BY JOHN K. WILSON

On November 2, the day before he lost re-election (in a failed attempt to lure voters with his faux patriotism), Donald Trump signed an executive order creating the 1776 Commission, which worked quickly to produce a report before Joe Biden could take office and rescind this terrible idea and the terrible people assigned to complete it. Today, the 1776 Commission issued its hastily assembled report purporting to reveal the “true” history that must be taught.

We can only be grateful that Trump’s loss means this report will be consigned quickly to the dustbin of history, rather than becoming the guiding force attempting to control how history is taught and silence its enemies.

The 1776 Commission is essentially a division of right-wing Hillsdale College (which has proudly remained on the AAUP’s censure list since 1988).The Chair of the Commission is Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, and Hillsdale professor Matthew Spalding, Vice President for Washington Operations, served as the Commission’s Executive Director.

Today, the White House celebrated the 1776 Commission Report, with a press release titled “1776 Commission Takes Historic and Scholarly Step to Restore Understanding of the Greatness of the American Founding,” which called the report “a dispositive rebuttal of reckless “re-education” attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.” As we all know, historians are only allowed to describe America as “exceptional” or “evil.” Anyone who claims otherwise obviously thinks America is evil and must be dealt with. And it’s hard to see anything scholarly in a report with no footnotes, no sources, and no real arguments beyond straw figures.

The 1776 Commission is the pseudo-scholarly version of the rioters at the Capitol: a bunch of conspiratorial loons babbling nonsense and imagining their words to be of supreme importance because some idiot incited them to run into the halls of power.

I lack the space and the will to address every distortion or lie found in this document (the section on Progressivism alone is breathtaking in its mendacious stupidity). Instead, I will focus on what the document says about universities.

The Commission complains that “Universities in the United States are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship…”  and argues that “Colleges peddle resentment and contempt for American principles and history alike, in the process weakening attachment to our shared heritage.” After all, the purpose of a historian is to strengthen “our shared heritage,” not to tell the truth. It’s not like freedom of thought or dissent are American principles, right?

The 1776 Commission argues, “Historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination, is an ideology intended to manipulate opinions more than educate minds.” This image of critical historians as people who “trample” honest scholarship, as a scholarly mob, is an alarming way to engage in an argument with someone. It is nonsense to say that historians “only” discuss the sins of America, and that historical truth must be silenced if it “shames Americans” by acknowledging anything negative.

According to the 1776 Commission, “Deliberately destructive scholarship shatters the civic bonds that unite all Americans. It silences the discourse essential to a free society by breeding division, distrust, and hatred among citizens.” Smearing the motives of unnamed evil professors, and claiming without any evidence that they are intentionally lying about history is a pretty disturbing approach, especially from a document that complains about “division, distrust, and hatred” in the very next sentence. The 1776 Commission argues that historians are obligated to produce patriotic propaganda or they are responsible for destroying our civic bonds.

It gets worse: This “deliberately destructive scholarship” is “the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.” It’s sickening to blame critical history for censorship, and then turn around and demand censorship to protect statues from “defamation” (here’s a little lesson for these fine scholars: you can’t defame a statue). But it’s especially appalling for the 1776 Commission to claim that historians are responsible for “the violence in our cities,” apparently imagining that the murder of George Floyd would have generated no protests if only historians had promoted a shiny happy vision of the American past.

Why, just on January 6, we witnessed violence in the city of Washington, D.C., that left five people dead, and I am certain that the 1776 Commission thinks progressive historians were somehow to blame for it all.

The 1776 Commission report is a bizarre and incoherent concoction of smears, right-wing propaganda, anti-intellectual disdain, conspiracy theories, meandering and repetitive idiocy, and outright lies in service of an extremist political agenda. In other words, it is a perfect embodiment of Trumpism and a document Donald Trump will be proud of, even though he will certainly never read it.