Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
Today President Trump launched a major attack on the history of the United States by announcing what he called The 1776 Project, a direct attack on the 1619 Project which aims to tell the story of how the English Colonists introduced what became the institution of slavery and entrenched racism in the United States. I know the subject well, my book which will be published sometime in the next year “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory!” Racism, Religion, Ideology and Politics in the Civil War Era and why they Continue to Matter” deals extensive with this history, and I can say based on his actions and utterances that the President is using this to further divide the country on racial lines and to open American history as his next front of his culture war.
Trump said he would create a national commission to promote a “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history,” which he said would encourage educators to teach students about the “miracle of American history.”
Here is the full text of his speech release by the White House:
“Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character. We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. (Applause.)
To grow up in America is to live in a land where anything is possible, where anyone can rise, and where any dream can come true — all because of the immortal principles our nation’s founders inscribed nearly two and a half centuries ago.
That’s why we have come to the National Archives, the sacred home of our national memory. In this great chamber, we preserve our glorious inheritance: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.
On this very day in 1787, our Founding Fathers signed the Constitution at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It was the fulfillment of a thousand years of Western civilization. Our Constitution was the product of centuries of tradition, wisdom, and experience. No political document has done more to advance the human condition or propel the engine of progress.
Yet, as we gather this afternoon, a radical movement is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance. We can’t let that happen. (Applause.) Left-wing mobs have torn down statues of our founders, desecrated our memorials, and carried out a campaign of violence and anarchy. Far-left demonstrators have chanted the words “America was never great.” The left has launched a vicious and violent assault on law enforcement — the universal symbol of the rule of law in America. These radicals have been aided and abetted by liberal politicians, establishment media, and even large corporations.
Whether it is the mob on the street, or the cancel culture in the boardroom, the goal is the same: to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage, and their very way of life.
We are here today to declare that we will never submit to tyranny. We will reclaim our history and our country for citizens of every race, color, religion, and creed.
The radicals burning American flags want to burn down the principles enshrined in our founding documents, including the bedrock principle of equal justice under law. In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we came from, and what we believe. As I said at Mount Rushmore — which they would love to rip down and it rip it down fast, and that’s never going to happen — two months ago, the left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.
As many of you testified today, the left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long. Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.
The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies. There is no better example than the New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project. This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.
Nothing could be further from the truth. America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history. (Applause.)
The narratives about America being pushed by the far-left and being chanted in the streets bear a striking resemblance to the anti-American propaganda of our adversaries — because both groups want to see America weakened, derided, and totally diminished.
Students in our universities are inundated with critical race theory. This is a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression, and that our entire society must be radically transformed. Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools, it’s being imposed into workplace trainings, and it’s being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors, and families.
A perfect example of critical race theory was recently published by the Smithsonian Institution. This document alleged that concepts such as hard work, rational thinking, the nuclear family, and belief in God were not values that unite all Americans, but were instead aspects of “whiteness.” This is offensive and outrageous to Americans of every ethnicity, and it is especially harmful to children of minority backgrounds who should be uplifted, not disparaged.
Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words. For many years now, the radicals have mistaken Americans’ silence for weakness. But they’re wrong.
There is no more powerful force than a parent’s love for their children. And patriotic moms and dads are going to demand that their children are no longer fed hateful lies about this country. American parents are not going to accept indoctrination in our schools, cancel culture at our work, or the repression of traditional faith, culture, and values in the public square. Not anymore. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
We embrace the vision of Martin Luther King, where children are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
The left is attempting to destroy that beautiful vision and divide Americans by race in the service of political power. By viewing every issue through the lens of race, they want to impose a new segregation, and we must not allow that to happen.
Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.
That is why I recently banned trainings in this prejudiced ideology from the federal government and banned it in the strongest manner possible. (Applause.)
The only path to national unity is through our shared identity as Americans. That is why it is so urgent that we finally restore patriotic education to our schools.
Under our leadership, the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant to support the development of a pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history. (Applause.)
