The order follows Trump’s recent attacks on critical race theory and the 1619 Project, directed by The New York Times Magazine, which revisits the country’s history with a focus on slavery and Black Americans’ contributions.
Racial justice issues have been at the center of this election following protests this summer and fall over the police killings of Black men and women. Trump has repeatedly lashed out at protesters, positioning himself as the “law and order” candidate.
His order blasts historical accounts that he says have “vilified” the nation’s founders.
“This radicalized view of American history lacks perspective, obscures virtues, twists motives, ignores or distorts facts, and magnifies flaws, resulting in the truth being concealed and history disfigured,” the order states. “Failing to identify, challenge, and correct this distorted perspective could fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.”
He blames “one-sided and divisive accounts” on race for failing to recognize the country’s “successful effort to shake off the curse of slavery and to use the lessons of that struggle to guide our work toward equal rights for all citizens in the present.”
The commission’s 20 members will be appointed by the president and serve for a term of two years. Ex-officio members will include the secretaries of State, Defense, Interior, Housing and Urban Development, and Education, along with assistants to the president for domestic policy and for intergovernmental affairs.
The order acknowledges that the federal government’s role is to preserve state and local control over instructional programs.
The commission is tasked with writing a report on the “core principles of the American founding and how these principles may be understood to further enjoyment of ‘the blessings of liberty’ and to promote our striving ‘to form a more perfect Union.’”
They must also help ensure patriotic education is offered to the public at national parks, battlefields, monuments, museums, installations, landmarks, cemeteries and other places that are significant to the Revolution and country’s founding. Agencies will be told to prioritize “the American Founding” in federal grants and initiatives.
Funding will be provided through the Department of Education and subject to the availability of appropriations. Members will serve without compensation.
The order also calls on agencies to prioritize federal resources to promote patriotic education, including the Department of State through its Fulbright scholars program.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/02/trump-1776-commission-education-433885
Biden’s Disbanding of 1776 Commission Shows Left’s War on U.S. History
It beggars belief, that one of Biden’s first intended acts was for his White House to take down the report issued Monday by the 1776 Commission, and on his first day as president, to disband the commission.
Is that really the priority? As one of the commissioners, I guess I’m flattered. But is the baying from the woke left so furious that dissolving a commission named after our nation’s founding, and deleting a report calling for teaching objective history, makes the top of the list?
The symbolism alone should give pause. But maybe the symbolism is the thing, and our new president wants to demonstrate his bona fides to the creators of the 1619 Project and their hard-left allies.
For the record, we commissioners intend to continue meeting and fulfilling the charges of our two-year remit. The Heritage Foundation will also continue to host the report, which you can henceforth find here.
The 1776 Commission’s chairman, Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College and member of The Heritage Board of Trustees, issued a statement along with Vice Chair Carol Swain and Executive Director Matthew Spalding, pointing out that the report merely called for
a return to the unifying ideas stated in the Declaration of Independence. It quotes the greatest Americans, black and white, men and women, in devotion to these ideas. The Commission may be abolished, but these principles cannot be. We will all continue to work together to teach and to defend them.
If we are to take the words of our new president at his inauguration seriously, as we must, the nation’s cup runneth over with challenges. “Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we’re in now,” he said, before reeling off our litany of woes.
What would help us fend off these demons, he said, was unity: “We have never, ever, ever, ever failed in America when we’ve acted together.”
Lofty words, but as one of his predecessors used to say: trust, but verify.
By abolishing the commission, and banishing the report, Biden threw in his lot with critics that from the moment the report was issued covered themselves with ignominy as they raced each other to denigrate our work.
One of the worst examples of the media “coverage,” was a CNN report whose headline actually screamed this libel: “Trump administration issues racist school curriculum report on MLK day.” In a breach of journalistic ethics (if those two words can still be written together), the body of the story did not bother to explain where in the report was there a hint of racism.
Ditto for USA Today, which had a straight up news report—not an opinion piece—with the breathless accusation that the report was a “document that excuses America’s history of slavery, derides the legacy of the civil rights movement and equates progressivism with totalitarianism.”
Ibram X. Kendi, the Boston University activist/professor who insists that racism on behalf of people he deems marginalized is not just welcome, but necessary and not actually racism, said this in a tweet: “This report makes it seems as if slave-holding Founding Fathers were abolitionists.”
It is not hard to understand why Kendi is so allergic to the Founders. He proposes a federal department of “anti-racism” that bars political appointees, and thus therefore believes in separating government from the consent of the governed, one of the key touchstones of the Founding.
On what the Founders believed, and more importantly what their contemporaries thought, I would rather rely on the words of the man who took up their work seven score and ten years later.
“In the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind rested on the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction,” Abraham Lincoln told Stephen Douglas on their famous Third Debate in 1858. “When this government was originally established, nobody expected the institution of slavery would last until this day.”
That is the work we recommended in the 1776 report, for historians to look at primary sources, analyze what they meant in the context of the time, debate that meaning in good faith, without an agenda, and be ready to correct the record when proven wrong.
To twist history to fit a political project is to write lies, which is why so many historians have criticized the 1619 Project, whose agenda is to make our America an object of contempt. The people who do this understand that Edmund Burke was ultimately right when he wrote, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” And they want to do the opposite.
In pursuing the opposite from what Kendi and the others want, we in the commission prefer to heed Biden’s words, when he called in his inaugural address to “reject the culture in which facts are manipulated and even manufactured.”
This is why serious intellectuals on the 1776 Commission, such as Charles Kesler, Matthew Spalding, Dr. Swain, and Dr. Arnn, felt so strongly about our work, and why we will continue to carry it out.
https://www.heritage.org/american-founders/commentary/bidens-disbanding-1776-commission-shows-lefts-war-us-history
I don't know where this latest batch of Democrats came from of course they're really marxists not Democrats but their egos are absolutely out of control they are absolute fools and they don't care at all what the American people think. They believe they can do anything they want to us; so when are we going to stand up and explain it to them? Let's take our country back.