On Monday, 18 January 2021, the Trump administration released a document titled The 1776 Report, written by the 1776 Commission, an advisory commission created by President Donald Trump on 17 September 2020 with the explicit purpose to promote “patriotic education.” The report attempts to portray Founding Fathers who owned slaves as abolitionists, attempts to portray Civil Rights leaders as conservatives, and attempts to portray “progressivism” and “identity politics” as dangerous threats to “America’s principles” on par with slavery and fascism.
Professional scholars of United States history of all political leanings immediately and universally denounced The 1776 Report as wildly inaccurate, jingoistic propaganda. It would be all too easy to dismiss it as not even worth debunking. After all, President Joe Biden signed an executive order which rescinded the 1776 Commission and removed The 1776 Report from the official White House webpage on his very first day in office.
Unfortunately, I fear that simply choosing to ignore The 1776 Report would be naïve. Tens of thousands of children across the United States who attend conservative private schools or are homeschooled are fed narratives identical to those presented in The 1776 Report through inaccurate textbooks published by conservative Evangelical Protestant book publishers, such as BJU Press and Abeka.
Supporters of these textbooks and the narratives they present will undoubtedly try to use The 1776 Report to legitimize their claims. They will try to portray it as a definitive account written by renowned experts working under the commission of the United States government. Therefore, in this article, I want to briefly talk about a few of the reasons why the report is wildly dishonest and untrustworthy.
The 1776 Report and the 1619 Project
As I mention in this article I wrote back in September 2020, President Donald Trump clearly created the 1776 Commission as a response to the 1619 Project, a long-form journalism project published by The New York Times Magazine, starting in August 2019. It is therefore worth comparing the two projects to see what the differences are between them.
I do not deny that there are legitimate criticisms that can be made about the 1619 Project. For instance, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay for the project claims that “one of the primary reasons” why the British colonies in North America decided to declare independence was because white slave-owning colonists were afraid that the British might try to abolish slavery. This almost certainly isn’t accurate.
Although a movement to abolish slavery did exist in Britain in 1776, it had very little traction and there was very little evidence at the time to suggest that Britain was going to completely abolish slavery in its colonies anytime soon. There is likewise very little evidence to suggest that any major leaders of the American Revolution believed that Britain was likely to abolish slavery anytime within the near future.
It is popularly believed nowadays that the 1772 case of Somerset v. Stewart legally abolished slavery in Britain, but this is not actually true. The court in that case merely ruled that enslaved people living in England had certain rights under common law and that an enslaved person living in England could not be seized and taken by force to the colonies against their own will. The case was significant because it did afford important legal protections to enslaved people living in Britain, but it did not make slavery illegal. In the end, Britain didn’t outlaw the Transatlantic slave trade until 1807, didn’t pass legislation to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire until 1833, and didn’t fully complete the abolition of slavery in its colonies until 1843.
Leslie M. Harris, a professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University served as a consultant for the 1619 Project. She later wrote an op-ed for Politico saying that she specifically told the people in charge of the 1619 Project that their claim about the colonists choosing to declare independence because they were afraid that Britain might abolish slavery was inaccurate, but they ignored her.
These kinds of preventable errors unfortunately don’t exactly do much good for the 1619 Project’s reputation. On the other hand, they are nothing compared to the kinds of claims that we find in The 1776 Report. Whatever flaws the 1619 Project may have, it at least does important work to challenge the narratives that American schoolchildren are normally fed. It is a good faith contribution to the ongoing debate over how American history should be taught in schools.
The 1776 Report is no such thing; it is an overtly racist, propagandistic hack job thrown together by a group of non-experts with very little thought or effort, relying on basically no supporting evidence whatsoever. It is nothing more than a stultifying exercise in vapid jingoism.
ABOVE: Logo for The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project
The people involved
Next, I want to talk about the people who were actually involved in writing The 1776 Report. Most people who read about the report seem to be under the impression that it was written by professional historians, but this isn’t really true. The commission that produced the report was almost exclusively composed of conservative white male college administrators with no formal background in history.
The chair of the 1776 Commission was Larry P. Arnn, an avowed conservative who is the current president of Hillsdale College, a private conservative college in Hillsdale, Michigan. Hillsdale’s entire curriculum is founded on the idea of “western heritage.” The college does not accept financial support from the United States government, since accepting government funding would require the college to adopt affirmative action programs, which the college refuses to adopt because it maintains that affirmative action is a form of racist discrimination against white people.
In 2013, Arnn testified before the Michigan Legislature that, shortly after he assumed his position as president of Hillsdale College, he received a letter from the Michigan Department of Education stating that the college “violated the standards for diversity.” Arnn interpreted this, saying, “because we didn’t have enough dark ones, I guess, is what they meant.”
After Democratic members of the Michigan Legislature criticized Arnn’s description of racial minorities as “dark ones” as racist, Arnn refused to apologize and instead doubled down on it, acting as though he had no idea why such a description could be construed as offensive, saying: “The state of Michigan sent a group of people down to my campus, with clipboards… to look at the colors of people’s faces and write down what they saw. We don’t keep records of that information. What were they looking for besides dark ones?”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Larry P. Arnn, the conservative president of Hillsdale College who served as the chair of the 1776 Commission
The vice chair of the 1776 Commission was Carol M. Swain, a conservative political commentator who is known for her bigoted opinions. For instance, she generated nationwide controversy after she published an op-ed in The Tennessean titled “Charlie Hebdo attacks prove critics were right about Islam” on 15 January 2015. The op-ed begins with this declaration:
“What would it take to make us admit we were wrong about Islam? What horrendous attack would finally convince us that Islam is not like other religions in the United States, that it poses an absolute danger to us and our children unless it is monitored better than it has been under the Obama administration?”
The op-ed goes on to make the usual xenophobic argument that Islam is inherently violent and dangerous and that Muslims must be kept out of the country.
There was only one professional historian on the 1776 Commission: Victor Davis Hanson, an emeritus professor of ancient Greek military history from California State University, Fresno. Hanson is especially known for his books The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (published in 1989) and The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (published in 1995).
