Trump’s 1776 Commission Calls for National Unity Around America’s Founding Values
President Donald Trump’s advisory 1776 Commission on Monday released a public report, fulfilling its task to revisit the nation’s founding history in an effort to reunite the Americans around its founders’ principles....
“Neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice and government by consent,” the report reads, following an re-examination of the principles and ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “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.”
The authors dedicated a large portion of the report exploring challenges to American’s founding principles. Some of these are historical, such as slavery, which is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that “all men are created equal.” Others are more contemporary, such as progressivism, which holds that the Constitution should constantly evolve to secure evolving rights; fascist and communist movements seeking a totalitarian government with no respect for individual rights; and modern identity politics in favor of a system of explicit group privilege in the name of “social justice.”
“The arguments, tactics, and names of these movements have changed, and the magnitude of the challenge has varied, yet they are all united by adherence to the same falsehood—that people do not have equal worth and equal rights,” the report states....
The report calls for a “national renewal” of education to teach the future American citizens the founding principles and the character necessary to live out those principles....
The authors specifically called out historian Howard Zinn and the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project for preventing students from seeing the humanity, goodness, and benevolence in America’s historical figures....
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What’s Next for 1776 Commission and the Fight to Preserve US History, by Virginia Allen, Daily Signal, January 22, 2021:
Gonzalez [Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and member of President Donald Trump’s Advisory 1776 Commission]: Sure, he created it in November and we were selected sometime in December. And the purpose of the commission was to restore the teaching of history to its proper role throughout America, not just at the school level, but as a civic engagement of all Americans.
And the reason for that is, we’re very open about it, is that the left has been using history as just another instrument in order to advance its purposes to the left, especially the culturally Marxist left.
There is no fundamental truth. The way we are taught history is just one narrative that can be replaced with another narrative. So there’s no transcendent truth. Facts did not happen....
History is very important. History is to a nation what memory is to an individual. And we can imagine how dislocated we would be if we were to wake up one morning and not have any memory of who we are or where we came from....
Gonzalez: He doesn’t need to do that. The left has already done that. The left has done that with the 1619 Project of The New York Times, which is the very epitome of what I have been describing, this attempt by the left to take over history, change it according to its likes so it can change our future.
In the case of the of the 1619 Project, it’s an interpretation of history by looking at all the worst things of America and believing that this is who we are, that America does not begin in 1776 when the declaration is signed or does not begin with the Constitution when it’s ratified in 1788 or drafted, framed, as we put it, in ’87, but it begins in 1619 when the first group of Africans arrive on a pirate ship to what is now Virginia, and that all of our history since then has been about slavery and it is still the central issue of our time. And that is just not the case.
The 1619 Project, which is the equivalent of the 1776 Commission for Biden, actually claimed, began to claim that the Revolution was waged because they thought that Britain, the colonial power, was going to take away the slaves and the power of Southern colonies to have slaves....
Look, this is going to be a very long battle. As I said, I wrote a book, “The Plot to Change America,” on this...