We are joined by some of the respected scholars involved in this project, including Professor Wilfred McClay. Wilfred, please. Thank you very much. Welcome. (Applause.) Thank you. Dr. Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars. Dr. Peter. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. And Ted Rebarber. Thank you, Ted. (Applause.) Thank you very much, Ted.
Today, I am also pleased to announce that I will soon sign an Executive Order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education. It will be called the “1776 Commission.” (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. It will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding. Think of that — 250 years.
Recently, I also signed an executive order to establish the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans who have ever lived.
Today, I am announcing a new name for inclusion.
One of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence was a patriot from Delaware. In July of 1776, the Continental Congress was deadlocked during the debate over independence. The delegation from Delaware was divided. Caesar Rodney was called upon to break the tie.
Even though he was suffering from very advanced cancer — he was deathly ill — Rodney rode 80 miles through the night, through a severe thunderstorm, from Dover to Philadelphia to cast his vote for independence.
For nearly a century, a statue of one of Delaware’s most beloved citizens stood in Rodney Square, right in the heart of Wilmington.
But this past June, Caesar Rodney’s statue was ordered removed by the mayor and local politicians as part of a radical purge of America’s founding generation.
Today, because of an order I signed, if you demolish a statue without permission, you immediately get 10 years in prison. (Applause.) And there have been no statues demolished for the last four months, incredibly, since the time I signed that act.
Joe Biden said nothing as to his home state’s history and the fact that it was dismantled and dismembered. And a Founding Father’s statue was removed.
Today, America will give this Founding Father, this very brave man, who was so horribly treated, the place of honor he deserves. I am announcing that a statue of Caesar Rodney will be added to the National Garden of American Heroes. (Applause.)
From Washington to Lincoln, from Jefferson to King, America has been home to some of the most incredible people who have ever lived. With the help of everyone here today, the legacy of 1776 will never be erased. Our heroes will never be forgotten. Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and all of their soul.
We will save this cherished inheritance for our children, for their children, and for every generation to come. This is a very important day.
Thank you all once again for being here. Now I will sign the Constitution Day Proclamation. God Bless You. And God Bless America. Thank you very much. (Applause.) Thank you.“
What he actually is saying that anything that questions his White Racist beliefs about American history is unpatriotic, or Un-American. This goes back to two things: first his primary and secondary school education where American History was still taught from textbooks derived from the writings of the racist and revisionist ideologies who propagated the twin myths of the Noble South and the Lost Cause. But the second may be even more important. It was his mentor and legal counsel Roy Cohn, the chief counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy who made his living as a Senator by attacking the patriotism of men like General George Marshall and many other American patriots as Un-American traitors or communists. There is only one degree of separation between Trump and McCarthy.
Edward R. Murrow spoke of McCarthy in his documentary See it Now, in words that could be equally descriptive of President Trump:
“No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Trump’s history it is the continuation of racist and nationalist propaganda. Yale historian Timothy Snyder wrote:
“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, ‘although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,’ wrote Orwell, tends to be ‘uninterested in what happens in the real world.’ Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism ‘has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.’ A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
The President fits the descriptions of both Murrow and Snyder. Today’s signing of the Executive Order was yet another Orwellian move to whitewash American history of its 400 years of systemic racism, systemic oppression and enslavement of Blacks; the centuries long genocidal extermination of the people of our First Nations, more often referred to as Native Americans. But let us not stop there, let’s move on to the anti-Catholic immigrant campaign directed against Irish and German Catholics known as the Know Nothings, whose members attacked and killed Irish and Germans, burned their churches, businesses, and attacked them in the streets. On the West Coast there were the crimes committed against Chinese immigrants who though not slaves in a legal sense were treated in a similar manner to like slaves in building stone walls for landowners, and in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, and other railroads throughout the west. But let us not forget the racial and religious discrimination against southern and Eastern European immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, who included Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Russians, Croats, Serbs, Bosnian’s, Turks, Armenians, Lebanese and too many others to name. And we cannot forget the Japanese American citizens placed in concentration camps after being forced to sell their homes and businesses for pennies on the dollar after the Pearl Harbor attack. Don’t let me forget to mention the conquest of Mexico which forced that country to surrender 40% or its territory to the United States, including what is now California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and much of Texas.
