The USA 1776 report

[Ian Geary]

Some Facebook criticism of this prompted me to look this up and read it.

Thoughts:

1) it was surprisingly hard to find. Given that slightly rude things posted decades ago come back to haunt people with regularity, something that is 4 days old has all but vanished. Had to click through several links to get it without signing up to anything, though incredibly easy to find articles deriding it. Wikipedia had several of these, but no link to it at all (surprised not surprised)

2) it's mostly waffle

3) it argues identity politics is bad, because it "divides" (Ignores the pre existing division fueling identity politics

4) it argues affermative action is racist, as it treats people unequally, in contradiction of the constitution. (Ignores the huge pre existing problem of people being treated unequally that hasn't been dealt with at all well)

5) it condemns teachers and administrators bringing politics into the classroom (presume that doesn't cover the politics of the report authors)

6) the report author doesn't like colleges very much

7) tries to claim the USA lead the way in abolishing slavery, which I think a lot of British people might question

All in all, as a piece of PR it seems to have some very obvious blind spots.

Some ideas in there I would have no problem with: teaching a balanced history, rule of law, strength of family, secular state etc. But these fit most democracies so hardly contravertial.

I do think "Patriot" is going to become the new dirty word in the USA though, so hopefully Jo can try and unite them again.

Edit: I found it for download here https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7...

Edited by Ian Geary on Friday 22 January 20:45

[Derek Smith]

Ian Geary said:

Some Facebook criticism of this prompted me to look this up and read it.

Thoughts:

1) it was surprisingly hard to find. Given that slightly rude things posted decades ago come back to haunt people with regularity, something that is 4 days old has all but vanished. Had to click through several links to get it without signing up to anything, though incredibly easy to find articles deriding it. Wikipedia had several of these, but no link to it at all (surprised not surprised)

2) it's mostly waffle

3) it argues identity politics is bad, because it "divides" (Ignores the pre existing division fueling identity politics

4) it argues affermative action is racist, as it treats people unequally, in contradiction of the constitution. (Ignores the huge pre existing problem of people being treated unequally that hasn't been dealt with at all well)

5) it condemns teachers and administrators bringing politics into the classroom (presume that doesn't cover the politics of the report authors)

6) the report author doesn't like colleges very much

7) tries to claim the USA lead the way in abolishing slavery, which I think a lot of British people might question

All in all, as a piece of PR it seems to have some very obvious blind spots.

Some ideas in there I would have no problem with: teaching a balanced history, rule of law, strength of family, secular state etc. But these fit most democracies so hardly contravertial.

I do think "Patriot" is going to become the new dirty word in the USA though, so hopefully Jo can try and unite them again.

Wasn't this on the official Capitol website under Trump? I remember reading, on one of the links on the Trump thread, some GOP/QAnon/Capitol invader criticised Biden for removing it as 'the first thing they did.'