Hanson has always held far-right political views. He and John Heath coauthored the book Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, which stirred up a great deal of controversy in the classics community upon its publication in 1998. In the book, Hanson and Heath argue that the field of classics is in terminal decline because politically correct liberals aren’t teaching their students to properly revere the ancient Greeks and Romans as the “founders of western civilization.”
Hanson has not published any kind of serious scholarly work since the 1990s and he spends most of his time nowadays writing curmudgeonly articles complaining about the supposed decline of “western civilization” for The National Review. It is therefore no surprise that Hanson is a die-hard, unapologetic Trump supporter. In 2019, he published a book titled The Case for Trump, in which he argues that Donald Trump is the savior America needs and that he is the only one who can truly make America great again.
Hanson has no background or qualifications in modern American history and it’s clear that it was only his unreserved support for Trump that won him a place on the 1776 Commission.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the emeritus classics professor Victor David Hanson
Plagiarism
It also quickly came to light that substantial portions of The 1776 Report were plagiarized verbatim from earlier sources. Notably, nearly the entire fortieth page of the report was clearly copied verbatim without attribution from an op-ed titled “Becoming America,” which was published in Inside Higher Ed in 2008.
The author of the op-ed is Thomas K. Lindsay, a conservative activist who briefly served as the president of Shimer College, a small private college based on a Great Books curriculum. Lindsay also happens to have been a member of the 1776 Commission, meaning he almost certainly plagiarized his own op-ed in the report.
This suggests that even the authors of the report did not consider it worth putting much effort into. They seem to have seen the report not as a serious academic endeavor, but rather a tool by means of which they could codify their own previously-held opinions into state ideology.
ABOVE: Photograph of Thomas K. Lindsay, a member of the presidential advisory commission that wrote The 1776 Report
Misquotation and misuse of sources
Even if we ignore the fact that none of the people involved in the writing of The 1776 Report were in any way qualified to write it and the fact that large chunks of the report were clearly plagiarized from other sources, even a cursory reading of the report reveals that it is shockingly poorly researched. The report does not contain a single footnote, endnote, or in-text citation of any kind. I have already cited more sources in this blog post than The 1776 Report cites in its entire forty-one pages.
The 1776 Report is littered full of quotes from various American historical figures, but it does not at any point say what its sources are for these quotes, when the quotes were originally made, in what context they were made, or why the person made them. The quotes are simply given, without citation, sources, explanation, or context. For all we know, the authors of the report simply lifted these quotations off BrainyQuote without even bothering to verify them.
In some cases, the quotations are horribly butchered and inaccurate. For instance, on page seventeen, the report quotes the ancient Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BCE) as having said that the family is “the seminary of the republic.” The report gives absolutely no information about where Cicero said this, when he said it, or in what context he said it. Nevertheless, it claims that the quote means that it is the role of the family to train young people to be leaders for their country by inculcating good values and that the “Founding Fathers” of the United States “often echoed” this sentiment.
As it turns out, this quotation appears to be taken from a very bad English translation of Cicero’s treatise De Officiis, which he originally wrote in 44 BCE. In book one, section fifty-four, Cicero writes, in the original Latin:
“Nam cum sit hoc natura commune animantium, ut habeant libidinem procreandi, prima societas in ipso coniugio est, proxima in liberis, deinde una domus, communia omnia; id autem est principium urbis et quasi seminarium rei publicae.”
This means, in my own English translation:
“Therefore, because it is by nature the common property of living beings to have the desire to procreate, the first connection is that of wedlock, next is in offspring, then is the single home, with everything in common; it, therefore, is the first principle of the city and, as it were, the nursery of the republic.”
In the United States in the twenty-first century CE, the English word seminary generally refers to a place of higher learning where people are trained to become religious leaders; in Rome in the first century BCE, however, the Latin word seminarium generally referred to a place that we might call a “nursery.”
In this passage, Cicero is not arguing that it is primarily the role of the family to train young people to become leaders for the republic. Instead, in this particular passage, when Cicero uses the term “seminarium rei publicae” (i.e., “nursery of the republic”), he’s talking about reproduction; he’s essentially arguing that it is important for a husband and wife to have lots of sex together and produce lots of offspring to serve the republic.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of the ancient Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero on display in the Musei Capitolini in Rome
Misrepresenting the Founding Fathers’ views on slavery
The 1776 Report attempts to portray the Founding Fathers of the United States as abolitionists. It is true that most of the Founding Fathers were generally uncomfortable about the existence of outright slavery in a country that was supposedly founded on the ideas of equality and freedom. Nonetheless, most of them never seriously committed to the goal of abolishing slavery and continued to own enslaved people themselves until their deaths.
As I discuss in this article from September 2020, of the major Founding Founders who are commemorated today, only Benjamin Franklin at the very end of his life could be accurately described as a committed abolitionist. Franklin was a slaveowner for over sixty years, but, by the end of his life, he had emancipated all the enslaved people he had ever owned.
In 1787, Franklin became the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. In February 1790, only a couple months before his death, he wrote a petition to Congress on behalf of the society advocating for Congress to do everything within its power to abolish slavery as soon as possible. His conclusion reads:
“Under these Impressions they [i.e. the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery] earnestly entreat your serious attention to the Subject of Slavery, that you will be pleased to countenance the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men [i.e. enslaved black people], who alone, in this land of Freedom, are degraded into perpetual Bondage, and who, amidst the general Joy of surrounding Freemen, are groaning in Servile Subjection, that you will devise means for removing this Inconsistency from the Character of the American People, that you will promote mercy and Justice towards this distressed Race, & that you will Step to the very verge of the Powers vested in you for discouraging every Species of Traffick in the Persons of our fellow men.”
Franklin, however, was a startling exception to the overall trend. The vast majority of the other Founding Fathers never fully rejected slavery and instead went to their graves as slaveowners.
