This is obviously in line with the executive order banning anti-racist training.

...privileges "protected classes" (legally, racial minorities, women, religious minorities, etc--a definition that's used to identify harassment and discrimination). The last step is left unsaid, but is clear: the privileging of protected identities victimizes people who are not part of these "protected classes"--that is, White people, and especially White men.

I'm gonna call this the Calhoun move, and it brings us right back around to a White victim complex, the 21st century version of White supremacy.

And now the move is complete: racist group rights become antiracism, which in turn becomes preferential treatment that...wait for it...

Here's the rest of that jaw-dropping rhetorical move from back on page 12 wherein antiracism becomes the same as Calhoun's racism. This may be the most outrageous lie in the document, and that's a hard title to achieve.

This is all predicated on forgetting what MLK was working on when he was assassinated, which was (among other things) anti-poverty and housing initiatives that had him essentially branded a Communist.

Quoting MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech in a document that opposes anti-racist activism is now so cliche it's practically a bingo square.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/060.html

As with the passage on abolitionism, again we have downplaying of Black leadership.

There's so much to do we have to ignore this ridiculous level of exaggeration.

We're gonna get back to this.

Please call the Swedes, their property's been stolen!

Oh wait.

I mean it really is the 1950s in here. Please let me off this time machine.

This is absolutely laughable to anyone who has ever read Marx, because it is more or less the opposite of what Marx actually argued for.

Misrepresentation. Actual quote:

My own contribution was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. (KM)

As is now obvious, the dictatorship of the proletariat is explicitly not the goal (and that's before we get around to explaining what dictatorship of the proletariat actually means).

Does this really never get old? Could they not come up with a better boogeyman than the one they used on Boomers?

What is about to happen here is some Red Scare level shit.

I would (not) like to introduce you to Francisco Franco and Spain until the 1970s.

Notice how very Trump this phrasing is. It's probably accurate (though look, I got better things to rant about than numbers of boats).

What the everloving fuck just happened here

(Also that's not exactly how the US got involved in WW2...at all.)

Second or third time we've had extraneous Ronald Reagan

At least I learned an interesting if archaic word today.

So we are now associating Progressivism (and rhetorically, progressivism) with...Mussolini. This is ridiculous. (Also note that there are or have been many forms of government that were bureaucracy-heavy, and while not always ideal, they were also not always fascist.)

A Google search will disprove this (but consistently, when they say Communism they mean Soviet Communism).

There's a rhetorical refrain in this document of ending subsections with some kind of vaguely described boogeyman that is fodder for conspiracy theories or making people feel under attack. See pages numbered 10 (2x) and 12.

Again, natural law is a specific, historically rooted branch of philosophy, and so is this. But what's happening here is not a debate between two schools of philosophy, but an argument against certain schools of legal thought. Conservative constitutional legal thought (embodied most famously by Scalia but also by much of the right wing of the current SCOTUS) is originalist. Originalism opposes the idea of "novel rights" and the "living Constitution," and insists on interpreting the Constitution as people theoretically would have done at the time of its writing.

The takeaway here is the foregoing screed on Progressivism and philosophy is actually a warm-up to an subtextual argument about Constitutional interpretation that is the bedrock of how conservatives view the Judicial Branch.

This is egregious. Not only are they quoting out of context, they have literally made it impossible to find the context.

Here the writers deploy a specific historical term without defining it, again for the linguistic refrain. Late 18th century Progressivism (capital P) becomes, by repetition, the same as 21st century AOC/Sanders progressivism (little p).

(I'm not going into depth here on the merits of what they're saying about Progressivism because it's not my particular field of knowledge and I'm sure Heather Cox Richardson is going to handle it.)

Keep an eye on this, the beginning of a truly remarkable rhetorical pivot that will equate, somehow, the evils of John C Calhoun and pseudoscientific racism with "identity politics" (or to put it more generally, anti-racism with racism).

Like William Goldman excising imaginary chapters on Princess Buttercup's wardrobe*, the Civil War magically vanishes into the wastes of Boring History That Calls Into Question Such Ideas as American Exceptionalism and the Role of States.

