opposite is true. Increased minimum wage disproportionately affects minority and low-skilled workers, who are most likely to be cut loose. This negatively impacts them in the long run, as they need these jobs to learn grit, self-regulation, motivation, and the ability to work constructively with others in order to climb the economic ladder.

However, its not just happenstance that minimum wage laws hurt minorities they were literally designed to. Famed economist Thomas Sowell gave an uncomfortable historical primer on the racist intent behind minimum wage laws:

In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum-wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.

Some supporters of the first federal minimum-wage law in the United States the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and underbid construction companies using unionized white labor.

Like many liberal policies, minimum wage sounds good, but it just doesnt work in practice and it harms the very people its supposed to help. (RELATED: $15 Minimum Wage to Cost California 400,000 Jobs).

8. Franklin Roosevelt fixed the Great Depression

Democrats love Big Government, so naturally, they love the massive expansion of federal power that was Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal. Indeed, Democrats and anti-free market Republicans credit the New Deal and by extension FDR with ending the Great Depression.

However, the truth is that FDR actually made the depression worse. In summary:

In their understanding of the Depression, Roosevelt and his economic advisers had cause and effect reversed. They did not recognize that prices had fallen because of the Depression. They believed that the Depression prevailed because prices had fallen. The obvious remedy, then, was to raise prices, which they decided to do by creating artificial shortages. Hence arose a collection of crackpot policies designed to cure the Depression by cutting back on production. The scheme was so patently self-defeating that its hard to believe anyone seriously believed it would work.

Roosevelt and his allies believed that American business needed Big Government regulation in order to flourish, but in reality, the exact opposite is true (are you noticing a theme?). Unfortunately, Democrats today still adhere to this nonsensical belief, to the detriment of business owners everywhere.

9. The War on Poverty worked

Only a liberal would believe that more government welfare would lead to less dependency on government. Enter John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnsons war on poverty.

When Kennedy first proposed a war on poverty, he said, We must find ways of returning far more of our dependent people to independence. Johnson later echoed this sentiment, proclaiming that the purpose of the legislation was to make taxpayers out of taxeaters.

That didnt happen. Instead, the war on poverty created a welfare state. Thomas Sowell writes:

Ironically, dependency on government to raise people above the poverty line had been going down for years before the war on poverty began. The hard facts showed that the number of people who lived below the official poverty line had been declining since 1960, and was only half of what it had been in 1950.

On the more fundamental question of dependency, the facts were even clearer. The proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level without counting government benefits declined by about one-third from 1950 to 1965.

All this was happening before the war on poverty went into effect and all these trends reversed after it went into effect.

Handouts dont breed self-sufficiency. Period.

10. Communism is a worthy cause

This is arguably the biggest and worst of all liberal truths: true Communism and/or socialism is a worthy goal.

Are you about to tell us Socialism was tried in Russia or Look at Venezuela etc? It has NEVER EXISTED! It comes AFTER global capitalism! pic.twitter.com/Rr1Ra0ugbE

The Socialist Party (@OfficialSPGB) November 16, 2016

Communism is the absolute antithesis to the sovereign, self-sufficient individual, so of course, liberals love it. In 2017, The New York Times published an entire series eulogizing Communism and singing its praises. Have they forgotten that Communism killed 94 million people in the 20th century?

Disturbingly, Information is Beautiful found that famine killed 101 million people in the 20th century and the major famines in that century exclusively took place in Communist countries.

Numbers dont like: Communism kills. Yet there are a disturbing number of liberals out there who view the world through red-colored lenses.