The Trump White House 1776 Commission released its final report Monday giving “a definitive chronicle of the American founding” to combat the dark ideological forces redefining the United States as an irredeemably racist empire built of for the sole purpose of oppression.
The 45-page report released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, two days before President Donald Trump leaves Washington, celebrates the nation’s founding while condemning the “destructive scholarship” emanating from the progressive left on university campuses that suppress dissent, breed extremism, and serve as “hotbeds of anti-Americanism.”
“To restore our society, academics must return to their vocation of relentlessly pursuing the truth and engaging in honest scholarship that seeks to understand the world and America’s place in it,” the commission wrote, encouraging Americans to “reject false and fashionable ideologies that obscure facts, ignore historical context, and tell America’s story solely as one of oppression and victimhood.”
In other words, the commission concluded that in order for the nation to heal, its educational centers ought to teach history with dedication to truth and context rather than selective storytelling to advance a political agenda.
The commission, which contains eminently credentialed Americans of a variety of ethnicities, was created last fall to restore “patriotic education” one year after The New York Times launched its anti-American, ahistorical, and characteristically Pulitzer-prize winning “1619 Project” that its editors admitted as historically inaccurate last spring. The White House report took direct aim at the 1619 Project already imposed on some 4,500 U.S. classrooms as emblematic of “the decline in American education” where students are taught a distorted view of their nation’s history, and grow up to hate their own country.
“States and school districts should reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles,” the report reads.
Instead of excusing the nation’s well-known sins such as slavery, the 18-member commission confronts them, arguing that they exemplify American exceptionalism because Americans worked tirelessly to root out the very evils progressives use to indict it.
“Of course, neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent,” the commission wrote. “But no nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more to achieve them.” After all, “the foundation of our Republic planted the seeds of the death of slavery in America.”
Of course legacy media immediately and predictably vilified the commission’s findings with levels of ignorance showing they clearly had neither read the report nor knew anything about its authors. New York Times reporter Astead Wesley mocked the report on Twitter.
shorter "1776 commission" pic.twitter.com/IExXcuWT4c
— Astead (@AsteadWH) January 18, 2021
Boston University’s racist anti-racist-in-chief Ibram Kendi declared the report was the Trump administration’s “last great lie.”
But it does not take long to read this report as the last great lie from a Trump administration of great lies. 2/11https://t.co/Nyhe0hHyHg
— Ibram X. Kendi (@ibramxk) January 19, 2021
The Lincoln Project’s expert-in-everything Tom Nichols appeared confused why “anyone is bothering with it.”
So many of you are commenting on the 1776 commission report. I cannot imagine why, at this point, anyone is bothering with it.
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 19, 2021
One historian at an Illinois college named Brian Leech complained no historians were co-authors of the commission’s report. Leech must not be aware that commission member Victor Davis Hanson, who has earned a doctorate in classics and has spent many years teaching in eminent universities, is an award-winning historian with numerous works of historical scholarship to his name.
I’ve now seen a number of people calling for degrees to be revoked of the historians who composed the 1776 Commission report. The joke is on them, though, because as far as I can tell from searching bios, no historians were involved in the writing of this report. https://t.co/PMiBLnhtwD
— Brian Leech (@brianleechphd) January 18, 2021
An advanced search of Leech’s tweets also revealed no such criticism lodged at the 1619 Project, or any reporting on the fact that the National Association of Scholars demanded the Pulitzer Prize Board revoke their prestigious award to its architect given the project’s many documented errors called out by both left and right historians.
The 1776 Commission outraged the left from the very onset with its rejection of their totalitarian scholarship rewriting American history as one of endless oppression. That rejection, according to the doctrine of wokeism, is the worst kind of evil one can commit: racism.
Cloaked in the moral righteousness of social justice, ideas challenging the progressivism reimagining the United States as irredeemably racist society that must make up for ancestral wrongs are vilified by the mob as racist and cancellable. No White House report that didn’t support their pledge to social justice as a religion was ever going to convince those baptized in wokeism.