• after this, we all need to read The Princess Bride to recover

The first non-White-man person to be mentioned by name in context. We are on page 12.

Oh. Hell. No.

Aside from the British example above, the authors seem to have forgotten that "movements to abolish slavery" included movements not run by White abolitionists, such as rebellions by enslaved people. One modest example roughly contemporaneous with the creation of the Bill of Rights: the Haitian Revolution. Or if you're hung up on White people abolitionists, Bartolome de las Casas (late in life). Who the hell even thinks the US invented abolitionism? WTF?

Remember, this is the abolitionist who somehow also owned slaves mentioned way back at the beginning of the document.

Probably not. Abolitionism was alive and well in Britain, and in fact, by the time of the Declaration, slavery did not legally exist in England (by the time the war ended, it didn't exist in Scotland either). It persisted longer in British colonies, until 1838. It's not unreasonable to think that enslavers in the American colonies might have seen the writing on the wall and supported the revolution in part because of this.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

as before: crack a book.

No. Congress outlawed the Transatlantic slave trade at the end of the 20-year period. It didn't actually end the transatlantic trade, and it didn't even attempt to end domestic slave trading.

We're about to have a whole paragraph diminishing American chattel slavery's evils, aren't we.

(Spoiler: yes, we are.)

Let me fix that for you: "Thomas Jefferson owned, bought, sold, and traded human beings, including a woman he kept as a sex slave and his own biracial enslaved children."

I sure hope divine justice doesn't sleep for Jefferson.

This page had my jaw on the floor so I can't be sure (sarcasm; I am sure), but this sure does sound like a little logical twist that actually excuses the three-fifths compromise.

It is in fact true. You cannot talk high ideals about individual liberty and self-determination and also own human beings without being a hypocrite.

hy·poc·ri·sy noun the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform

First mention of slavery.

It may be useful to remember while reading the following how mad Trump is about the 1619 Project, and that the 1776 Commission emerged from that anger.

At this point, this document on educational reform is sounding like some of the more bombastic interpretive materials at a 9/11 memorial.

Wut.

I just gotta bring back our friend

This is just gratuitously ideological.

OK folks, buckle up. Shit is about to get real

THIS LANGUAGE MADE IT PAST JANUARY 6

Note again the actual relevant text: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," which means Congress cannot make a law that permits Lieutenant Asshole of the Bumfuck Constabulary to throw your ass in prison because you ran your mouth (exceptions for threats, etc). All it means is you cannot face government persecution for speech, ie you cannot be disappeared like a Chinese dissident. Twitter, being not Congress, can ban you for any reason they like. Welcome to adulthood.

WHOA COWBOY.

Let us take a moment and correct this buzzword with the actual clauses: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Notice what is and isn't included here. There is no entitlement to special treatment for religious groups. TAX THE TELEVANGELI--I mean, interesting omission.

These are all from the First Amendment, which has two other clauses not mentioned here: "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances". These are telling omissions.

GUESS WHICH ONES

(you don't have to guess, they're the ones unmoderated comment sections and evangelical preachers feed on)

More or less my argument against Constitutional Originalism, but hey, conservatism is rarely consistent.

Y'know, I was going to make a serious comment, but I'll just let Ivanka do it.

Note how the use of this phrase unfolds in the coming pages, particularly when they get around to talking about identity politics.

False. In New England states, they actually do. And there's this little thing called the referendum...

(Y'know, it's not like they're wrong about representative institutions. It's that they insist on putting in stupid false shit when they didn't even need to.)

Here it is again!

(Obviously my objection is not to the republic as a form of government. It's to the fact that adoption of this language in schools would transform small-r republicanism into big-R Republicanism. Linguistic propaganda if not defined.)

Token woman out of context to go with your token Black people out of context.

Really a vast oversimplification--intriguing from this crowd, whose strategy is usually to argue for the devolution of powers to the states. That view is reflected below, but I would've expected to see more attention to states here.

Can we call this purple prose? Or whining? Or both?

Here is another token image of a Black person out of context. The document still won't mention slavery for another three pages.

