The Great White Hoax

A provocative new history of the forgeries, bogus science, rigged data, and fake news that keep American racism alive

“Anyone interested in the intersection of race, politics, and public lies in America will want to read this book.” —David S. Reynolds, Bancroft Prize–winning cultural historian and author of John Brown, Abolitionist and Walt Whitman’s America

Fake news, outright political lies, a shamelessly partisan press, and the collapse of truth, civility, and shared facts, Philip Kadish argues, are nothing new. The Great White Hoax, a masterpiece of history and literary sleuthing, reveals that the era of Fox News and Donald Trump is simply a return to form. We have been here before.


In a book that brilliantly puts our current era into historical context, The Great White Hoax uncovers a centuries-long tradition of white supremacist hoaxes, perpetrated on the American public by a succession of political hucksters and opportunists, all of them willfully using racial frauds as tools for political and social advantage. In the antebellum era, slavery’s defenders used bogus science to “prove” the inferiority of American people; during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s enemies circulated a sham pamphlet accusing him of promoting a dilution of the white race through “miscegenation” (a racist term invented by the pamphlet’s authors). From these murky beginnings, author Philip Kadish draws a direct thread to Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Birth of a Nation, Henry Ford’s the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Madison Grant’s embrace of eugenics (which directly influenced Adolf Hitler), Alabama Governor George Wallace’s race-baiting, and Roger Ailes’s creation of Fox News.


The Great White Hoax reveals white supremacy as today’s real “fake news”—and exposes the cast of villains, past and present, who have kept American racism alive.