ABOVE: Portrait of Benjamin Franklin from around 1785 by Joseph Duplessis. Although he owned enslaved people for over sixty years, in the last few years of his life, Franklin became a convinced abolitionist.
The 1776 Report claims that George Washington “came to detest” slavery and states: “By the end of his life, he freed all the slaves on his family estate.” It is true that, in the years after the American Revolution, Washington began to admit privately to some of his acquaintances that he was a bit uncomfortable about his own ownership of enslaved people. Nonetheless, saying that he “came to detest” slavery is a bit of an overstatement and the claim that he “freed all the slaves on his family estate” is demonstrably false.
At the time of Washington’s death in 1799, there were 317 enslaved people working on his plantation at Mount Vernon, of whom only 123 were his personal property. One hundred fifty-three of the enslaved people who worked on George Washington’s land belonged to the family of his wife Martha. The remaining forty-one enslaved people belonged to other enslavers in the region, who loaned them to Washington for profit.
George Washington stipulated in his will that all 123 of the enslaved people he personally owned were to be set free upon the death of his wife Martha. Martha ended up setting these people free in December 1800 because she was afraid that they would try to murder her to obtain their freedom. Meanwhile, the 153 enslaved people on Washington’s plantation who were owned by Martha’s family were never set free and, upon Martha’s eventual death in 1802, they were inherited by her grandchildren.
ABOVE: Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon, painted in 1851 by Junius Brutus Stearns—a heavily idealized and inaccurate representation of George Washington as a kind slaveowner
The 1776 Report claims that Thomas Jefferson originally included “a strong condemnation of slavery” in the Declaration of Independence. This isn’t exactly true. The passage Jefferson included in his initial draft for the Declaration didn’t so much condemn slavery so much as shift the blame for the existence of slavery in the North American colonies from the colonists who actually owned slaves to the English king. The passage reads as follows:
“He [i.e., King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
The 1776 Report also fails to mention that Jefferson personally owned over six hundred enslaved people—more than any other United States president. He only set two enslaved people free during his lifetime and he only set five enslaved people free in his will.
Thomas Jefferson and the other white people who oversaw his plantation brutally abused and mistreated the enslaved Black people who worked there. For instance, the nail factory at Monticello was staffed entirely by enslaved children. Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. wrote an entry in Jefferson’s Farm Book about how the children who worked in the nail factory didn’t like going to the nailery on freezing cold mornings in the dead of winter, so the overseer ruthlessly scourged them all for “truancy,” which increased productivity tremendously. Acts of violent cruelty like this must have been extremely common.
Thomas Jefferson was also a habitual sexual predator. At some point between 1787 and 1790, he began to make sexual advances towards a young enslaved Black woman named Sally Hemings. Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife Martha and she is said to have borne a strong resemblance to her. We don’t know how she felt about Jefferson, but, since she was his slave and she had no power to refuse his advances, she did not have the ability to give consent. Therefore, anytime Jefferson had sexual relations with her, it must be considered rape.
Sally Hemings was somewhere between fourteen and seventeen years old when Jefferson began raping her. This means that Thomas Jefferson was guilty of raping a minor. Hemings ended up giving birth to six children; Jefferson is thought to have been the father of all of them. Quite frankly, he was a sick, twisted man and the fact that he played such an important role in founding our country should make us seriously question what ideals our country was really founded on.
ABOVE: Portrait of Thomas Jefferson from 1800 by Rembrandt Peale
The 1776 Report mentions that James Madison intervened to make sure that the words slavery and slave were not used in the United States Constitution. This is true. The report, however, fails to mention the fact that Madison himself owned over one hundred enslaved people and never emancipated any of them. The reason he kept the words slavery and slave out of the Constitution was because he was embarrassed by them, not because he seriously supported the idea of getting rid of slavery anytime soon.
Of the people who are widely revered today as “Founding Fathers,” John Adams was probably the only one who never owned enslaved people at any point in his entire life. Adams was a staunch religious conservative who believed that the ownership of enslaved people was immoral. Nonetheless, he was strongly opposed to the idea of immediately abolishing slavery because he strongly supported the property rights of slaveowners and he naïvely believed that slavery would simply die out on its own through gradual emancipation.
On 24 January 1801, Adams wrote a letter addressed to two abolitionist leaders. In this letter, he declares that slavery is immoral, but claims that it will naturally die out on its own and that any use of force or violence to end slavery “would produce greater violations of Justice and Humanity, than the continuance of the practice.”
Adams further argues in the letter that there are “more serious and threatening Evils” in American society than slavery and that one of the worst of these evils is “a general Debauchery as well as dissipation, produced by pestilential philosophical Principles of Epicurus.” In other words, Adams seems to have believed that white people engaging in things like drinking, partying, gambling, and extramarital sex was a far worse problem than white people enslaving Black people.
ABOVE: Portrait of John Adams by Gilbert Stuart. Adams was the only person who is widely revered today as a “Founding Father” who never owned slaves, but he was nonetheless strongly opposed to abolitionism.
Erasing land theft and genocide
The 1776 Report is not only misleading because of the things it actually says, but also because of the things it doesn’t say. The report contains many glaring omissions. Notably, there is not even a single mention of any Native American person anywhere in the entire forty-one-page report.
Moreover, on page two, the report asserts that the “people” of the United States (by which the report obviously really means “white settlers”) have carved “communities out of a vast, untamed wilderness,” which makes it sound like North America was just completely uninhabited when white Europeans started showing up.
The report conveniently omits all mention of the fact that there were probably somewhere between fifty and a hundred million Indigenous people living in the Americas in 1491 immediately before the arrival of Europeans. For comparison, the population of Europe at the time was probably somewhere between seventy and eighty-eight million people. This means that that the number of people living in the Americas was similar to the number of people living in Europe at the time. Nonetheless, as far as The 1776 Report is concerned, Native Americans simply never existed at all to begin with.
Likewise, the report contains absolutely no mention of the fact that white settlers stole all the land on which the United States is now founded from the Native people through vicious wars, ethnic cleansing, and flat-out genocide. The report certainly doesn’t mention the struggles for sovereignty that Indigenous peoples today still face. The report is literally trying to erase this history, so that white Anglo-Americans Americans won’t have to face the crimes of our ancestors.
