1776 Commission Report: Schools Should Reject “Activist Propaganda” in Curriculum

In a long-awaited report from President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, the members of the committee lambasted activist curricula like The New York Times’ 1619 Project, urging school districts to reject any teachings that promote “one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles.”

The commission, which Trump convened in response to the prevalence of demented academic movements like “critical race theory” that put all of America’s woes down to slavery and its lingering effects throughout the centuries, argued in their report that children are being taught lies about the founding of the country.

“The most common charge leveled against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie,” the report said. “This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.”

The report says that the truth of America’s founding is that the framers “planted the seeds of the death of slavery in America.”

“Is it reasonable to believe that slavery could have been abolished sooner had the slave states not been in a union with the free? Perhaps,” the report said. “But what is momentous is that a people that included slaveholders founded their nation on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal.'”

The report’s authors lamented the disservice being done to young men and women in our nation’s public schools.

“Deliberately destructive scholarship shatters the civic bonds that unite all Americans,” they wrote. “It silences the discourse essential to a free society by breeding division, distrust, and hatred among citizens. And it is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.”

You’ll not be surprised to see that leftists are thoroughly disgusted by the report – none more so than the originators of the 1619 Project themselves. The New York Times reached out for a quote from James Grossman of the American Historical Association, and he did not disappoint.

“This report skillfully weaves together myths, distortions, deliberate silences, and both blatant and subtle misreading of evidence to create a narrative and an argument that few respectable professional historians, even across a wide interpretive spectrum, would consider plausible, never mind convincing,” he said. “They’re using something they call history to stoke culture wars.”

The irony is so thick in that quote that it defies further commentary. We’ll just let it stand as is.