United States of America Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Here’s Why ‘The 1776 Report’ Is Nonsense

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 After all, President Joe Biden signed an executive order which rescinded the 1776 Commission and removed The 1776 Report from the official White House webpage on his very first day in office.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.

Here’s What the Costumes and Flags on Display at the Pro-Trump Insurrection Mean

On 6 January 2021, a mob of violent, pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the United States Capitol building in Washington D.C., forcing both houses of Congress to evacuate. These insurrectionists wanted to force Congress to overturn the vote of electoral college, which voted in favor of Joe Biden becoming the next president of the United States. Thankfully, after several hours of fighting, the rebels were eventually driven out of the Capitol. Congress has now ratified the votes of the electoral college, confirming Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January 2021.

Many of the insurrectionists at the Capitol were dressed in unusual costumes and carrying various flags. Many people are confused about why they dressed in this manner and what their costumes signify. Obviously, the real concern here should be the fact that these insurrectionists literally attempted a coup. Nonetheless, I think it is worth examining some of the iconography that was on display in order to get a sense of the kind of narrative that these people are trying to promote.

When Does United States History Really Begin?

There’s a lot of controversy going on right now about when we should say that United States history begins. In 2019, The New York Times Magazine launched an initiative called “The 1619 Project,” which argues that the year 1619 should be seen as the true year when the United States was founded because that is the year when the first enslaved Black people arrived in the English colonies in North America.

In response to this, in September 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was creating a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education” throughout the United States and to defend traditional narratives about American history against the claims made by the 1619 Project. I’ve already written an entire article about what a ridiculous idea I think this is, so I’m not going to talk any more about it.

What is interesting, though, is the way that both the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission fixate on particular dates for the supposed founding of the United States. I contend that both of these proposed dates are fundamentally flawed. In fact, I believe that it is a mistake to try to pin down any particular date for the founding of the United States. This country has come into existence through a long, gradual process and focusing on exact dates and saying those dates matter more than all the others limits the ways we can think about American history and naturally tends to marginalize certain groups of people from the American story.

Donald Trump Is No Patriot

On 17 September 2020, President Donald Trump delivered a speech at the “White House Conference on American History,” an event at the National Archives Museum in Washington D.C. In this speech, Trump claimed that United States history teachers all across the country who are radical leftists and who hate America are using their positions to indoctrinate schoolchildren into what he regards as a dangerous and evil anti-American ideology, which he claims is causing “riots and mayhem” all over the country.

Therefore, he has promised to issue an executive order to “restore patriotic education to our schools” by establishing a “1776 Commission” to “encourage” teachers across the country to only teach American history in a way that inspires patriotism and makes students proud to be Americans.

In other words, Trump doesn’t want teachers to talk about any of the bad stuff that the United States has done. He wants real history to be thrown out of schools and a heavily sanitized, jingoistic narrative to be taught instead. The full transcript of Trump’s speech is available on the White House’s official website. Here is my response to some of the things he said.

States That Should Change Their Flags

If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’ve probably heard that the state of Mississippi has now revoked the official status of its state flag, which has the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia in the upper left-hand corner. All Mississippi state flags flying outside government buildings are set to be taken down within the next fifteen days and a commission has been set up to design a new flag for the state.

I was reading about this news and it got me thinking about other state flags. I started looking up state flags and realized that there are some other states that could really stand to change their flags too. Here’s a quick run-down of some of the states that I think need to change their flags the most.

The Modern World Isn’t Even Remotely Secular

In his 1882 work Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (i.e. The Gay Science), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared:

“Gott is tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet! Wie trösten wir uns, die Mörder aller Mörder? Das Heiligste und Mächtigste, was die Welt bisher besaß, es ist unter unsern Messern verblutet—wer wischt dies Blut von uns ab? Mit welchem Wasser könnten wir uns reinigen?”

In English, this means:

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have murdered him! How do we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? The holiest and mightiest thing that the world so far has possessed, it has bled to death under our knives—who will wash this blood off from us? With what water could we purify ourselves?”

When he wrote this, Nietzsche did not mean that God had literally died, but rather that modern science had disproven his existence and human beings had entered into a new, secular age. Nietzsche believed that humans needed to find something to replace God to provide life with meaning.

Few academics today agree with everything Nietzsche believed, but they do generally seem to agree that, in the western industrialized world in the twenty-first century, religion is no longer important in most people’s lives and secularism and rationality now generally reign supreme. This notion, however, is entirely mistaken. Traditional religions of all kinds are, in fact, thriving in the western world, especially here in the United States, and belief in the supernatural remains widespread.

Should We Be Tearing Down Statues of Socrates and Aristotle Because of Their Views on Slavery?

You may have heard that there are bunch of statues that have been taken down recently. I think that’s a good thing. Some other people disagree. On 12 June 2020, the British comedian John Cleese—who is known as a member of the comedy group Monty Python and as the co-writer and lead actor for the sitcom Fawlty Towers—issued this tweet:

Cleese followed this up with another tweet in which he said this:

There is a lot to unpack here. Cleese is obviously joking, but, through his misunderstanding of what protesters want and why, he has inadvertently raised some very serious questions that I think are worth addressing.

Is the United States a Democracy or a Republic?

There is considerable debate among people in the United States over whether this country is supposed to be a democracy, a republic, or both. Generally, liberals and progressives tend to argue that the United States should be both a democracy and a republic, while conservatives tend to argue that it should only be a republic.

In this article, I want to examine the history of this debate, look at the etymologies and definitions of the words republic and democracy, and decide which of these words best describes the form of government that exists in the United States.