ABOVE: The Trail of Tears, painted in 1942 by the American painter Robert Lindneux
Taking Frederick Douglass’s words out-of-context
In many cases, The 1776 Report clearly deliberately takes quotes out of context to make historical figures sound like conservative jingoists when, in fact, they were nothing of the sort. For instance, on page twenty, the report attributes the following quotation to the Black abolitionist leader and orator Frederick Douglass (lived 1818 – 1895):
“The Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”
The 1776 Report doesn’t say where this quote comes from, but I was able to track it down. It comes from near the beginning of Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” which he delivered on 5 July 1852 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. In the part of the speech that this quotation comes from, Douglass is talking about how the ideals described in the Declaration of Independence are noble and amiable.
The 1776 Report, however, conveniently neglects to mention anything else that Douglass says in this speech, because the rest of the speech goes totally against the image of the United States that The 1776 Report wants to project. In the speech, Douglass goes on to roundly excoriate the United States, declaring that the country has never lived up to any of the ideals that are espoused in the Declaration of Independence and, indeed, that the authors of the Declaration never really meant a word they said about “freedom.” He deplores the United States as a nation full of liars and hypocrites, who talk about “freedom” while ruthlessly profiteering off the suffering and enslavement of thousands of Black people. He declares:
“My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”
“Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! ‘I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;’ I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.”
This is not a speech defending the Declaration of Independence; this is speech calling out the Declaration of Independence as a lie and the so-called “Founding Fathers” as a bunch of racist, slave-owning hypocrites.
ABOVE: Photograph of the Black American abolitionist leader and orator Frederick Douglass
Misrepresenting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement
The 1776 Report doesn’t just do this to Frederick Douglass; it also attempts to portray the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s as a moderate reform movement that was later hijacked by radical left-wing extremists, who supposedly departed from the vision of the movement’s founders. On pages fifteen and thirty-one, it attempts to support this claim using a handful of unsourced, out-of-context quotes from Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which it presents to make it sound like Dr. King was a moderate who opposed affirmative action.
In reality, Dr. King was a wholehearted supporter of affirmative action, which he considered to be a natural extension of the fight for Civil Rights. In fact, he was a self-identified democratic socialist and an ardent supporter of wealth redistribution. In a private letter written on 18 July 1952 to his future wife Coretta Scott, Dr. King declares:
“I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human system it fail victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. So I think Bellamy is right in seeing the gradual decline of capitalism.”
In the same letter, Dr. King goes on to clarify that he does not support communism as conventionally defined, that he does not support violence, and that he believes the United States must transition to a socialist economy gradually and peacefully. Nonetheless, he firmly believed that a transition was necessary.
Dr. King didn’t just express his support for democratic socialism and wealth redistribution in private letters, though. In 1963. Dr. King delivered a public speech at Western Michigan University, in which he declared:
“We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”
Later, in a speech to his staff in 1966, Dr. King openly endorsed democratic socialism, saying “something is wrong with capitalism” and “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
Clearly, whatever you think of him, there is no question that Dr. King was a leftist radical—and not just for his time. Leftist radicals today are still following in Dr. King’s footsteps. If he were alive today, I am certain that he would be a supporter of Black Lives Matter, universal health care, and all those other movements that the Trump administration liked to demonize.
Indeed, this should hardly be surprising; Dr. King’s friend and fellow Civil Rights leader John Lewis, who died on 17 July 2020, was a supporter of Black Lives Matter and a member of the Medicare for All Caucus. Likewise, Dr. King’s own daughter Bernice A. King is a supporter of Black Lives Matter and she stated in an interview with ABC News that her father and mother “would be extremely proud” of the Black Lives Matter movement if they were alive to see it.
ABOVE: Photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressing the crowds on 28 August 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
Denouncing universities
The 1776 Report roundly deplores most American universities and professors as “anti-American,” declaring on page eighteen:
“Universities in the United States today are often 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.”
The same page goes on to declare that scholars who dare to question the actions of the United States government are “the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.”
What the authors of The 1776 Report are really mad about here is the fact that universities in this country are not currently doing enough to indoctrinate their students into blind devotion to the United States and, as a result, some students are learning to think critically and question the narratives that the government has been feeding them.
Notice how the report equates any speech that goes against what the report itself argues with “libel” while simultaneously complaining that “free speech” is being “oppressed.” The report is thereby using the idea of “free speech” as an argument for the suppression of actual free speech.
Conclusion
Whatever you think about the United States nowadays, you cannot hide the fact that this country has an extremely dark history. Our nation-state is built on land that was stolen through wars and genocide. Our so-called “Founding Fathers” were a bunch of racist, sexist, slave-owning hypocrites who wrote some nice things about “liberty” and “justice,” but never really meant a word of any of it.
When the institution of slavery was threatened, roughly one million white American citizens fought to defend it, because they preferred to die than to live in a country where Black people could be free. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry remain thoroughly ingrained the bedrock of our society and these forces continue to influence our politics and institutions.
Donald Trump’s signature slogan is “Make America Great Again,” but the truth is that America was never really great to begin with. Maybe sometime this nation will be great, but we certainly haven’t gotten there yet, nor are we even close.
“In the end, Britain didn’t outlaw the Transatlantic slave trade until 1807, didn’t pass legislation to abolish slavery in its colonies until 1833, and didn’t fully complete the abolition of slavery in its colonies until 1843.”
As I understand it, slavery was explicitly declared illegal within the UK in 1772 when the courts decided Somerset v Stewart. This obviously comes in close proximity to the US Declaration of Independence. I can still believe there was no real connection between the two but I think it’s worth addressing why not, if so, and it’s important not to start the UK history in 1807 when S&S came a full 35 years earlier.
