Sabotaging America: Public Schools and the News Media

The President’s July 3rd speech at Mt. Rushmore should be required reading for every grade school and high school student. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. If you dislike Trump’s personality and/or manner of speaking, don’t watch the video, just read the transcript. It only takes about 15 minutes – https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-south-dakotas-2020-mount-rushmore-fireworks-celebration-keystone-south-dakota/.

This speech has the patriotic tone that is emblematic of the national pride that news reporting, school history curriculums, and political campaigning demonstrated a generation ago. In addition, it showcases what is entirely missing from all those same institutions today. It is a reminder of how good we can feel and should feel about our country and our heroes. It evokes a sense of accomplishment, imagination, and pride that transcends racial and ethnic lines. It inspires us to improve and evolve.

The enormity of achievement articulated in this speech is so far beyond anything being accomplished today by BLM protestors and their political, corporate, and media supporters, no comparison can be made. The fact that this group of agitators and their sponsors don’t realize how insignificant they are in comparison to the four people carved into Mount Rushmore, plus all the other American icons the President mentioned, is tragic. Here is a line from the speech which succinctly makes this point by recounting just a few of Lincoln’s accomplishments –

“Lincoln won the Civil War; he issued the Emancipation Proclamation; he led the passage of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery for all time and ultimately, his determination to preserve our nation and our union cost him his life”.

These are monumental achievements. The vandalism, violence and maleducated malice being wrought by BLM today as they occupy city blocks and exhort their followers is barbarous and primitive by comparison.

Today’s rioters and anarchists are carriers of an anti-American virus, a virulent and toxic disease they are trying to spread via destruction and intimidation. However, they are not the source of the illness. The source that incubated this sickness, beyond any doubt in our minds, is the public education system in this country. Allowing the public school system to become a crucible for anti-American sentiment has been the biggest failure of our federal government. There is a lamentably false view of America’s past being dogmatically injected into the civics curriculum and bleeding into other subjects as well. Witness the fact that 3500 public schools are adopting, and will teach as historical fact, the screed of the 1619 Project¹. Of all the things the education system in any country needs to get right, it is teaching the history, culture, and traditions of the homeland. In the United States, that includes how and why our country came to be, and who the people were that envisioned and constructed our unique form of government. For a country as young as ours relative to most European Countries, that history is well documented right from the start. While there is, and will likely always be, debate as to how small details are recounted and interpreted, there is only one factual account of that history. This is not a science fiction episode where a time traveler can alter past events and cause a different timeline of history to unfold.

The public education system now teaches children that our history, and the motivating forces that drove it, are diametrically opposed to what has been taught for over 200 years. Progressively biased educators are trying to re-write and retroactively mold our history so it either conforms with present day morality and sensitivities or is rejected utterly. The minds of these teachers are too weak to explain that achievements of the past, in the context within which they occurred, are not to be devalued as our collective moral character continues to evolve for the better. Instead, these educators are trying to destroy the record of our history, just because they don’t like it. This is an endeavor born of their arrogance and mediocrity. As the President said in his speech “…Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children…”

The news media reaction to the Mount Rushmore speech was also fascinating. Most of the reporters appear to have written their commentary before the speech was even presented or the transcript released. They criticized words and themes that were not anywhere to be found in the transcript. Here is just one example from the Washington Post – “President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus.”

What “Confederate symbols”? In no universe would any of the men on Mount Rushmore ever be considered a member of the Confederacy. The words Confederate or Confederacy are not mentioned anywhere in the speech. One of three things are possible here:

1. In order to be the first with the “scoop” on the speech, some news outlets pre-wrote their analysis based on a summary statement or bullet points released about the speech ahead of time. They filled in the gaps with what they assumed the President would say, and then just waited for the speech to be over before hitting the “publish” button. This is sloppy and reprehensible.
2. It didn’t matter what was in the speech, the media outlets had already coordinated a response among themselves that would be consistent in its criticism of Trump. In this line of thinking, the “news” from this event would not be the actual content of the speech, but rather the overwhelmingly universal damnation of the speech by the news media. This is pure phony propagandizing.
3. The speech was so superbly written, the news media could not come up with any legitimate criticisms. Since it has become verboten to praise anything Trump says, they created a false reality that had nothing to do with the actual content of the speech and then reported “news” on that false reality. In their commentary, not only did they fabricate words and topics that were not present in the speech, they went out of their way to cast the event as negative and disruptive to “cancel” any positive energy or pride the speech might inspire. This is mendacity or psychosis, or both.

To us, the news reports on this speech were the final nails in the coffin of forthright political reporting from the major news media companies in this country. This includes Fox News. We realize that because the election is near, there is going to be lots of exaggeration and hyperbole in the news these days. However, the media falsehoods regarding the Mount Rushmore speech are beyond the pale. This misrepresentation is different in character than what exists in the normal tit-for-tat mudslinging with President Trump. This time, the media went out of their way to demonize heroes of our history, and along with them the foundations of the country. They have fully sided with the anarchists and are now actively perpetuating, rather than reporting, anti-American, white-supremacist, and racist bigotry throughout the country. We are guessing that the goal of this effort is to try to make the public believe that it is Donald Trump, not the media, who is trashing our country by hopelessly swimming upstream against the strong currents of a righteous and valid culture shift. The gamble of course is that the media believes that they, not the President, have the more powerful mechanism for delivering their message, and that their negative message resonates more deeply than the positive tone of the President’s.

The willingness to entirely abandon patriotism in any form is expected from the BLM protestors, but we didn’t think the major media would follow so gleefully, slavishly and completely in their anti-American footsteps. At the very least, we thought that as a practical matter the marketing and accounting folks of the news organizations would have raised some red flags on this one. Alienating a huge portion of their audience who are patriotic and love our country could depress their revenue. More importantly, trashing our country’s history is arousing a powerful guardian response in those patriotic Americans. The potential calamitous consequences of recklessly inciting a full-fledged culture war are frightening.

The major news media has been degenerating towards depravity for some time. Now they and the public school system have become contemptible saboteurs of the United States and its history.

¹ For our analysis of the 1619 Project, see this prior post –  Weaponizing the sin of Slavery.