Should Trump Defund Schools Pushing 1619 Project?
By Carole Hornsby Haynes, Ph.D. September 8, 2020
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.” ~ The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kunedera
President Trump has threatened to defund any schools that teach the 1619 Project, a collection of essays, short fiction, and poems by the New York Times that claims 1619, not 1776, is the true date of our founding because that’s when the first slave ship arrived in the American colonies.
The project also claims the Revolutionary War was an effort by colonists and the Founding Fathers to preserve the institution of slavery.
Liberals are destroying our history and inventing their own as they press forward to a Marxist takeover of our Republic. The project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
Danger of the 1619 Project
If students are exposed to this fake history garbage, they will soon believe that America was founded on the ideal of slavery and America will cease to be known as the land of liberty. People will no longer have any memory of our Founding and its Judeo-Christian principles.
If this sounds far fetched, consider how history has been revised about the antebellum South and the Civil War. During the 20th century, liberals have led their ideological war against the white South, claiming the North fought the “Civil War” to free slaves while the South fought to keep it. They contend the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment prove the North was fighting to end slavery.
Based on that premise, Northern liberals, who consider themselves to be morally superior, have dictated to the “morally inferior” white Southerners about how to run their lives through federal laws, fanatical federal prosecutors, arbitrary federal judges, and ruthless actions of ideologues in city and state governments and education establishments. The government interference runs a wide gamut including federally micro-managed election processes, Affirmative Action, multiculturalism, and diversity.
The cultural war between North and South has raged since the 1830s when Northern liberals decided to replace Christianity with secular humanism so that it would become the official religion of the U.S. The religious South was the battleground. It’s the South where Christianity has had the strongest hold and so the South must be destroyed.
Vilifying the Southern Confederacy has been part of that ongoing ideological war to destroy the Southern people socially, politically, and economically. The war has continued under many battles that are cover for the real purpose of destroying the South – such as removal of Confederate monuments because they are “racist.”
Students are no longer taught that the North engineered and fought the war to force the Confederate states back into the Union so they would have to pay the high tariffs to fund the federal government. Northern capitalists were using the federal government to set up their national industrialization of the U.S with the South funding it. Instead they are told that slavery was the cause of secession and the war.
Why do people believe this lie? Because he who wins a war gets to write the history about it. The U.S. government started and waged a gory war against a foreign nation – the South had lawfully seceded – even as the Constitutional rights of citizens in both the North and South were violated viciously. The atrocities by the federal army and government toward Southerners were so unparalleled in American history that the government wanted them whitewashed. Northern liberal historians and liberal Scalawags (Southern turncoats), who were fully supported the nationalists aims and actions of the federal government, were only too happy to oblige.
Legitimate historians get their facts from primary documents (such as the U.S. War Department’s The War of the Rebellion -Hay and Nicolay). But to whitewash the truth and make the North look good, mainstream historians selected only certain facts and even greatly distorted many of those facts.
With the 1619 Project, America’s history will continue to be revised and racism will become the center point of the radical left narrative with the founding of America forever buried and forgotten. Racism is the tool to divide and create hate by those trying to take down a government. If the 1619 Project gets into any of our schools, students will be psychologically manipulated for violent activism in far left organizations.
Constitutional Issue
Although the 1619 Project has already been pushed into D.C. and Chicago schools, the California public school system has captured the spotlight. The California legislature has been trying to pass a bill to require radical ethics-study course for high school students that would include the 1619 Project.
After reading a tweet that the project had already been implemented in California schools, Trump fired back that any school implementing the 1619 Project will not receive federal funding. In his speech commemorating the Fourth of July this year, Trump expressed concern that children are taught to hate America through the biased, anti-American history they’re being taught. White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought reported that Trump has ordered federal agencies to remove training in and stop teaching “critical race theory,” which is based on Marxist critical theory.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark, introduced legislation this summer to ban federal funding ofschool curricula based on the 1619 Project. Although the bill can wield political power for Trump, the legislation runs foul of the Constitution’s 10th Amendment --just as does the U.S. Department of Education which leaves education to the states. The Conservatives battled the USDE’s involvement in the Common Core standards yet now a conservative wants to pass a law about classroom curricula which is constitutionally to be handled locally by superintendents and teachers.
Catch-22
Forbes sums up the dilemma:
“On the one hand, the institutional left, represented by the New York Times, peddles the tale that slavery wasn’t just a great evil, but is the founding principle of America. The political right is now dominated by a president who doesn’t seem to understand the basic constitutional principle of checks and balances. Once again, America’s schoolchildren are caught in the middle.”
The writer ignores that President Obama routinely ignored checks and balances. And others before him. That’s why we are at this critical junction.
Any federal involvement in education is unconstitutional and usurps the freedom of the people to control the education of their own children. Yet for many decades the federal government, aided and abetted by both political parties, has increasingly grabbed control of education including creating the U.S. Department of Education.
With the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Obama’s government seized more control over education and the purpose of education was officially changed from academic to social and emotional learning with psychological manipulation of students’ mindsets with government approved thinking. States are implementing radical sex and critical theory curricula and forcing huge school bonds onto the voters to fund it all. People are turning out enmasse to denounce the radical programs yet the state and local governments ignore them and continue the leftward march.
If we had a Democrat President, we can bet the 1619 Project would be pushed into every school. Since most state and local governments will not stop it, Trump may provide us the only solution.