This is not wrong, but I wanted to flag somewhere that Britain actually possessed a representative government (Parliament) at the time. George III did his best to ignore it, but it existed. It just didn't include representation for colonies.

I'm not tagging this "these people are stupid" because that's not the issue; they are attempting to make US representative government look more innovative than it actually was.

WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUUUUUCK??

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA Hang on I gotta roll on the floor for a minute HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Ahem.

MAY I INTRODUCE TO YOU CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM? THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE? EMPEROR CONSTANTINE? THE POPE? ALL THE POPES? INCLUDING THE TIME THERE WERE TWO POPES?

The sundering of--

Children. Sit down and let the adults do history.

Needless to say:

Disingenuous. I don't know if this is technically true, but there sure have been governments and systems of government that lasted much longer.

Incorrect. They came up with what we have today minus twenty-seven important bits of it that comprise most of what the United States has spent the last 240 or whatever years fighting over. The Bill of Rights--the "but mah freedoms" part of the Constitution--didn't come along for four more years.

Here's another theme that emerges in the document repeatedly. Watch over the next ten pages or so as it goes from natural rights and law-over-ruler to obedience.

OK wait. So...civil law was sundered from religious law because of Christianity in the last sentence, but in this sentence, schisms in Christianity (which, remember, had sundered political and religious law) undermined political unity?

(I mean, there were a lot of wars because of the various reformations and counter-reformations, but

• there was no prior Christian unity, as I'm sure the Orthodox would like to remind us, to say nothing of the heretics the Inquisition enjoyed killing all over western Europe
• political unity? Really? Like Europeans weren't over there killing each other even if they were all at least nominally Catholic?

Look, it's like somebody thinks the multi-national, polyglot monastery in The Name of the Rose was representative of pre-Reformation Europe and forgot that The Name of the Rose is a murder mystery.

(They didn't think that. These people wouldn't make it ten pages in anything by Eco. Bear with my nerd analogies.)

What you mean, "became"?

I assume they mean to imply "since Plato" here, but we're really back in the land of undergrad "since the beginning of time" essay introductions.

Also, only two?

(Oh sweet summer child.)

We come now to my favorite part. Get ready.

I have not puzzled out why this section does not reference the European Enlightenment--the intellectual milieu through which the founders drove their philosophical and political shopping carts--and instead vaguely references "ancient philosophers", but this is one of many cases of Incorrect By Flagrant Omission in this document.

Do I laugh? Do I cry? Do I set something on fire?

Actually, this is one of the great lies of American patriotism even when it's not being put forward by a wannabe autocrat's educational propaganda council. The principles of the Declaration sound really nice, but they are historically and philosophically situated, highly interpretable, and have never applied to everyone.

Essays have been written on how this phrase appears in Locke's (earlier) work with "property" instead of "happiness", and how and why Jefferson changed it. I'm not going to delve too deeply there, but it's worth asking what Jefferson meant by "happiness", and for whom, in a context where only White, landholding men were entitled to full liberty (and voting rights).

Spoiler: the Reds are coming!

Also, obviously: ALL PEOPLE HAVE NEVER BEEN TREATED EQUALLY IN THIS COUNTRY, rendering this statement pointless blather from a practical point of view.

Laughably out of context - it is not clear what the abstract truth is, because the Declaration isn't quoted, and it's not clear what Lincoln's argument was, and we have no idea where Lincoln said this in the first place.

I can only assume they are referring to "all men are created equal"--in which case the previous paragraph on talent is a total aside.

this is very, very interesting. Obama was known to surround himself with a brain trust, Hilary was and is a policy wonk, and literally the whole point of this document, as will become plainly evident later, is to argue against intellectualism. It is not a stretch to read this as a denunciation of competence as a qualifier for office, and a defense of government by the ignorant.

Notice that they use "caste" here rather than race or gender.

I am not going to wade into the philosophy of natural law here because I am 1) not a philosopher, and 2) drinking a glass of wine. The founders did go in for this stuff, but it is...highly critique-able.

This is (I think) the first time the document uses "men" in a non-gender-specific way outside the context of a period quote. This pre-1960s default to "men" instead of "people" continues throughout. With "republicanism", this is the second major case of a repeated imprecise, ideologically motivated language refrain.

