RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/04/like-david-mccullough-americans-ignorance-of-history-should-keep-us-up-at-night/

In academia, including teacher education, an illiberal secular fundamentalism severs connections between schools and religion, morality, and knowledge.

David McCullough, the well-known historian, couldn’t sleep. Of course, people in their 80s often experience some form of insomnia, his doctor, Thomas H. Lee, told him. But the pea under McCullough’s mattress was metaphorical, not physical.

The author of Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of presidents John Adams and Harry S. Truman, among other highly praised works, tossed and turned. Why? Because public figures don’t know American history, don’t understand that despite uncertainties and challenges, “Things worked out — because individuals behaved in certain ways with integrity and resilience. They figured out how to work with other people, and they tried to do the right things.”

So wrote Lee, with his patient’s permission, in a Wall Street Journal commentary nearly two years ago. By the time McCullough spoke at the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., last Labor Day weekend, his anxiety about historical ignorance had expanded from our leaders to the whole country.

McCullough’s main topic was his latest book, “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought American Ideals West.” But he confessed that he worried American history isn’t taught much anymore, that subject matter in general does not receive proper attention.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/03/universities-are-complicit-in-1619-projects-disgusting-swindle/

David Randall is Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars.

Of course Hannah-Jones doesn’t welcome pushback. But we expect better of our universities. They shouldn’t give their intellectual and moral authority to her gimcrack wares.

The backers of the New York Times’ 1619 Project don’t believe their hate-reading of American history can stand up to examination in the light of day. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from their full flight from critics across the political spectrum.

Proponents of the 1619 Project—believers that the real founding of the country came with the landing of African slaves in Jamestown in 1619—are determined to foist their ideas on children who don’t have enough information to argue back. They’ll force teachers to teach its falsehoods as the only acceptable history. They’ll arrange “dialogues” throughout the nation, where their advocates say six sorts of nonsense and their carefully selected “interlocutors” reply, You’re so very right! But they’ll never allow for an open debate against an informed opponent.

They know the arguments behind the 1619 Project would fall to pieces if they did. So they carefully arrange matters so that no one ever gets a chance to say that the emperor has no clothes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/dh-wednesday-lead-hate-america-project-david-horowitz/

Editorial Note: It’s time to recognize that the current ideologies of the progressive Left and the Democrat Party – Cultural Marxism and Identity Politics – pose existential threats to America’s survival.

America is unique among nations in being founded on a set of ideas and values rather than having a shared “identity” based on “blood and soil.” The founding of America during the revolutionary era 1776 – 1787 was based on principles that provide the sinews of our national identity. They are what create a unity out of the diverse peoples that have settled and occupied this country since its founding. They have been the inspirational force that enabled America to abolish slavery, become a global symbol of freedom, and provide the world’s chief bulwark against global tyrannies.

It is this inspirational memory that the political left has set out to erase and destroy. The most disturbing manifestation of this sinister aggression is the so-called “1619 Project,” the brainchild of a staff writer at The New York Times, named Nikole Hannah-Jones. It is supported by The Pulitzer Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution and the nation’s cultural elite. Six months after its launch, the “1619 Project” Is already a curriculum in 3,500 public high schools in all 50 states.[1] Given the extreme leftwing nature of the teacher unions and the public education establishment, while disturbing this is hardly surprising.[2]

The “1619 Project” is described by Times editorial board member Mara Gay in the following words: “In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”[3] In a formal statement, the Times editorial board elaborated: “The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”[4]