How to Counter the Left’s Historical Revisionism
For one thing, conservative people and organizations must continue teaching true American history.
The Left’s current strategy to defeat the United States and its sacred institutions relies on indoctrinating American school children by inserting polluted, racist, anti-American thought processes into school curricula while simultaneously removing the religious and moral underpinnings that have been part and parcel of public education since the nation’s founding. Leftists’ victory is achieved by raising an entire generation of children totally divorced from the realities of American history and beholden to the fictional dogma of the socialists.
And, unfortunately, it’s working.
The first salvo in this fight was the adoption of the politically and racially charged 1619 Project by public schools across the country. President Donald Trump countered with the 1776 Commission, which was promptly disbanded by President Joe Biden the day he took office. Biden, of course, then doubled down for his leftist overlords and vowed to push Critical Race Theory not only on federal employees and our military, but also on our teachers and school children as well.
Thankfully, the 1776 Commission continues its work despite the lack of a federal charter. Matthew Spalding, noted historian and executive director of the 1776 Commission, recently explained that the Commission is shifting its focus to the state and local level.
“The federal government has no role in curriculum, zero, no constitutional power, no authority. They can’t do it by using money to get around that fact, which is what [Biden] is trying to do on Critical Race Theory,” said Spalding. “It’s the authority of the state and the state legislature, especially, that control curriculum. And then beyond that, it really is a matter of school boards, schools, and parents.”
Spalding’s comments on CRT and the indoctrination of American school children are in the same vein as those made recently by former Attorney General William Barr in accepting the Edwin Meese III Award for Originalism and Religious Liberty from the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Barr noted that the greatest threat to religious freedom in America today is the militant and hyper-active secularist climate of the public education system. For nearly two centuries since America’s founding, public education included foundational Judeo-Christian values. This helped instill moral character — and the deeper reason for it — in America’s youth as well as establish a sense of common identity and civic and cultural bonds.
After the 1970s, however, things started going off the rails. “This is when the Left embarked on a relentless campaign of secularization intent on driving every vestige of traditional religion from the public square,” explained Barr. “Public schools quickly became the central battleground. This was the period where it was thought you could completely isolate education from religion. The rich Judeo-Christian tradition was replaced with trite talk of liberal values — be a good person, be caring. But there was no underpinning for these values.”
Barr went on to point out that the Left is no longer even about secularization in the sense of removing religion from public life, but about inserting its own religion and belief system that is fundamentally antithetical to traditional God-centered religion. “[The Left] has its notion of original sin, salvation, penance, its clergy, its dogmas, its sensitivity to any whiff of heresy, even its burning at the stake.”
As Barr and Spalding point out, the Left is not interested in adding an alternative viewpoint to American discourse. It seeks to quash any viewpoint outside its own. And it has launched a full-on attack against our society by trying to emphasize and exploit our differences, by rejecting natural law so that the Left itself can become our new religion.
Barr said it best. “Confronting this issue is one of the most urgent tasks for concerned legislators, lawyers, and organizations such as [Alliance Defending Freedom]. To save religious liberty, we must save our families and their children from the extreme secular-progressivism that pervades our current system of public schools.”
Kudos to men and women like Barr, organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the 1776 Commission itself for doing just that.
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