This a quick heads-up on the “1776 report”, which was released by the White House, of all days, on MLK Day. It’s another attempt to re-write and white-wash history and prop up the modern white supremacist movement.
The report was written by the “1776 Commission”, a rag-tag group of mostly white and conservative “historians”; it states that criticism of the Founding Fathers' slave ownership ‘has done enormous damage’ and has had a ‘devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric’. The report claims that the nation’s founders detested slavery even though many of them owned slaves.
The report seems to be a response to The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which traced the story of slavery through American history and became a lightning rod for Trump and conservatives, who saw it as an attack on their view of American history. www.nbcnews.com/...
I have skimmed through the 41-page report at the link in the tweet above. It looks like something written by Stephen Miller with fetid contributions by Tucker, Hannity and Limbaugh. Probably, most of the material is a rehash of prior right-wing racist writings. Hopefully, others can decipher it and predict what impact it will have on the nation, if any, in the coming weeks.
The table of contents shows the insidious propagandist nature of the report -
There is a lot of bashing of MLK, the Civil Rights Movement, Howard Zinn and “Progressivism”. The report ends with recommendations on education and indoctrinating the next generation with patriotic/nationalist/racist ideology.
The title of the announcement of the report at www.whitehouse.gov/… reads like something Sacha Baron Cohen would write — “1776 Commission Takes Historic and Scholarly Step to Restore Understanding of the Greatness of the American Founding.”
Here are some reactions, with a few excerpts from the report —
Defending Slavery -
The Civil Rights movement turned into Calhounism??
A good bit of the report is an attack on our education system.
Bizarre twisted words -
Universities in the United States are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country.
Racism is the foundation of the GOP -
The report is aimed at the right-wing base and no one else.
trump will be vacating the White House tomorrow but the simmering racism, now at full boil, is likely to persist, stoked by leaders of the racist party, aka the GOP. Let’s make sure the racists fail, as they always have in history.