Nah fam. All government assert a public claim as to why, but many (oligarchies, dictatorships, totalitarian societies calling themselves communist) have no interest in being just.

My rage reduces me to comments on sloppy usage, such as this pronoun that does not refer to its grammatical antecedent.

Let me be very clear: they are arguing that principle is not enough, and that descent, language, religion, customs, etc are necessary. They don't restate descent here, but that is the point of this whole digression on Jay - the significance of Whiteness.

JESUS H CHRIST

If you can't see the White (Anglo) nationalism there, I can't help you.

In the next paragraph they're gonna try to qualify it, but you don't quote this shit and then try to make it look pretty if you don't want everyone to believe it. (Jay was a slaveholder and an abolitionist, if you can believe it, at the same time. He was also a supporter of Christian missionaries.)

• There were many American peoples. None of them were White.
• "those subjects became a people by declaring themselves such and then by winning the independence they had asserted as their right" - OK no. Quite a lot of people did not have the autonomy to "declare themselves" part of a people, and indeed were not recognized as such. There were also loyalists. And this idea of "a people" is...really complicated.
• While it's true that the first citizens of the United States were former British subjects, it is worth noting that a lot of other people lived in the current United States at the time who were tribal citizens, French colonists, Spanish colonists, and enslaved people who weren't considered citizens of anywhere.

Oh look, they were shitting me.

ARE YOU SHITTING ME.

I cannot read this without hearing an undergrad being a paper "Since the beginning of time..."

Here beginneth a vast number of references to small-r republicanism, which is never defined. This is a case of language mattering. The US has a republican form of government, of course, but repetition of language can be, and in this case, is, an ideological refrain. "republican" is one of two notable cases here.

We gotta do this clause by clause:

• "its people have shared a history of common struggle and achievement" - no. Aside from the long history of dispute about who born in the United States really "counts" as an "American", there has never been a common struggle.
• "carving communities out of a vast, untamed wilderness" - no. As of this writing I have finished reading the first half of the document and there has, as yet, been no mention of Indigenous peoples. (Also, see the vast literature on the relationship between expansionism, the "frontier", and American exceptionalism.)
• "winning independence and forming a new government" - dramatic oversimplification. Interesting fact about this document: in contains almost no references to state government.
• "wars, industrialization, waves of immigration, technological progress, and political change" - not highlighting this because it's wrong, but because it implies a strictly linear progress of history that is typical of American exceptionalism and intellectual arguments for racism, colonialism, etc.

All in all, what Luke said.

This is an unapologetic statement of purpose: to change public education to a patriotic/nationalistic discourse that will lead to a specific vision of the "more perfect Union"

Psst it is going to be eight more pages before this document mentions racism.

One of many places in which I call foul on the lack of citation. CONTEXT MATTERS

Technically true, but worth acknowledging that there were others working on it at about the same time. This was an enlightenment idea, not an American idea.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA crack a book, y'all.

We are not going to do an accounting here of whether "America" (hi, America is two continents, we're talking about the US) has on balance done more good than harm. That is disingenuous. The fact is that the United States has done great harm that is not erased by its good, and it is more urgent to deal with the harm than to pat ourselves on the back about the good.

"Saruman the White has ever been our friend and ally" -Grima Wormtongue

Also, this is the first of many misrepresentations that earn the following comment, which I would like as a rubber stamp because I'm gonna need it:

Historiography tells us that history as told is always partisan. Facts are inevitably incomplete. This here is the lie that the entire rest of this pack of lies sits on: that there is one American history that is actually accurate.

This line, associated with Reagan, is from a sermon by John Winthrop, a Puritan immigrant who was primarily interested in establishing a theocracy. It is emblematic of the idea of "American Exceptionalism", which you are about to be beat over the head with. See further https://www.neh.gov/article/how-america-became-city-upon-hill#:~:text=That%201630%20sermon%20by%20John,center%20of%20his%20political%20career.

I'll be flagging certain repeated phrases or language choices that are misleading or biased.

Oh god here we go.