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Trump Admin Releases 1776 Report - Patriots Unite!

All of this fits in really well with Palma’s “how to convert a conservative” discussion. Basically you need to disabuse them of all that American exceptionalism horseshit.
 
Highland Deac said:
Yeah, that one seemed odd to me as well. Nearly every nation has a date for its independence day, so America is hardly unique in that regard.
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But ours is the best! Didn't you read the report!?
 
PhDeac said:
Any mention of the founders who were enslavers or that most of our Presidents before the Civil War were enslavers and relied on enslaved people in the White House?

"Incompatible" my ass.
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There's plenty of passages and claims in this "report" that really just makes you shake your head, and this is definitely one of them. So the Founders knew that slavery was incompatible with the phrase "all men are created equal" but they nonetheless allowed slavery to exist, made several compromises with slaveowners in the Constitution (such as the infamous 3/5 Compromise), and in many cases were slaveowners themselves who never freed the vast bulk of their slaves in their lifetimes, and indeed lived very well off their labor. I'd say they found slavery to be very compatible with their "way of life", and it seems clear that when they said "all men are created equal" they really meant it for white men only.

Basically claiming that you can't really blame America or the Founders too much for slavery because lots of other nations practiced it is bosiding and whataboutism on an epic scale. It's also rather hard to argue that America is exceptional and special when we allowed slavery to flourish for generations like lots of other nations and empires throughout history. This report is riddled with such inconsistencies and contradictions of logic and reason.
 
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The argument that fascism arose as a response to Bolshevism was precious.

Also impressive was the nearly complete absence of any Civil War history.
 
One thing that does worry me is how many GOP-dominated state legislatures or governors will try to implement this "report" or force this onto their public school systems. You just know that Art Pope and Phil Berger and the new NC Superintendent of Education (she's a hard-core Trumpite) would probably love to require NC public school systems to start teaching or using some of this. That's the real danger here, imo.
 
"...There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, through an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps..."
 
And in the time since that quote, white people are largely against any government assistance for fear that it will go toward people who are not white.
 
the Frankfurt School would have loved this
 
The news media and academic reaction to the 1776 Report has been about what you'd expect - lots of ridicule and few taking it seriously. Among other things, the 1776 Commission did not include any academic historians who focus on American history, but instead "includes high-profile conservative activists and pundits, as well as several Trump Cabinet officials as ex-officio members." The Commission was chaired by the President of Hillsdale College, a right-wing Christian college in Michigan. Not surprisingly, the Hillsdale College President is an outspoken Trump supporter.

This USA Today article is fairly typical of the general response:

"On the evening of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the White House released the final report from its “1776 Commission” – a document that excuses America’s history of slavery, derides the legacy of the civil rights movement and equates progressivism with totalitarianism...The report compiles disparate references and quotations throughout American history to argue that the country must return to “patriotic education” in schools and for American families to “raise up morally responsible citizens who love America.”

"The report defends the Three-Fifths Compromise and Fugitive Slave Clause, provisions in the Constitution that counted each enslaved resident of a state as three-fifths of a person and required runaway enslaved people to be returned to enslavers across states lines respectively, as “just that: compromises.”

"In an instance of circular reasoning, the authors excuse several of the Founding Fathers' ownership of slaves by citing their installation of universalist principles into the Declaration of Independence and Constitution as planting “the seeds of the death of slavery in America,” despite this being the same observation from critics who call the Founders hypocrites."

"The report claims that American progressives maintain a “false understanding of rights” that “created what amounts to a fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state,” and is more consistent with 20th-century Soviet-style communism or European fascism than ostensive American values...This authoritarian "shadow government" purportedly operates without democratic oversight and "continues to grow around us."

"The report has already been criticized by historians for various historical falsehoods, arguing it promotes a reductive narrative of American history with a nationalist political agenda that, to quote one critic, "few professional historians would consider plausible.''

The NY Times, Washington Post, and other news sources are all out today with articles on the 1776 Report, and their tone is similar to this article.
 
Maybe everyone in school will get to watch Mike Huckabee's history videos

 
Just got around to reading some of the drivel, my god. I guess it explains why Cruz and the other Harvard educated Nazis alongside him thought that referencing the Compromise of 1877 was good thing.
 
I love that it went down right after noon.
 
A week or two before that they also inexplicably produced a report on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. Murder in a Non-American cathedral in...the twelfth century.

Got that shit saved and will be teaching it for years
 
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