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This professor invented a genocide. Here's how. | History Teacher Reacts | Elephants in Rooms

Mr. Terry History

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Ken LaCorte ‪@ElephantsInRooms‬ explores the tragic history of disease among Native Americans to debunk a widely believed myth of massive, deliberate biological warfare fabricated by former university professor Ward Churchill. While it is true that up to 90% of Native populations were devastated by unintentional epidemics—and there is exactly one historically documented case of the British distributing smallpox blankets at Fort Pitt in 1763—Churchill may have completely invented a narrative that the U.S. Army intentionally infected the Mandan people in 1837, baselessly claiming it caused over 125,000 deaths. Churchill's fictionalized account went unchallenged for over a decade because it appealed to his activist audience, but he was ultimately investigated, exposed for academic fraud, and fired after a separate national controversy regarding an essay he wrote mocking the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Terry chimes in.

Original Video: LIVE DEBATE [God is Degenerate!] 10/2/2026...

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20 Comments

@YAH2121 4 days ago

The Mccarthy video is worth reacting to. Its nuanced at the very least

@OttoMattak 1 day ago

A longtime student of various Indian wars here and I remember Ward Churchill. Always thought of him as an activist more than a scholar. I never knew what became of him.

@susansokoloski2233 9 hours ago

This is why Peer Reviewed Journals for publication of research is vital. No matter any science journal, history journal, or otherwise, peer review is vital.

@pinkybrown1525 12 hours ago

Europeans gave small pox, the natives gave syphilis

@martint.ingham7132 4 days ago

I watched the video on McCarthy the other day and thought it might be something you'd react to. I found it insightful and would recommend it.

@thostaylor 4 days ago

At Fort Pitt, there was certainly 'mens rea' (intent). However, smallpox usually spreads through bodily contact - it is very difficult to get it to spread through blankets or clothing (formite-infection). The CDC says "human-to-human transmission of variola virus occurs by inhalation of large, virus-containing airborne droplets of saliva from an infected person. Before smallpox was eradicated, it was mainly spread by direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact between people."

@georgeshehan5150 7 hours ago

The United States could not have engaged in a genocide since 1492 as it didn't exist in any form until 1775 at the Continental Congress.

@gaelicpatriot3604 4 days ago (edited)

6:50 Smallpox and Measles are obligate human pathogens so they can’t infect animals anymore due to evolutionarily adapting to urban human populations, but it’s thought that Smallpox started with an ancestor pox virus in rodents, while the Measles virus is ancestrally related to Rinderpest (which affects cows).

@patrickfitzgerald9833 2 days ago

19:39 speaking of the Cynical Historian he had a whole video about disgraced Historians and Ward Churchill was one of them about this and other topics he had embellished

@terryhunt2659 16 hours ago

At the time it was thought that smallpox was routinely transmitted on cloth, etc., that had been in contact with sufferers. We now know that this is not usually the case, and that smallpox is usually transmitted directly via breath and sputum.

@woodsmand 1 day ago

peer review only works when the peers do their jobs. This floating around for years without scrutiny because it confirmed the biases of academics and they had no motive to question it. It only became discredited when the rest of his work came into question.

@dyadica7151 4 days ago

Ken takes on some uncomfortable topics and deals well and fairly with them.

@Trishapurpleprincess 3 days ago

This was made into a episode of dr Quinn medicine woman in the 90s

@MilesRowanVlogs 4 days ago

The part that grabbed me was how one badly sourced claim can become “common knowledge” simply because it gets repeated often enough. I’ve been building my own videos around going to places, digging into what actually happened there and separating the story from the folklore on my channel, so this really clicked with me. Mr Terry is at his best when he slows a claim down and asks, “what’s the actual evidence?” That habit matters far beyond this one topic.

@beminem 3 days ago

love your content mr. terry. keep rockin it!

@IESVSCHRISTVSDOMINVSNOSTEREST 9 hours ago (edited)

There are also some good videos on the atrocities attributed to Leopold II’s Congo Free State.

There is an early invention of these claims at the time, largely the result of total belief of a few individual foreign actors, missionaries, and spies (which there were many of in the Congo Free State at the time, largely in the name of undermining Leopold’s government on behalf of other European powers) and then a later one in the late 20th century, who literally conjured the 15 million number by citing the interviews of a hundred or so random Congolese people, taking their testimony as gospel, then assuming their experience was reflective of the entire Congo, even when said estimates conflicted with the total population of the Congo at the time.

The guy who derived the number even stated that he wanted to give a Holocaust narrative to Africans. Wild stuff.

@0816M3RC 4 days ago

It is stuff like this that gives the anti-academics ammo to distrust academia.

@atlasmonologues 1 day ago

It's this kind of activism dressed up as scholarship that has fomented our culture of politics today. Along with the wave of anti-establishment sentiment from the post-Vietnam era, people have become so disenchanted with experts and authorities such as the government and academia that they are willing to latch on to the first belief that aligns with their preconceptions and reject all evidence to the contrary. The observed excesses of government and academia are real, but the rubber-band effect has been extreme and has played a part in the wide rift in the perceptions of reality we have between Left and Right in politics today.

@gt2p818 11 hours ago

I do hope you watch the McCarthy one

@thepagecollective 6 hours ago

Around the year 1992, the anniversary of 1492, overnight, Columbus was dethroned, Thanksgiving became Native American Day and Native American stuff became the thing.