CNN stated Monday after the release of the report defending 1776 as the true founding of America that the Trump administration issued “a racist school curriculum report on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.”
“A commission stood up by President Donald Trump as a rebuttal to schools applying a more accurate history curriculum around slavery in the US issued its inflammatory report on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day,” the CNN report stated.
Trump “blamed the school curriculum for violence that resulted from some of the protests, saying that ‘the left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools,’” CNN said, continuing:
Trump’s presidency has been marked by his racist statements and actions, including his incitement of a mob, which included White supremacists, to storm the US Capitol on January 6 in protest of Biden’s victory.
On Tuesday, Dr. Matthew Spalding, executive director of Trump’s Advisory 1776 Commission, told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily, the commission’s report is defending 1776 as “the true founding” of America.
Spalding, Hillsdale College’s vice president for its Washington, DC, operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government, noted as well that the use of “identity politics” today may be added to “slavery or progressivism or fascism or communism abroad” as threats to the founding principles.
The commission was, in part, considered to be a response to the New York Times 1619 Project, which claims America’s true founding date is 1619, the year African slaves were first brought to the colonies.
“But more broadly,” Spalding said, “Howard Zinn and other revisionist histories for some time have been arguing that America really is not a playing out, if you will, of principles set down in the Declaration,” in terms of the statement that “all men are created equal.”
“But [that] it actually is defined by the existence of slavery, and, thus, it is systemic from the very beginning,” he continued. “And we reject that claim outright indeed.”
Spalding said that, despite the fact that America has had its flaws, such as the existence of slavery at one time, “America’s history has always been a relationship between those principles and a nation trying, aspiring to uphold those principles.”
“The abolitionist movement began in America,” he noted.
“It began in America in light of the principles of the Declaration,” he added. “That’s what Lincoln turned back to. That’s what Martin Luther King later turned back to very prominently in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”
Spalding said “what makes America exceptional” is the fact that it began its first day with “a claim of truth, that all men are equal.”
The Hillsdale College dean observed all “justice” movements have referred back to the principles and claims found in the Declaration of Independence.
“That’s where abolition comes from; that’s where women’s suffrage comes from, the civil rights movement … the pro-life movement, the anti-communist movement,” he said. “They all move back to a claim of justice, which we find in the Declaration of Independence. To move away from that is to … find your principles elsewhere. And that’s what we’re worried about.”
Spalding explained America is now seeing an “increasing rise of claims of group rights, based on ethnicity or race or sex or something else.”
He said these claims of such group rights are “always problematic” because “who says what group has rights and what groups don’t have rights?”