Who wrote Trump's ‘1776 Report’? Here are all the people involved with commission that challenges 1619 Project
The 1776 Commission, established by President Donald Trump in December 2020 to promote “patriotic education”, released its report on Monday, January 18 with a sweeping account of American history as defined by a host of Trump allies that seeks to deny historians' accounts of the nation's slave-owning founders and to counter the New York Times Magazine’s controversial 1619 Project. Now the Internet wants to know who authored this controversial 1776 report.
The report — described as a “definitive chronicle of the American founding” — pushes back on what the commission sees as the “decline of American education” led by “progressive educators” who “sought to reshape students in the image they thought best.”
The report states that the declared purpose of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission is to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.”
This requires a restoration of American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those principles that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling. And a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.”
The 1776 commission is a clear counter to the Times’ 1619 Project, which Trump and other Republicans have blasted frequently and tried to stop schools from teaching. The project, first published in August 2019, seeks to re-examine the country’s history and challenge the widely held opinion that the country was founded in 1776. The title essay won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020.
According to the published report, "By turning to bitterness and judgment, distorted histories of those like Howard Zinn or the journalists behind the '1619 Project' have prevented their students from learning to think inductively with a rich repository of cultural, historical, and literary referents. Such works do not respect their students’ independence as young thinkers trying to grapple with social complexity while forming their empirical judgments about it."
"They disdain today’s students, just as they doubt humanity, goodness, or benevolence in America’s greatest historical figures. They see only weaknesses and failures, teaching students truth is an illusion, that hypocrisy is everywhere, and that power is all that matters."
The individuals who assisted with the preparation of the 1776 Report are William Bock, Alexandra Campana, Ariella Campana, Joshua Charles, Brian Morgenstern, Macy Mount, McKenzie Snow and Alec Torres. Adam Honeysett is the designated Federal Officer.
