President calls for “patriotic education”
WASHINGTON » President Donald Trump escalated his attacks on “left- wing demonstrators” and “farleft mobs” Thursday, portraying himself as a defender of American heritage against revolutionary fanatics and arguing for a new “pro- American” curriculum in the nation’s schools.
Speaking at the National Archives Museum, Trump vowed to counter what he called an emerging classroom narrative that “America is a wicked and racist nation,” and he said he would create a new “1776 Commission” to help “restore patriotic education to our schools.”
The president reiterated his condemnations of demonstrators who tear down monuments to historical American figures, and he even sought to link the Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, to the removal of a Founding Father’s statue in Biden’s home state, Delaware.
“Our heroes will never be forgotten,” Trump said. “Our youth will be taught to love America.”
Since the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, in police custody in May in Minneapolis, and the protests that followed nationwide, the president has seized on cultural issues and has sounded many of the same themes — notably including at a showy Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore.
Since then, his vision of a Democratic Party hijacked by anti- American Marxists has become a core theme of his campaign. But he elevated the concepts Thursday by delivering them in the august setting of the National Archives Museum, standing before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in what was billed as the first “White House Conference on American History.”
The event was held on Constitution Day, the anniversary of the document’s signing in 1787. Trump said it reflected “centuries of tradition, wisdom and experience.”
“Yet as we gather this afternoon, a radical movement is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance,” he added.
The president focused much of his speech on his claim that American schools have become infected with revisionist ideas about the nation’s founding and history, producing a new generation of “Marxist” activists and adherents of “critical race theory” who believe American society to be fundamentally racist and wicked — and who have taken to the streets in recent months.
Trump said “left- wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left- wing indoctrination in our schools,” adding that “it’s gone on far too long.”
Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University, said conservatives have long been angry at what they see as a growing emphasis in American public schools on themes of civil rights at the expense of more traditional historical narratives, mainly those revolving around white men.