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TRUMP’S 1776 COMMISSION TO PROMOTE ‘PATRIOTIC EDUCATION’ IN THE US

In a move aimed at pleasing his conservative voter base less than two months before the November 3 election, US President Donald Trump signed an ex- ecutive order to set up a “national com- mission to promote patriotic education” in the US. The initiative, dubbed the ‘1776 Com- mission’, is an apparent counter to The 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of essays on African American history of the past four centuries, which explores the Black community’s contri- bution in nation-building since the era of slavery to modern times. Trump announced the move at a history conference celebrating the 233rd anni- versary of the signing of the US Constitution (on September 17, 1787); the document being written in the decade after the original 13 colonies declared independence from the British Empire in 1776. Trump said that he wanted $5 billion from companies that were building the US version of TikTok for setting up the “very large fund” that would teach Ameri- can children “the real history, not the fake history.”

The Project is a special initiative of The New York Times Magazine, launched in 2019 to mark the completion of 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in colonial Virginia’s Jamestown in August 1619. A brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a MacArthur Grant-winning journalist, the collection aims “to reframe US history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year,” according to Jake Silverstein, the publication’s editor-in-chief.

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Currently lagging behind Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in polls for the presidential race, Trump has sought to activate his right-wing supporters by doubling down on what he describes as “cancel culture”, “critical race theory” and “revisionist history”. A new “1776 Commission”, “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding,” and teach the youth to “love America.” The USA’s founding “set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abol- ished slavery”, while many pointed out that the institution continued unabated for almost two-and-a-half centuries, including 89 years after American indepen- dence. The efforts by the president of the United States to use his powers to censor a work of American journalism by dictating what schools can and cannot teach and what American children should and should not learn should be deeply alarm- ing to all Americans who value free speech.

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