Trump continues to try to shift the news cycle away from his 200,000 COVID-19 deaths with all new fascist outrages on a near-daily basis, and today is no exception.
President Donald Trump is continuing to wage battle against interpretations of history which he claims are un-American.
In a Sunday morning tweet, the President said the US Department of Education would investigate whether California schools are using the New York Times' "1619 Project" in public school curriculum. The Pulitzer-Prize winning collection reframes American history around the date of August 1619, when the first slave ship arrived on America's shores.
"Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!" he wrote on Twitter, citing a message from an unverified account saying it was being taught in schools there.
The message came after the President on Friday night banned federal agencies from conducting racial sensitivity training related to "white privilege" and "critical race theory."
Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, instructed heads of federal agencies to dramatically alter racial sensitivity training programs for employees, deeming them "un-American propaganda" in a two-page memo.
Like that memo, it's unclear the extent of the phenomenon the President is identifying. Some schools have said they will adopt the 1619 Project into their lessons -- though how many isn't known.
The 1619 Project was launched by the New York Times Magazine last year. After the launch, the Pulitzer Center was named an education partner for the project and announced its education team would develop educational resources and curricula for teachers to use. The 1619 Project curriculum is available online for free through the center.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican, has introduced legislation that would prevent schools from teaching the curriculum. The legislation, titled the Saving American History Act of 2020, "would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts. Schools that teach the 1619 Project would also be ineligible for federal professional-development grants."
The legislation appears unlikely to gain any significant traction in the Senate but stands as a way for Cotton to send a message.
The moves follow a pattern by the President of disparaging attempts to process or reckon with the country's fraught racial history. In his convention acceptance speech, the President said "Americans are exhausted, trying to keep up with the latest lists of approved words and phrases, and the ever more restrictive political decrees. Many things have a different name now, and the rules are constantly changing."
"We want our sons and daughters to know the truth," Trump went on. "America is the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Our country wasn't built by cancel culture, speech codes, and crushing conformity. We are not a nation of timid spirits."
America was built, quite literally, by slave labor, and then by indentured servitude for freed slaves and Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and then by poor Irish, Scots, Romani and Italian laborers who formed unions because they were white, and then by unions who were shattered and bloodied by corruption and strikebreaking, and then by machines that replaced the labor.
That's besides the point though, which is that Trump is threatening defunding and censorship made patently illegal by a host of US laws and the Constitution. He can't actually do anything, but he can continue a culture war to anger his followers and motivate them towards hatred in time for the election season as it gets under way for real this week.
All this is a problem, but it's a petty distraction while Trump is proclaiming he is the final arbiter of truth in America, it's a distraction from Trump's chosen path of genocidal neglect from COVID-19 deaths.
Keep that in mind.
Also vote early.
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