THAT WE CAN’T TRUST HISTORIANS? What the Fake History of Guns Can Teach Us. “Jon Weiner, author of the 2005 book Historian’s Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower acknowledges that Bellesiles’s book is an example of academic fraud, but he argues that this and other left-biased cases of fraud only come about when historians come under attack by right-wing interest groups. With Nancy McLean’s recent book Democracy in Chains, which is essentially a hatchet job against libertarians, Weiner’s roundabout defense of Bellesiles and other fraudulent scholars effectively provided a ready-made (if laughably partisan) defense of her own scholarly dishonesty.”