That didn’t take long: Biden removes Trump’s ’1776 report’ on U.S. history from White House website - The Washington Post

That didn’t take long: Biden removes Trump’s ’1776 report’ on U.S. history from White House website - The Washington Post

That didn’t take long: Biden removes Trump’s ‘1776 Report’ on U.S. history from White House website

Well, that didn’t take long: A report on U.S. history published by the Trump administration on Monday was removed from the White House website by President Biden a few days later — and he disbanded the new commission that wrote it.

“The 1776 Report” was released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and immediately lambasted by historians as racist and false for many of its statements, including its defense of slaveholding Founding Fathers and of the Three-Fifths Compromise, which at the 1787 Constitutional Convention allowed enslavers to count their enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for determining representation in the House of Representative as well as for taxation purposes.

It also likened American progressives to European fascists and contended that the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. had devolved into “identity politics.”

On Wednesday, Biden signed the “Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” which, among other things, disbanded the Advisory 1776 Commission. Trump had created it in November and ordered it to issue a report calling for “patriotic education.”

Trump’s ‘patriotic education’ report excuses Founding Fathers for owning slaves and likens progressives to Mussolini

Section 10, Part C of Biden’s executive order says unceremoniously that the Nov. 2 executive order that Trump had signed establishing the commission “is hereby revoked.”

Not long after the new president signed the order, the report could no longer be found on the White House website where it had resided for a few days.

Trump created the 18-member 1776 Advisory Commission after months of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice and charged it with promoting a “pro-American curriculum” that CONTINUE READING: That didn’t take long: Biden removes Trump’s ’1776 report’ on U.S. history from White House website - The Washington Post

Trump’s 1776 Commission Releases a Literal Whitewash of U.S. History | Diane Ravitch's blog

Trump’s 1776 Commission Releases a Literal Whitewash of U.S. History | Diane Ravitch's blog

Trump’s 1776 Commission Releases a Literal Whitewash of U.S. History

On the day before the election, Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a “1776 Commission” to rewrite American history. This commission was intended to refute the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which told the story of American history from the view of African Americans. It was also, allegedly, an answer to “critical race theory,” which you can be sure Trump could not define. I thought this was a bad idea, since history should be written by historians, not by presidential commissions packed with cronies and ideologues.

On December 18, with 33 days left in his term in office, Trump announced the members of his commission, all predictably conservatives and reactionaries. The group was headed by Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, a Trump ally. I called this “absurd.”

Many thought that the commission couldn’t possibly rewrite American history in the few days allowed to them, but miraculously they issued a report just a few days ago. Presumably, it was written before the commission ever CONTINUE READING: Trump’s 1776 Commission Releases a Literal Whitewash of U.S. History | Diane Ravitch's blog

Trump’s ‘patriotic education’ report excuses Founding Fathers for owning slaves and likens progressives to Mussolini - The Washington Post

Trump’s ‘patriotic education’ report excuses Founding Fathers for owning slaves and likens progressives to Mussolini - The Washington Post

Trump’s ‘patriotic education’ report excuses Founding Fathers for owning slaves and likens progressives to Mussolini

President Trump’s “patriotic education” commission released a report on Martin Luther King Day that equates American progressives with European fascists and says it is “untrue” that the Founding Fathers were hypocrites for enslaving people while calling for equality in the nation’s founding documents.

The report is the product of the “1776 Commission” created by Trump late last year after nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice. He tasked the 18-member panel with promoting a “pro-American curriculum” that celebrates “the miracle of American history.”

Posted on the White House website on Monday, the national holiday to honor the civil rights leader, the White House said the report was aimed at countering what it said were efforts “to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.”

“It is very hard for people brought up in the comforts of modern America, in a time in which the idea that all human beings have inviolable rights and inherent dignity is almost taken for granted, to imagine the cruelties and enormities that were endemic in earlier times,” the report says. “But the unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.”

The report was blasted by historian Ibram X. Kendi, author of the best-selling “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” and director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. He wrote on Twitter:

“It claims America is ‘the most just and glorious country in all of human history’ — the nation’s great founding truth. But anti-Americans are disregarding this great patriotic truth, the report argues. But it CONTINUE READING: Trump’s ‘patriotic education’ report excuses Founding Fathers for owning slaves and likens progressives to Mussolini - The Washington Post

CURMUDGUCATION: The 1776 Commission On Authentic Education

CURMUDGUCATION: The 1776 Commission On Authentic Education

The 1776 Commission On Authentic Education

The 1776 Commission released their thing today, and pardon my French, Mom, but holy shit is it bad. You knew it was going to bad. It's really bad. You probably didn't know that Progressivism is on the same Challenges to American Principles list with slavery and fascism. Slavery, by the way, is addressed primarily through a massive whataboutism. 45 pages, and every one of them is filled with horrific, racist, dumb, awful awfulness (okay, pages 2 and 4 are blank). 43 pages of awful (without any footnotes or endnotes or citations or bibliography in sight for this work of ultimate scholarship). I don't have the time at the moment to pick apart all of it (I'll link to it, but you really shouldn't read it on a full stomach, and empty stomach, or at the end of a hard day).

I will note that the report came out remarkably quickly--the members of the commission were announced on December 18, which gave them a month, and a month full of holidays like that. It's almost as if someone had already pretty much written the report ahead of time (or, it turns out, as if someone had simply cut and pasted big chunks of it). 

At any rate, I'm going to focus on just one section, because it articulates so very clearly how terribly, dangerously wrong these folks are about education.

In Appendix IV: Teaching Americans About Their Country, after the section on the misuse of history, after the section about the decline of education (late 1800s, with the rise of progressivism), we CONTINUE READING:  CURMUDGUCATION: The 1776 Commission On Authentic Education