I'd like to start giving people the option of commenting on shorter Cold Takes pieces (which I don't cross-post here or provide audio for). I'm going to use this post for that: I will generally leave a comment for each piece, and people can leave their comments as replies to that.
It is so, so much worse. I investigated the claim in depth, found it was indeed "ballistically false" (the claim being that the source they cite supports what the book says, not whether what they say in the book is actually true), and then decided to find out if Wengrow had perhaps apologized and issued a retraction . I ran across this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1460660171496173577?s=21 in which Wengrow defends his scholarship by variously claiming that people misread the source, that people misunderstood the claims in the source, that the source saying that "many" whites chose to stay with the Indians is evidence for his claim that they "almost invariably" did so, and that his source is unreliable and should not be trusted.
This guy is either very stupid, a very bad liar, or just lazy and thinks that everyone else is a gullible idiot.