At its dark and evil heart what Trump is doing is “whitewashing” history, writing out our long history of slavery and racism. It is designed to buttress his own ignorance of American history. Trump went to school at a time time American history was written by the most successful revisionist historians of American history, those who promoted the twin myths of the Noble South and the Lost Cause.
Trump’s “Patriotism” is nothing more than that promoted by the Confederates after they lost the war but succeeded in using violence, legislation, and the courts to return freed blacks to at best second class citizenship, at worst slavery by another name.
This is not honest patriotism, especially when he intentionally quotes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to whitewash his racism. It is the fraudulent patriotism of a draft dodger who despises military, legal, Judicial and diplomatic personnel, calls those wounded, killed, or prisoners of war losers, who despises the ideals, the Constitution, our laws, and the truth.
Trump can only support history if it supports his views which are authoritarian, nationalist, and racist.
When Samuel Johnson said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” he was referring to men like Trump, not people who have an honest love of their country despite its flaws, and use that love to “build a more perfect Union,” and not promote division and hatred as Trump does every day.
I say damn his nationalism, damn his fraudulent patriotism, damn his racism, and damn any Executive Order that he promulgates on re-writing history to fit his warped world view, and damn anyone who mindlessly follows him into the dark and sulphuric abyss of his soul.
I can abide a lot that political leaders do, but to knowing lie about our history for his racist political gain I cannot ignore. Unlike West Germany which acknowledged its war guilt And even after reunification has continued to pursue, charge and try Nazi War Criminals, the United States only executed one Confederate War Criminal, the Commander of the Andersonville Prisoner of War Camp, a lowly Major, while allowing Confederates up to Vice President Alexander Stephens, to go unpunished and to be allowed to hold state and Federal offices which they abandoned to join the rebellion.
While I wish no harm to come to the President in this life, but I do pray that if God is just that Trump will be held accountable for all of his crimes, in and out of office. These include his infidelity to at least two wives, his other sexual assaults, affairs and infidelities; his numerous corporate bankruptcies that destroyed the lives of many of his employees and contractors; his multiple violations of the Hatch Act that prohibits any person holding Federal Office for using it for personal, financial, or political gain. The President is a yet to be convicted criminal, a serial liar, a serial adulterer, and an open, flagrant and unrepentant racist. I am sorry, if anyone claiming to be a Christian can support that, they have no right to call themself a follower of Christ.
As for me, I do not fear him. As the young Anti-Nazi German resistance leader Sophie Scholl said:
“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”
I won’t be among he millions who want to survive. I will resist, and I will embody what the German General Ludwig Beck said:
“It is a lack of character and insight, when a soldier in high command sees his duty and mission only in the context of his military orders without realizing that the highest responsibility is to the people of his country.”
And this:
“Final decisions about the nation’s existence are at stake here; history will incriminate these leaders with bloodguilt if they do not act in accordance with their specialist political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience reaches its limit when their knowledge, their conscience, and their responsibility forbid carrying out an order.”
This is were we are right now, but I am done for tonight but honestly I cannot imagine how anyone who considers themself a person of faith, especially a Christian can defend Trump’s actions and words as President. Now he and his cabinet, especially his attorney General are looking to using the police power of the government against any and all political opponents for the alleged crime of sedition.
As the German resister to Hitler, Henning Von Tresckow said: “I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.”
As a Christian, a historian, and Priest I am a furious adversary of the President who tramples all that I hold dear.
I say the same about Christians who support Trump, Cover up his perversion of the Christian faith and repeat the conspiracy theories of QAnon, which from an orthodox Christian perspective is nothing more than a Gnostic apocalyptic cult.
As for me, I will tell the truth. Despite threats of death and violence, that I receive on a regular basis, I will speak out. For me this is a matter of my oath to the Constitution, my vows as a Priest, and my commitment as a historian committed to telling the truth. So help me I will tell the truth. I can do no other if I am to remain faithful to the Constitution, my Oath, and my vows as a Priest.
Until tomorrow,
Peace,
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 