I am already familiar with the case of Somerset v. Stewart. Although it is popularly believed that the court in that case declared slavery illegal in Britain, the court actually did no such thing. The court merely ruled that an enslaved person living in England could not be seized and taken by force to the colonies against their own will. The case was significant because it did afford important legal protections to enslaved people living in Britain, but it did not make slavery illegal.
I think it was also important because the impression arose that slavery was illegal providing
impetus to the anti slavery movement. it helped define the parameters of what slavery was distinguishing it from servants.
Has any territory in the world been free of “wars and genocide”? Even the “Native Americans” stole the land through war and genocide. The US for the most part negotiated and bought the land from the Indians:
“…Felix Cohen, a New Deal legal authority on Indian law claims and Stuart Banner’s much more recent book, How the Indians Lost Their Land to think about this question. The record according to Cohen, who lived in an America not besotted with victim and group rights’ claims, is a mixed one, and relative to most western countries who confronted aboriginal populations, one that stands up rather well. Similarly, Banner’s book also argues that theft of Indian lands wasn’t the norm, and in any event, much of the policies pursued in this regard enjoyed significant support from many of the Indians involved in the transactions.”
https://lawliberty.org/on-brian-caplans-inquiry-do-indians-rightfully-own-america/
It is true that wars and genocide have happened in every part of the world. It is also true that various Native American peoples fought wars and committed genocides against each other before the arrival of Europeans. This does not, however, mean that wars and genocides are morally acceptable, nor does it mean that white settlers are somehow absolved of blame for their actions that have contributed to the plights of Native people, which are still ongoing even today in the twenty-first century.
The site Law & Liberty, which you cite here, is published by the Liberty Fund, a conservative think tank. Their articles are mostly written by upper-class, white, conservative men who have a vested interest in justifying the status quo. They deliberately take the narrowest possible definition of the word “steal,” note the fact that the United States often signed treaties with Native American tribes for the procurement of land, and therefore claim that the land wasn’t really stolen. This is, however, missing the point.
When white Anglo-American settlers made treaties with Native people, they did so with the conviction that the land was already rightfully theirs for the taking and a large professional army to support their claims. Even in the cases where the settlers were willing to give Native people compensation in exchange for their land, they were generally not willing to let Native people keep their land indefinitely. When Native people refused to give up their land, the settler armies would fight them for it and, in most cases, they would eventually win. Native people realized this, so many of them agreed to sell their land, usually hoping to receive compensation and favorable treatment in return, rather than violence.
You can hardly call a deal made under duress a fair one, but yet this is precisely what the article you have linked does. It incorrectly assumes that the deals made between settlers and Natives were fair and fails to take into consideration the massive power imbalance that existed between them.
Following that logic how could these “white Anglo-American settlers” have “stolen” land that was also “stolen” by the “Native American peoples”. If the “Native American peoples” stole the land then it was never rightfully theirs anyway. And that “Law & Liberty” merely referenced the writing of Felix Cohen who was certainly no conservative ideologue.
But look to current events to see how the Biden administration is literally stealing from Native Americans by denying them their valid land rights:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/22/utah-tribe-blasts-bidens-drilling-freeze-federal-l/
That’s another issue entirely, one that starts with lying that “some” means “all”—some land usurped by what’s the modern-day USA was claimed by Native American peoples via warfare, not all—and that ends with lying that anybody has justified theft under duress (be that violence or threat of violence).
I presume you have enough experience with the English language to have heard the saying, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Many of us learn that by the end of elementary school.
I notice you’re also pretending that the treaties with the Native Americans have been respected. We—as in the USA and settlers in general, since my own ancestry came over here less than a century ago from Eastern Europe—had (and sometimes have) a tendency to demand treaties be signed that we then don’t respect, where we violate the terms we ourselves agreed to.
Case in point: Mount Rushmore violated the Sioux Treaty of 1868 (a.k.a. Treaty of Fort Laramie).
Aren’t we complicit for continuing to live in the US? Shouldn’t we leave to an area where there’s never been human rights violations…such as Europe or Africa?
Spencer it is so sad to see your white privileged come to fruition in all its glory. Your analysis is purely based on your 21st century white privileged perspective on the topic. While condemning Thomas Jefferson who was not abhorrent in his times, you never mentioned Andrew Jackson and his (for lack of better words, a true white supremist), Mister “Black Slaves are our right” and least we forget the “The Trail Of Tears”. Oh, in case you were not informed ” The Founder of the Democratic Party ” . I guess it doesn’t fit or conform to you feigning as an objective scholar of history. Spencer, as much as I truly enjoy your ancient history commentaries, your analysis of current affairs has exposed you as a leftist idiologe. I guess it is not your fault. You have been infected by the leftist racist narrative that white people are inherently bad. As an Hispanic man who according to my DNA results is also 40% native American; I forgive you. Now get on with your life and stop trying to be the history equivalent of Bill Nye The Science Guy. He is a joke of the first degree. You are better than that. Your leftist crowd will dispose of you in the same way as the Bolslevics dispose of the anarchists ( who helped them defend Moscow against the White Army ” once they took control.
The reason I don’t mention Andrew Jackson in my article is primarily because The 1776 Report does not mention him. This article is meant as a response to the report, not a detailed overview of American history. If I were trying to cover everything significant that happened in American history, I would need to write an entire book on the subject and even that would not be enough.
It is true that Andrew Jackson committed atrocities. It is also true that he was an important founding figure in the Democratic Party. That, however, was all the way back in 1828. The Democratic Party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2021 is very different from the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson in 1828; it has a very different platform and a very different base. There are many legitimate criticisms that can be made of the contemporary Democratic Party, but saying that the Democratic Party is the party of racism in the United States today because the party was originally founded by Andrew Jackson nearly two hundred years ago is a logical fallacy.
I do not pretend to be “an objective scholar of history” because there is no such thing as an “objective scholar.” No historian can ever truly be “neutral” or “objective” or “unbiased” because every historian is writing from some kind of perspective. Even if every statement that a historian makes is a verifiable fact, the historian still has to choose which facts to talk about. There is no objective way to determine which facts are most important, so the selection process therefore inherently introduces bias.
