Donald Trump is indeed “flooding the zone” with unconstitutional executive orders drawn directly from the pages of the chilling Project 2025 playbook.
Two days ago, on January 29th, President Trump reestablished the “1776 Commission,” which he first ordered into existence in November of 2020. A council of hacks and weirdos, still utterly transfixed by the late Howard Zinn, the commission released a cursory report in January of 2021. In its current iteration, it will promote what the Trump administration ominously calls “Patriotic education.”
This all is part of an executive order “ending racial indoctrination in K-12 schools,” that for strange reasons spends a great deal of time punching down on transgender youth and the adults who care for and about these kids. But it also calls for the elimination of federal funding for schools that defy Trump’s edict. Patriotic education, the order reads, will include an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles.” Patriotic education will consist of “a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history,” and promote “the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper.” Criticize the republic, and you can wind up in trouble As I asked two years ago, when might we expect the book-burning to begin?
Though no specific examples are cited, much indeed seems to be at stake. “In recent years,” the order reads, “parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight.” As a result, “innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.”
Good Lord! That sounds terrible! It is also, plain and simple, a dangerous load of horseshit.
I am not a patriotic educator. I believe that America is a racist country, that inequality is hard-wired into the system, and in my classes we discuss the historic roots of these problems. How can we fix them, after all, without understanding them? To do any less would be historical malpractice. I suggest to my students that after the passage of 250 years, if we have not yet lived up to our “noble principles,” perhaps we do not hold those principles very closely at all. The same document that proclaims that “all men are created equal” denounces the “Indian savages” who fought to defend their homelands from white invasion and enslaved peoples who, from the beginning of this nation, pointed out the yawning gap between American ideals and reality and the emptiness of its founding rhetoric. The Founders, hardly a god-like group, created a constitution that counted enslaved people as 3/5 of a human being, and that would solve its financial problems through the massive expropriation of Indigenous land.
We should not laugh off these attacks on the integrity of our work. It is time to push back, and push back hard. It is not the job of the historian, we might suggest, to make you feel food about the past, to tell you comforting myths, that if this country just keeps trying, it just might get things right. It is, in fact, our job to point out how this administration is playing a very old game by trying to cement inequality in place, to uphold white supremacy, and that racism, in the country’s past and in this administration’s present, is fundamental to the story of the United States. Saying that, under this executive order, is now illegal.
There always has been tension between history-as-patriotic-education and history as an academic discipline that asks critical questions about the past and examines in a systematic manner processes of continuity and change, measured across time, in peoples, institutions and cultures. Teachers at the K-12 level wrestle with these tensions far more directly than do most college history professors. But we need to be involved. Talk to a history professor. Chances are she or he will tell you about the many times students have approached after class, and expressed their amazement and disappointment that nobody had taught them this material before. College students learn many things, but one of those is the lies they were told in high school. It happens in my Native American history class nearly every semester: students who attend school in New York State, for instance, learn about Cherokee Removal, but nothing about their state’s treatment, and removal, of much of its own Indigenous population. Even Deep Blue New York conceals from its students the truth of its own campaigns of dispossession, its own efforts to eradicate Indigenous peoples.
If you have followed the Right’s war on history, there is nothing new in this order. These perverts are obsessed with students’ sexuality; these racists are determined to halt discussions of race and inequality. They are working with determination to secure white supremacy and white privilege by outlawing any educator who teaches that “the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory.”
The Trump Administration demands that teachers lie about this country’s past. For Trump and his followers, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. If they can convince you to believe that this country past is different than what the documents clearly show, the can claim that what has always been unjust is just, what has always been exploitative is fair, and what has always been explicitly evil is good. On those rare occasions when they concede a shortcoming, they say we have never failed because we have not yet finished trying to fix problems that ought to have been fixed generations ago.
If Trump’s friends read this, they will say that I am part of the problem, that if I just stuck to the facts in my classes, and if I left out my biases, my revisionist inclinations, and my “anti-American ideas,” all would be well. I would challenge these people to point out something in a book that I have written, or a class I have given, that is factually incorrect. Fight back, my friends. Don’t let these fascists and trolls denigrate your vital work. Don’t stop teaching your students to ask tough questions, to search relentlessly for answers, to demand to see the evidence, and show courage in the face of those who despise them and the work you are teaching them to do.
There is a lot that is great in this country. Its political system and governing class are not. I’m not interested in unverifiable assertions that the United States is the greatest country on earth–we seem to lead the world only in military spending, women’s basketball, and the mass incarceration of people of color. The Trumpzis are entitled to their opinions. But let me just say this: if you have to lie to young people to get them to accept your vision for what this country is and ought to be, the problem is not disloyal or treasonous teachers. It’s you, and your ideas about this nation and its history.
