President Donald Trump‘s signed an executive order on Monday officially establishing the 1776 Commission, which will seek to combat liberal propaganda in the education system.
Just signed an order to establish the 1776 Commission. We will stop the radical indoctrination of our students, and restore PATRIOTIC EDUCATION to our schools!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2020
Trump first announced plans to establish the commission in September, when he decried critical race theory and its inclusion in federal diversity training programs.
He also blasted the New York Times’ 1619 Project as “toxic propaganda” and said it must not be allowed into public schools’ curricula.
“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda — an ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together,” he said.
The Department of Education is already planning to investigate schools that incorporate the 1619 Project, which argues that American colonists fought the Revolutionary War not to declare independence and preserve liberty, but to preserve slavery.
The 1776 Commission will go one step further and “better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776, and, through this, form a more perfect Union.”
“In recent years, a series of polemics grounded in poor scholarship has vilified our Founders and our founding,” the executive order reads. “Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.”
The commission, which will be apart of the Education Department, will “promote patriotic education,” but also focus primarily on allowing “local communities to reassert control of how children receive patriotic education in their schools.”