In that case, what determines your take being right (or at least more correct) than the historians criticized here? You presumably decided what facts to emphasize etc. as well. I don’t ask this to accuse, but what is the criteria for accuracy? Did you simply mean to say above that everyone has biases? Does that preclude an objective conclusion? Or are we simply to pick whatever interpretation fits our biases?
There is a big difference between an author being biased (as in having an opinionated perspective on something) and an author being wrong or dishonest.
All historians must rely on evidence. Historians are not supposed to make sweeping claims without evidence, nor are historians supposed to present evidence in a deliberately misleading manner in order to make it seem as though the arguments they are trying to make are better supported than they really are. As I discuss in the article above, The 1776 Report makes all kinds of sweeping claims about history that are clearly contrary to the actual evidence and it deliberately takes quotes out-of-context in order to misrepresent them to mean things that the original authors clearly never intended.
All right.
Also I guess it is not covenant to mention that 250,00 to 500,000 WHITE Northerners died during the Civil War to free the Black Slaves? Spencer, stop the self loathing, I know you are white but wake up and stop hating yourself, your ancestors and your race. Your ancestors created the country that millions around the world would live to be a part of. Why do you think that is so? Why did so many Blacks and Hispanics vote for Trump? Do you wonder? Do you even care?
Spencer, I’ve enjoyed your excellent articles on ancient history and practices, and after reading several of them I decided to subscribe to your channel. However, I was really put off by your one-sided treatment of the “1776 Report.” Are you sure you aren’t working for the New York Times?
Spencer – I commend you on your analysis of The 1776 Project. Continue to speak the truth, supported by facts, data, and rigorous research as evidence.
Something is pernicious about our “normal” narratives, let alone this piece of tripe. Over and over again we refer to the nascent US being “settled” by “settlers.” The country was already settled by millions of inhabitants, who created roads, cities, towns, agricultural fields, trade agreements, etc.
At least the Spanish had the grace to call their “settlers” conquistadores.
You mention the population of the Americas in 1491, before first contact with the Spanish. I think it would be more relevant and interesting to know what the population of the Americas was in, say, 1620.
Native population in North America particularly would have peaked around 18 million at the very most, but by the time the Pilgrims got there it’s very likely there were fewer than 1 million remaining. It’s impossible for us to imagine how devastating disease was to these populations.
I also think you misunderstand Douglass. His initial speech is devastating, as it ought to be. But his opinion of the founding certainly changed over time, and his great push was to make America live up to the ideals outlined by the founders, however bad the founders themselves were at living up to them.
I stand by my prior comments where I’ve said that your politics remain a major blind spot for you. If everything you don’t agree with is “white supremacy” then those words don’t really mean very much anymore, and you’re providing cover for REAL white supremacy.
Hi author and posters
On the Jefferson issue rather than calling him sick and twisted, he may well have been I don’t know, it is more interesting to understand how as a person he reconciled the contradictions of his life and work.
He seems to have regarded himself as generous and benevolent and been completely blind to the unequal power relationships. The Hemings story is a good example
this is a very good lecture to start with
https://www.c-span.org/video/?426629-1/thomas-jefferson-hemings-family
you do attract some angry people , I hope they watch it
The Hemings story has been debunked:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/1999/01/thomas-jefferson-hook
He could still have fathered her children, it’s just uncertain.
The article you have linked here does not in any way “debunk” the story; it merely notes that there is still a possibility that Thomas Jefferson may not have been the one who fathered Sally Hemings’s children. In fact, the article itself notes that the genetic researchers still believe that the “simplest explanation” is that Thomas Jefferson was the father.
The “genetic researchers” that left out important information to create a viral headline tried to save face by saying they still think that Jefferson is the father. Of course they said that.
More info:
“Thomas Jefferson at the time was 64 and ailing, hardly making him a leading paternity candidate.”
“A more likely candidate, Turner said, is Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, who was known to have socialized with the slaves at Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello.”
https://mediamythalert.com/2011/10/16/finally-some-attention-for-book-disputing-jefferson-slave-mistress-liaison/
It’s also notable that Randolph had 5 sons with age ranges of upper teens to low 20s.
So out of 25 possible fathers are we to believe that a frail 64 year old man was the father?
“The college does not accept financial support from the United States government, since accepting government funding would require the college to adopt affirmative action programs, which the college refuses to adopt because it maintains that affirmative action is a form of racist discrimination against white people.”
Chief, I know you’re bright enough, but you’re acting as if AA programs don’t exclude qualified people, white, East Asian, or hell, even some Indians, from good schools in favor of less qualified “protected groups”. If we’re going to give special admissions proceedures for certain races (again, AA discriminates against Chinese people more than it does whites, just ask around), why not also do so on the basis of any of the following: hair color, eye color, sub-caste, species identity (yes, those are a thing), whether one is Irish (yes, the Irish had less paid employment at one time than African Americans), etc.
“Our nation-state is built on land that was stolen through wars and genocide. Our so-called “Founding Fathers” were a bunch of racist, sexist, slave-owning hypocrites who wrote some nice things about “liberty” and “justice,” but never really meant a word of any of it.”
If your ancestors owned slaves, it was due to the Arabs capturing them in the first place (while it does not lessen the wrong done by white slave owners, Arabs often don’t get any attention at all for the slave trade despite being the main culprits, even down to the present day).
You say that our land was “stolen”. Maybe, however, literally every society that has ever been documented was founded on land that was “stolen” by other people. People act as if the “Native” Amerians just fell from the sky as in their mythology when in fact they migrated from Asia. What tribe is truly “native”, anyway? They didn’t arrive all at once, did they? Which specific locations belong to which tribes? The one’s who had it last or the one’s who had it before other “Native” Americans stole it from them? Name any other society on earth at the time of 1776 that could ever dream of the kind of egalitarian ideals that we had and manage to fulfill even some of them?
“When the institution of slavery was threatened, roughly one million white American citizens fought to defend it, because they preferred to die than to live in a country where Black people could be free.”
