1776 Commission
The 1776 Commission, also nicknamed the 1776 Project,[1][2] is an advisory committee established in September 2020 by then-U.S. President Donald Trump to support what he called "patriotic education".
[9] The commission was conceived partly as a response to The New York Times' 1619 Project,[10] which deals with systemic racism and explores American history through an African-American framework.
[19] In response to the work of figures like Howard Zinn and groups like the 1619 Project, the 1776 Commission sought to increase "patriotic education" via a centralized (federal) approach to a nationalist curriculum.
[3] Other appointees included his former domestic policy advisor Brooke Rollins; Charles R. Kesler, a Claremont Graduate University professor and editor of the conservative journal Claremont Review of Books; Ned Ryun, a Bush speechwriter; Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA; Phil Bryant, Republican former governor of Mississippi;[3][29] classical historian Victor Davis Hanson; John Gibbs, a former Trump appointee; Scott McNealy, founder of online curriculum company Curikki; Peter Kirsanow, a black Civil Rights Commission member; Thomas Lindsay, a political science professor; Michael Farris, a lawyer and political science professor; and former Congressman Bob McEwen.
[31] Among other things, the document identifies "progressivism" and "racism and identity politics" as "challenges to America's principles" and likens them to "communism," "slavery," and "fascism."
It refers to the pro-slavery U.S. politician and former U.S. vice president John C. Calhoun as "the leading forerunner of identity politics" and criticizes some aspects of the civil rights movement.
[32][34] Historians condemned the report, saying it was "filled with errors and partisan politics",[3][5] factual inaccuracies, a lack of scholarship, and use of prior work without attribution.
[36] On January 19, 2021, the Association of University Presses released a statement: "While we leave it to historians to offer a detailed rebuttal of the document's inaccuracies – if any should choose to do so – we note that it is plagued by procedural deficiencies that would render it unpublishable as a serious work of scholarship.
[5] Grossman said, "This report skillfully weaves together myths, distortions, deliberate silences, and both blatant and subtle misreading of evidence to create a narrative and an argument that few respectable professional historians, even across a wide interpretive spectrum, would consider plausible, never mind convincing.
"[3] Historian Timothy Messer-Kruse likened the content of the report to "every moldy trope of 1950s fifth-grade civics books" and wrote that it misrepresented the beliefs of founding father John Jay as expressed in Federalist No.
"[42] Jeff Sharlet of Vanity Fair compared the report's section on identity politics to Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik's justification for the 2011 Norway attacks in his manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence.
The group, led by former aides to Ben Carson and Newt Gingrich, promotes what it calls "patriotic education" and says that it aims to combat "anti-American indoctrination"; it proposes a Trump-inspired "1776 pledge" for officials and candidates.
