Trump’s 1776 Commission Rebukes Attacks on National Archives

AMAC Exclusive – By Pat Conroy

On the occasion of Constitution Day and the one-year anniversary of President Trump’s speech at the National Archives announcing the establishment of the 1776 Commission, members of that Commission issued a statement Friday responding to woke attacks on the National Archives building in Washington, DC.

The National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), a government agency tasked with caring for our country’s historical government records, recently published an internal document put together by its task force on racism.  The report identified problems with “systematic racism” and “equity” inside the Archives. NARA’s report recommended employing “trigger warnings” to “forewarn audiences of content that may cause intense physiological and psychological symptoms.” And just what was that dangerous content? The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. 

The 1776 Commission’s statement eviscerated the absurdity of this move by highlighting actual history. “In a 1952 address at the National Archives dedicating the new shrine for the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, President Harry Truman predicted that our liberty would be lost, ‘if the time ever comes when these documents are regarded not as the supreme expression of our profound belief, but merely as curiosities in glass cases,’” the statement recounts. “Much more quickly will our liberty be lost if the current dishonest narrative that condemns the Archives and the documents it houses as racist succeeds in taking root.”

When Trump established the 1776 Commission last year to help “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history”, he explained that the proliferation of radical ideologies in nearly every American institution is what impelled him to take action: “Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character,” President Trump said. “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country.” Ultimately, Trump explained, it comes down to ensuring that future generations are taught to love their country for its many triumphs and learn from its failures: “We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. To grow up in America is to live in a land where anything is possible… all because of the immortal principles our nation’s founders inscribed nearly two and a half centuries ago.”

Unfortunately, however, his successor Joe Biden would not allow that commonsense initiative to continue. In a revealing display of the Democratic Party’s central focus on rewriting the narrative of American history, President Biden disbanded the 1776 Commission within the first hours after taking his oath of office. “I’m rescinding the previous administration’s harmful ban on diversity and sensitivity training and abolishing the offensive, counterfactual 1776 commission,” President Biden said. “Unity and healing must begin with understanding and truth, not ignorance and lies.”

In its statement Friday lauding the 234^th anniversary of our Constitution, the 1776 Commission argued that “the signing of the Constitution began the fulfillment of the promise made in the Declaration of Independence” and that the Constitution “paved the way for the liberation of many millions, in the United States and around the world, from the shackles of poverty, despotism, and slavery.”

In ordinary times, it would seem unnecessary for private citizens to have to explain in clear terms what a day of such national importance as Constitution Day truly means – but, as anyone who has been keeping up with the news knows, these are not ordinary times. As the 1776 Commission statement illustrates in its defense of our National Archives, “powerful forces today are seeking to smear America’s founding as essentially unjust.” The statement continues: “[i]ronically, the efforts of the 1776 Commission to strengthen the common bonds that unite Americans… have been attacked by the same forces in our society that are working to legitimize a system of widespread discrimination based on an extraordinary claim that every realm of public life in America is systemically racist.” 

American leaders were once united in their celebration of America’s founding. President Truman, a Democrat, understood the importance of preserving a factual, patriotic account of American history as his speech at the Archives showed. The last two Democrat presidents also eschewed the radical anti-American beliefs being embraced today by President Biden and the new Democrat Party.  In his inaugural address, President Clinton spoke about the limitless potential of America, no matter its flaws: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

Even the president whom Biden served under as Vice President once explicitly rejected the notion that America is irredeemably racist. While coming under heavy fire for his ties to the inflammatory pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, then-candidate Barack Obama arguably saved his campaign by repudiating Wright’s anti-American sentiment. “But I have asserted a firm conviction — a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people — that, working together, we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union,” Obama said. Yet, Democrats today – and perhaps even Obama himself — no longer have use for those beliefs in America expressed in 2008 by the man they once treated as a political deity, and the health of our democracy is dramatically suffering as a result.

The willingness of the Biden administration to tolerate and, in some cases, encourage the type of perversion of American history the 1776 Commission has identified helps to underscore the sense of urgency for Americans to publicly reject these corrupt teachings.

With each passing day it is becoming abundantly clear that for Biden and the Democrats, there can be no unity or healing that they call for without the existence of taxpayer-funded radical indoctrination permeating every institution in America. From big tech companies to the United States Armed Forces, mandatory “diversity and sensitivity” training — which essentially amounts to discrimination against certain people deemed “oppressors” solely because of their race, — and other CRT-inspired programming are becoming commonplace.  

Regardless of political affiliation, Americans must be able to unite around the shared principles that have defined and sustained our self-governing republic from that miraculous day in Philadelphia 244 years ago all the way to the present. The observance of Constitution Day reminds us that a citizenry who understands and respects the true history of America is one that will carry proudly forward the torch of liberty and equality for generations to come.

Pat Conroy is the pen name of a Washington, D.C.-based political strategist.