You left out the part about Native Americans fighting for the Confederacy. Also, black Americans fought against the Union as well (by that I mean those who were not slaves). Also, Albert Pike was pro-Native American rights. White supremacists generally don’t command an entire army of Native Americans (non whites) voluntarily in fighting a war.
“The Democratic Party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2021 is very different from the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson in 1828; it has a very different platform and a very different base. ”
It does. A Base that’s too naive to ask Harris about her Brahmin caste and what if anything she planned to do about the imported caste discrimination Indian Americans face from each other on regular basis (there’s literally a popular show about matchmaking where an otherwise qualified, decent guy named Vyasar was deemed unfit for marriage by a costar because he was born into the wrong caste. Somehow, many white Americans seem oblivious to that classism but spend a lot of time talking about the watered down caste system already in place in America (though of course it is worth discussing regardless).
“Donald Trump’s signature slogan is “Make America Great Again,” but the truth is that America was never really great to begin with. Maybe sometime this nation will be great, but we certainly haven’t gotten there yet, nor are we even close.”
“Great” may be a relative term. Ask those Indian doctors whether America is great and I bet they’ll say “idk but it’s a hell of a lot better than where I’m (my parents) are from!” Seriously, how can you say that America isn’t great when you have entire oceans of people screaming to get in this country and risking prison time and even death to get into this country from south of the border and elsewhere? You can’t have it both ways: if America isn’t “great” then those migrants/refugees/Asian doctors are all a bunch of idiots who should appreciate the joys of socialism.
“it’s a garbage country composed of garbage people, and has been in rapid decline since the 1920s.”
Our mistake was not following Plato’s lead and banning crappy music (Kanye), crappy TV (teen mom), and talentless celebrities (Kim Kardashian).
Jsust about everybody knows that Kim is Armenian, an ethnic group that is generally not classified as “people of color”.
I know there is some hair-splitting over what does and does not constitute a “person of color” but this is the first time I’m hearing (from a white person or otherwise) that Armenians are “people of color”. Apparently this particular designation is contentious as a quick search reveals. If you insist on calling her a person of color, then simply substitute her for Miley Cyrus and my point still stands. For what it is worth, the Irish were considered “non-white” as well for a while so I suppose you could call us “people of color”. Honestly, I think it is hypocritical for people to use the term “people of color” and think that it is in any way less racist than the term “colored people”. The only difference to my eyes is the addition of the preposition “of”.
I’ll be honest that I was completely ignorant about Kim Kardashian’s ancestry and my assessment of her as a “person of color” was based entirely on my vague recollection of the few photographs I’ve seen of her. You clearly know much more about her than I do. I probably should have looked her up on Wikipedia before writing my comment above.
Both 1619 Project and the 1776 Project are bad histories in the end. They are both ideological and tend to reject nuance of any kind.
Saying the motivation for the American Revolution was simply the preservation of slavery is not just a preventable little error. It’s a major problem that seems to gloss over the evils of another “peculiar institution”: The British Empire. While the BE did worse stuff in other places, I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand the first successful case of independence from it.
Why a lot of Enlightenment Revolutions (many of which involved independence from other European powers in the Americas) had massive struggles in getting rid of slavery is complicated.
One distinction between 1776 and 1619 is that the former DID include political intent to create a country. The DOI was a political manifesto. The simple arrival of slaves in a colony had no such implications.
Most of the Northern states ended slavery early in the Republic’s history and relatively peacefully. Many of them had “phase out plans” before The Constitutional Convention and Pennsylvania did before Cornwallis even surrendered to Washington and Lafayette. True many of those plans were slow and had to be revised a number of times. Although the last slaves were freed not long before The Civil War in some of those states, the vast majority had been much earlier than that.
Really the best way to understand the bit about slavery and The American Revolution is this: There was a split between pro and anti slavery factions very early after Independence from Britain was won. At The CC the pro-slavery factions got some of what it wanted, butt he antis left the event thinking they had gotten enough to ensure that slavery would die a natural death. Once the slave trade was banned in the US in 1808 with several states having phase outs in place, that wouldn’t have looked unreasonable.
The first thing they didn’t see coming was the Haitian massacre and the paranoia it kicked off in some Southern states. The other was the cotton gin.
Hi Spencer, while I’ve enjoyed your writing in the past and I agree with your premise that the 1776 Project was largely junk written by people who are not historians, unfortunately you have extensively misrepresented Thomas Jefferson. He, and the other Founders, were not “sick, twisted” individuals. As I and other commentators have recommended to you before, Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s work is essential for understanding the Founders and Jefferson specifically’s relationship with slavery. I’m disappointed you haven’t taken up our recommendation and have repeated these misrepresentations.
As an aside, even despite the disappointing fact that many of the Founders compromised on the slavery question, there were indeed many who consistently opposed it. There is a reason slavery was abolished in most of the northern states shortly after the revolution, which freed thousands of people. Said abolition movements explicitly cited the egalitarian philosophy of the American Revolution, including the exact words of the Declaration of Independence.
I understand that you are a progressive who is opposed to racism and you want to fight against the whitewashed version of history that is often taught. That describes me as well. But American history is complex and a purely negative and dark view of American history is just as misleading and wrong of a view of history as a purely celebratory one, if not more so.
“The op-ed goes on to make the usual xenophobic argument that Islam is inherently violent and dangerous …” It’s not an argument, it’s a fact. Please consider the following verses from the Quran – the holiest book in Islam, the supposed word of the Islamic God – and then tell me how it’s not violent:
Sura 9, verse 29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” Notice that this verse doesn’t say: Fight the tyrants and aggressors. No it says: Fight people who do not believe what you believe.
Sura 9, verse 123: “O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness.”
Sura 5, verse 33: “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement.”
Or consider the pronouncements of the founder of this religion:
Sahih Bukhari (52:260): “…The Prophet said, ‘If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.’ ”
Sahih Bukhari (84:57): “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”
Sahih Muslim (1:33): “The Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”
Sahih Bukhari (52:73) – “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords’.”
