Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw swore an oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution when he was elected in 2019. To fulfill that oath, he is now fighting the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for labeling the U.S. Constitution “harmful and difficult to view.”
Crenshaw introduced a bill Tuesday that would ban the NARA from attaching “harmful content” warnings to any Founding-era documents, including the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights.
“The left is engaging in a Marxist cultural revolution, attempting to undermine our founding and our history and our sense of what it means to be an American,” Crenshaw told The Federalist. “These little steps, slapping warning labels on our founding documents, are all part of their effort to tear down our founding principles, and it must be stopped. My bill makes sure the National Archives is prohibited from including content warnings alongside founding documents of the United States. Whoever decided to put those warning labels up in the first place should also resign.”
The National Treasures Act of 2021 would effectively stop the NARA from attaching such warnings to “any document drafted in whole or in part by a Founding Father of the United States.”
Over the summer, the National Archives issued “harmful content” warnings on all its collections of online documents, including Founding-era documents like the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. The warnings, which allegedly protect against documents that “reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes; be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more,” and “include graphic content of historical events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, natural disasters and more,” were slapped as a blanket statement across the Archives’ cataloged website.
In June, the Archives’ racism task force discussed removing the label “Charters of Freedom” from Founding documents, claiming that America’s governing documents didn’t grant freedom to everybody. The task force also argued to include “trigger warnings” on documents in the Archives’ “structurally racist” Rotunda, which houses the U.S. Constitution.
On Tuesday, 45 Republican lawmakers wrote to the Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero, demanding the Archives remove warnings on seminal documents. Politicizing such documents only “obscures the truth,” the lawmakers said.
“The reality is that this is indeed a war of words. When you have an entire movement in America that seeks to undermine our founding and our history and our sense of what it means to be an American, these little steps actually matter,” Crenshaw said in an Instagram video last week, blasting the Archives for becoming woke. “To engage in a purely cultural revolution, which is what Marxists want to do, you have to start with language, with labels, you have to change the culture from within. That’s exactly what this is and that’s why we should care about it.”
