Here are some excerpts, annotated by me:
In an executive order signed on Wednesday in his first day in office, Biden disbanded Donald Trump’s presidential 1776 Commission and withdrew a report it released Monday. Trump established the group in September to rally support from white voters.
[Freedom based on individual rights appeals only to "white" voters? What does that tell you about the Left's view of non-whites? Is US NEWS claiming that non-whites are incapable of living in freedom, of possessing personal agency? Your guess is as good as mine. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass would certainly beg to differ.]
and as a response to The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which highlights the lasting consequences of slavery in America.
[Lingering consequences of slavery, such as they are objectively determined should be addressed, of course. But lingering consequences is not the thrust of the 1619 Project. That is a disingenuous deflection. No, the 1619 Project’s primary mission is to reframe America as a slave state, not the anti-slavery free state that the Founders actually created, contradictions, compromises, and hypocracy notwithstanding. The 1619 Project cancels America by whitewashing the Enlightenment, the fundamental catalyst of the American Founding, out of the history of America. The Enlightenment principles that formed the intellectual Foundation of the American Revolution didn’t start gaining steam until decades after the first slaves arrived in the British colony of Jamestown in 1619, the event that the 1619 Project unjustly claims is the true Founding of America.]
In its report, which Trump hoped would be used in classrooms across the nation, the commission glorifies the country’s founders
[I have not read the report. And of course the “devil is in the details.” But if it “glorifies the country’s founders,” it is certainly correct. The Founders created the first ever nation Founded explicitly on elevating the individual, all common individuals equally, to the sovereign, relegating the state as servant, by deliberate philosophical design.]
, plays down America’s role in slavery,
[The 1619 Project inverts the Founding, claiming preservation of slavery, rather than the Enlightenment principles that stand antipodal to slavery, was primary to America. If the 1776 Commission report corrects that hierarchy, it is not down playing the terrible moral and political attrocity of slavery. It is accurately portraying the true history of American slavery as an aberation--a birth defect--that ran in contradiction to this nation’s own stated principles of liberty equality. If this is what Trump’s 1776 Commission accomplishes, then Trump’s commission is correct.]
condemns the rise of progressive politics,
[The rise of Progressive politics was and is a reactionary collectivist repudiation of America’s individualist Founding principles, and deserves condemnation. See, for example, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change. Or simply look at any welfare state policies of the Progressives, which uniformly violate people’s inalienable individual rights, and turns government from the institution that “secures these rights” into a rights violator.]
and argues that the civil rights movement ran afoul of the “lofty ideals” espoused by the Founding Fathers.
[The Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King explicitly espoused the Founding Fathers and their ideals. To King, these ideals were more than merely “lofty.” He sincerely believed in them, and said so. Contrast that with what the Civil Rights movement, if you can call it that, has morphed into--a racist, collectivist, statist cabal that judges people by their group affiliation rather than the content of their individual character.]
The panel, which included no professional historians of the United States, complained of “false and fashionable ideologies” that depict the country’s story as one of “oppression and victimhood.” Instead, it called for renewed efforts to foster “a brave and honest love for our country.”
Historians widely panned the report, saying it offers a false and outdated version of American history that ignores decades of research.
[Which historians? Individual Rights outdated? Well, that suits the totalitarian Left just fine. True intellectuals would never view history as "up-to-date" or "outdated", but as true or false.]
“It's an insult to the whole enterprise of education. Education is supposed to help young people learn to think critically,” said David Blight, a Civil War historian at Yale University. “That report is a piece of right-wing propaganda.”
[Then why oppose an alternative view of the Founding? Either the true beginning of America was 1619 and the United States of America established in 1776 was a fraud to protect slavery, as the K-12 curriculum of the 1619 project claims, or the true Founding was 1776 when the Founding Fathers “built the new nation ‘upon a set of virtues and values that would create a truly free society,” virtues and values that the Founders believed would “work toward . . truly delivering on that promise for all,” over time, as the 1776 Unites curriculum teaches, and as Clemson University’s C. Bradley Thompson demonstrates in America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It.
