Alana Mastrangelo
BreitbartThu, 21 Jan 2021 00:00 UTC
© Katherine Nagasawa/WBEZ
The 1776 Commission was removed from the White House website about an hour after President Joe Biden was sworn into office on Wednesday afternoon.Biden had already prepared to
reverse key policies of the Trump administration through executive orders on his first day in the White House.
One of those policies to be reversed was the 1776 Commission, according to a report by
CNN.
The 1776 Commission had released its final report on Monday, fulfilling Trump's request to reaffirm the importance of America's founding principles in the daily life and education of its citizens.Now, a search for "1776 report" and "1776 commission" on the White House website comes up blank, giving an
error note, which states, "It seems we can't find what you're looking for."
An archive of the White House website from Monday shows the importance former President Trump placed in restoring the "understanding of the greatness of the American founding.""The 1776 Report calls for a return to the unifying ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence," said Chairman Larry P. Arnn, Vice Chair Carol Swain, and Executive Director Matthew Spalding in a joint statement on Wednesday:
"It quotes the greatest Americans, black and white, men and women, in devotion to these ideals. The Commission may be abolished, but these principles and our history cannot be. We will all continue to work together to teach and to defend them."
Comment: As one person said: 'Is the baying from the woke left so furious that dissolving a commission named after our nation's founding, and deleting a report calling for teaching objective history, makes the top of the list?' To that
the writers had this to say in defense of the project:
For the record, we commissioners intend to continue meeting and fulfilling the charges of our two-year remit. The Heritage Foundation will also continue to host the report, which you can henceforth find here.
"Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now. We have never, ever, ever, ever failed in America when we've acted together."
One of the worst examples of the media "coverage" was a CNN report whose headline actually screamed this libel: "Trump administration issues racist school curriculum report on MLK day." In a breach of journalistic ethics (if those two words can still be written together), the body of the story did not bother to explain where in the report was there a hint of racism.
Ditto for USA Today, which had a straight up news report โ not an opinion piece โ with the breathless accusation that the report was a
"document that excuses America's history of slavery, derides the legacy of the civil rights movement and equates progressivism with totalitarianism."
Ibram X. Kendi, the Boston University activist/professor who insists that racism on behalf of people he deems marginalized is not just welcome, but necessary and not actually racism, said this in a tweet: "This report makes it seems as if slave-holding Founding Fathers were abolitionists." It is not hard to understand why Kendi is so allergic to the Founders. He proposes a federal department of "anti-racism" that bars political appointees, and thus therefore believes in separating government from the consent of the governed, one of the key touchstones of the Founding.
On what the Founders believed, and more importantly what their contemporaries thought, Abraham Lincoln told Stephen Douglas on their famous Third Debate in 1858:
"In the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind rested on the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. When this government was originally established, nobody expected the institution of slavery would last until this day."
That is the work we recommended in the 1776 report, for historians to look at primary sources, analyze what they meant in the context of the time, debate that meaning in good faith, without an agenda, and be ready to correct the record when proven wrong. We in the commission prefer to heed Biden's words, when he called in his inaugural address to "reject the culture in which facts are manipulated and even manufactured."
This is why serious intellectuals on the 1776 Commission, such as Charles Kesler, Spalding, Swain, and Arnn, felt so strongly about our work, and why we will continue to carry it out.
As per above, we will see if Biden's words ring true or hollow. A calculated guess suggests the latter.
A British take adds focus to the outlandish rejection of the Report:
The 1776 Report - produced by President Trump's Advisory 1776 Commission โ is a thing of such beauty, dignity, and scholarship that it makes me wish I were American, not British. I find it utterly inconceivable that any administration in the UK would be capable of producing a document of such gravitas or wisdom. Take this bit from near the end:
To be an American means something noble and good. It means treasuring freedom and embracing the vitality of self-government. We are shaped by the beauty, bounty and wildness of our continent. We are united by the glory of our history. And we are distinguished by the American virtues of openness, honesty, optimism, determination, generosity, confidence, kindness, hard work, courage and hope. Our principles did not create these virtues, but they laid the groundwork for them to grow and spread and forge America into the most just and glorious country in all of history.
There's a confidence, there, a pride and a clarity of purpose that you simply would not find in anything produced by Boris Johnson's flaccid regime, nor by any of its recent predecessors (except perhaps Margaret Thatcher's) nor by any of the parties currently likely to form the next government.
We all still know exactly what kind of country we'd like to live in. Our problem is that we don't live in it any more. And the fault lies entirely within the system of customs and unwritten rules is dependent on the probity of the people within it. The rot was the exception; now it's the rule.
Though it's true that the events of the last few weeks have shown America's institutions to have been similarly corrupted, the difference is that the U.S. has an inbuilt reset button which it can press any time. The U.S. can go back to the first principles established by the Founding Fathers. Indeed, 'freedom' appears in the very first sentence of the introduction, and crops up again and again, unapologetically, as one of the fundamental rights enshrined in the phrase 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.'
Suppose now a commission were to be established along the lines of President Trump's Advisory 1776 Commission. You'd get a bunch of race-baiting hack pseudo-academics such as you find bloviating in all the newspapers and making unwatchable revisionist documentaries for the BBC. There'd be no talk of liberty or tradition either. It would all be about nebulous qualities like 'tolerance' and 'sustainability' and 'resilience' and 'community'.
Britain is lost, I fear. America still has a future. That written constitution has made all the difference.
See the final report
here.
Comment: As one person said: 'Is the baying from the woke left so furious that dissolving a commission named after our nation's founding, and deleting a report calling for teaching objective history, makes the top of the list?' To that the writers had this to say in defense of the project: As per above, we will see if Biden's words ring true or hollow. A calculated guess suggests the latter.
A British take adds focus to the outlandish rejection of the Report: See the final report here.