“… and that Muslims must be kept out of the country.” I strongly condemn any kind of attacks on or discrimination against Muslims simply because they are Muslims. I myself have met very likeable, peaceful Muslims. But this should not prevent us from criticizing their religious texts. The Old Testament also contains violent passages. But pointing out these passages does not make you an antisemite. Criticizing Islamic scriptures does not make you xenophobic. What I am arguing for is this: We must separate between “Muslims” (a group of people) and “Islam” (the values, norms and orders in their scriptures).
I will probably write an article on this subject at some point in the future. The problem with saying that Islam is inherently violent is that this assumes that there is some “inherent” essence to the religion to begin with that all forms of it must share. All religions are internally diverse and can be interpreted in many different ways.
It’s true that there some passages in the Quran that are easy for critics to interpret as advocating violence, but contemporary Islam isn’t actually defined by what it says in the Quran; it is defined by how people practice the religion today. There are a few militant extremist Muslim groups that are violent, but the vast majority of Muslims are not violent and do not support what groups like ISIL are doing. There is no reason to say that the interpretations of Islam used by a tiny minority of violent militant extremists are any more valid or any more reflective of “true Islam” (whatever that means) than the interpretations adhered to by the vast majority of Muslims.
Moreover, Islam is hardly unique in having militant extremists associated with it. Every ideology and every belief system (including every religion) has some kind of violence associated with it. There are even militant Buddhists for crying out loud! Likewise, horrible acts of violence have been committed in the name of atheism under various communist regimes. The existence of violent Muslims just means that Islam can be interpreted in violent ways, just like any other belief system.
“Every ideology and every belief system (including every religion) has some kind of violence associated with it. There are even militant Buddhists for crying out loud! ”
1. False. Jainism, Daoism, and Laveyan Satanism have no people destroying entire countries in the name of religion. Sikhism *might* have violence associated with it (not just hundreds of years ago) due to the Khalistan movement, but that pales in comparision to the Islamic persecution of Sikhs, Hindus, Jains, et.al in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In UAE, a Hindu mandir just opened up. Guess who is allowed there? Anybody who is not a Muslim. If a Muslim were to convert to Hinduism there, that person would face the death penalty. No other religion has multiple countries that mandate death for apostasy, today anyway. Now, does that mean, say, a Buddhist or Hindu can’t be a bad person or a murderer? No.
2. I’m pretty sure those so-called “militant Buddhists” were reacting to Jihadi Muslims who were targeting Buddhists and their places of worship. In Thailand (Sri Lanka, Burma, insert predominantly Buddhist country), for instance Muslims kill innocent people by all sorts of means. Only Islam does this crap in today’s day and age. Sure, people cite the Salem Witch Trials from hundreds of years ago, but the fact is, the only religion *today* that engages in violence is that founded by Muhammad. FWIW Hindu Nationalists (a more plausible example than the alleged Buddhist militants) are reacting to over a thousand years of Islamic extremism in India. The NYT is puerile, and therefore not a scholarly source. The Ram Mandir in India was demolished to make way for a Masjid that was later demolished to make way for a new Ram mandir. Granted, there could have been a better way of going about doing that than tearing it down without warning, but then again, the Muslims did the same to the preexistent Ram mandir anyway, so there’s that.
“There is no reason to say that the interpretations of Islam used by a tiny minority of violent militant extremists are any more valid or any more reflective of “true Islam” (whatever that means) than the interpretations adhered to by the vast majority of Muslims.”
No Jew today interprets the violent passages in the Tanakh as an instruction manual for persecuting members of other faiths. The exact opposite is the case with Islam. What lay people decide is the correct interpretation of Islam and what all of the Grand Muftis decide is the correct interpretation of Islam are two different things. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem declared that apostates should be killed. Presumably, he knows more about Islam than you or I do. Presumably he knows more about Islam than 99% of the Muslim world. This same Mufti said that suicide bombing was morally acceptable to use against Israel (i.e. Jews). Where has the Dalai Lama made such claims? Where have the Jain monks or the Daoist monks, or the High Priest of the freaking Church of Satan made such claims? They have said the exact opposite.
„All religions are internally diverse and can be interpreted in many different ways.“ I agree, but in my opinion, some interpretations are more straightfoward and plausible than others. For example, when the Quran commands to fight unbelievers, then it clearly commands to fight unbelievers. These passages really are easy to interpret as advocating violence, because they … plainly advocate violence. What’s more, we shouldn’t forget the example of the founder of this religion, a very violent man who – amongst other things – ordered two adults to be stoned for adultery.
Sahih Bukhari (6:60:79):“ […] So the Prophet ordered the two adulterers to be stoned to death, and they were stoned to death near the place where biers used to be placed near the Mosque. I saw her companion (i.e. the adulterer) bowing over her so as to protect her from the stones.“
„[…] but contemporary Islam isn’t actually defined by what it says in the Quran.“ This is a very strange statement. The Quran is considered as the perfect word of the creator of the universe and you just say, it’s not that important for contemporary Islam?
„[…] but the vast majority of Muslims are not violent and do not support what groups like ISIL are doing. There is no reason to say that the interpretations of Islam used by a tiny minority of violent militant extremists […]“. It’s more complicated. For example, 76% of Pakistanis support the death penalty for apostasy and 81% of Egyptians support the death penalty for adultery. They do that because it is commanded in their scriptures. Those percentages are taken from a survey that was conducted by the Pew Research Center in Muslim countries. The whole report is here file:///C:/Users/David/Downloads/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf The two numbers, which I cited, are on pages 54 and 55. Of course, we are not talking about all Muslims, but we are not talking about a tiny (!) minority either.
„Moreover, Islam is hardly unique in having militant extremists associated with it.“ I agree, but the foundational texts of some religions and ideologies can be more easily used to justify violence. Islam is one of them. ISIL merely has to implement what the Quran and the example of Muhammad prescribe. There is no need for hairsplitting and exegetical acrobatics. By contrast I’m not so sure, if the Buddha clearly ordered the killing of Non-Buddhists.