Critical thinking requires objectivity balance. Indoctrination and historical revisionism is the opposite of helping young people learn to think critically. The article goes on, arguing that the report . . .]
attempts to soften America's role in slavery and explain it as a product of the times.
[Why?]
“Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil,” the panel wrote in the 20-page report. “The unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.”
[Doesn’t critical thinking require full context? One does not “soften” American slavery by considering it within the context of slavery over time and human history. Ignoring that full context does not promote critical thinking. Context-dropping makes critical thinking impossible.]
Whatever its inaccuracies and the wisdom of such an endeavor—I don't think the Federal Government should be involving itself in local school curriculums—it's laudable that Trump attempted to counter the fraudulent and philosophically treasonist 1619 Project. But the fact that Biden was so quick to cancel Trump's report tells you he's on the side of the Left's project to cancel America. A good counter to the "1619 Project" is the 1776Unites curriculum, which is
grounded in the Woodson Center Principles and help educators bring their K-12 students encouragement, enrichment, and the genuine empowerment that comes with personal agency.
As 1776 Unites founder Robert L. Woodson put it, America’s founding generation built the new nation “upon a set of virtues and values that would create a truly free society, the freest the world had ever seen. They even knew at the time it was falling short of truly delivering on that promise for all, but they knew what they were working toward.”]
Note, in the article, the appeals to authority--"Historians widely panned the report"--and the ad hominem--"a piece of right-wing propaganda." Why are only Left-Wing-approved intellectuals “qualified historians”, but conservatives are not? Why are Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College, Carol Swain of Vanderbilt Law School, Charles R. Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and the rest of the 18 member commission not qualified? Because they are conservatives? Indeed, why should the label “professional historians” guarantee accuracy? You do not have to be a historian to analyze and understand history. Otherwise, teaching history to young people is a fruitless endeavor, and “critical thinking” about history is impossible to lay people. It’s the resurrection of the “philosopher-king” folly of Plato, thoroughly discredited by The Enlightenment.
Note also that the reference to "white voters" is not a quote from a critic. It is part of the report of US News, an allegedly "unbiased" source of mainstream news! This is clear evidence that the Leftism of the press as well as the American Left are inherently racist. Why else would the reference to skin color be raised about a scholarly interpretation of the Founding of the United States of America?
Finally, note that all of the features of the 1776 Commission project cited in this report is presented in a vacuum, and then brushed off as propaganda and an insult and so on. The argument from intimidation hangs over this whole article.
To be sure, there are valid criticisms presented in this article. As one critic said, it is “government indoctrination of American students” because it has no citations and is incomplete. It is a step toward centralization of education, a very bad, statist idea. Trump should never have attempted to intervene in school curriculums. On these merits, Biden was right to abolish the 1776 Commission and its report. The right way to counter the 1619 Project, a private initiative of the New York Times, is through private initiative.
But make no mistake. Biden’s executive order to abolish Trump’s commission did not spring from any concern with expanding government’s power. He’s committed to expanded government control over our lives. In keeping with his collectivism/statism, and as explicitly endorsed in his campaign and in his inauguration speech, Biden is squarely on the side of the counter-American 1619 Project, which I have argued is an attempt to literally cancel America by discrediting the Founding Enlightenment philosophy of individualism. The Left, after all, represents Americanism’s antipode, collectivism. You can’t push a slow-motion criminal socialist agenda on a Foundation of inalienable individual rights and a government designed to secure these rights. Those Declared principles of the Founding Generation are as much anti-Democratic Socialist as they are anti-slavery, anti-racism, and anti-collectivism. So, they must be cancelled, as if they never existed.
Cancel America: that is the motive behind Biden’s executive order repealing the 1776 Commission and its report. But those of us who believe that America’s true Founding was 1776, not 1619, have a powerful historical wind at our backs--the exact words of the Declaration of Independence. As Harvey Milk put it in his 1978 Gay Freedom Day celebration in San Francisco,
On the Statue of Liberty it says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free . . . .” In the Declaration of Independence it is written “All men are created equal and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights . . . .” That’s what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence. No matter how hard you try, you cannot chip those words from off the base of the Statue of Liberty.
Amen.
Related Reading:
Biden Cancels America
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson.
The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics
A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig
The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism
The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery
