June 29, 2026
"At a time of fierce debate over how to teach American history, particularly around issues of race, the Freedom Trucks weigh in squarely on one side of the argument..."
"... telling a patriotic, positive story of core American values and exceptionalism. They stand in sharp contrast to liberal efforts in recent years — in classrooms, museums, national parks and media — to lift up discussion of systemic racism and highlight chapters where America has failed to live up to its ideals."
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57 comments:
More Commie-talk from the WaP00…
So the 'Trump-backed' moniker leads off the story to instruct the right-thinkers on how to interpret it. The dumbing-down of America, is that also covered in the revisionist stories? Say - did they mention who underwrites and 'backs' the version they apparently prefer? Or did it come directly from God, and is therefore exempted? Oops, forgot - no God.
History tells us that under Barack Obama, race relations were necessarily destroyed to aid in crafting a trickle down bullshit scheme to keep people fueled with rage. .
Begley's Axiom: The Left is never satisfied.
Sanitized? That's pure opinion.
Always great to get MORE history to give balance to bad history used for indoctrination and propaganda:
https://union.wisc.edu/about/land-acknowledgement
I've been giving friends copies of the Paul Johnson work History of the American People. A great antidote to leftist propaganda. Opinionated and informative.
Sanitized? Or accurate? They can't be less honest and they are probably more practical and meaningful than the parade of self-hatred we get from the left.
It would be nice if we could show the good and the bad in a more even-handed manner, and maybe some schools successfully do that, but where they do, it is in spite of, not because of, champions of truthiness like the Washington Post.
No subject has been more beaten to death during my life than racism. Nobody has anything new to say. I wish everybody would just shut up.
Paragraph 7 is where the sinner is revealed: Hillsdale College.
Paragraph 10 is where the truth starts getting a little light: 'Much of the content in the trucks is noncontroversial. There are panels about various battles during the Revolutionary War... '
But: How is this possible, when we're in 'a time of fierce debate over how to teach American history'?
Derrida on picking a side between Bin Laden and a failed West. The point is the last two sentences, the "even if" and :"even in," which is what the left is unable to do.
``What appears to me unacceptable in the ``strategy'' (in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so on) of the ``bin Laden effect'' is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the disrespect for the law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse _open onto no future and, in my view, have no future_. If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico-political scene, of the ``world'' itself, then there is, it seems to me, _nothing good_ to be hoped for from that quarter. What is being proposed, at least implicitly, is that all captialist and modern technoscientific forces be put in the service of an interpretation, itself dogmatic, of the Islamic revelation of the One. Nothing of what has been so laboriously secularized in even the nontheological form of sovereignty (...), none of this seems to have any place whatsoever in the discourse ``bin Laden.'' That is why, in this unleashing of violence without name, if I had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well I would. Despite my very strong reservations about the American, indeed European, political posture, about the ``international terrorist'' coalition, despite all the de facto betrayals, all the failures to live up to democracy, international law, and the very international institutions that the states of this ``coalition'' themselves founded and supported up to a certain point, I would take the side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the name of the ``political,'' democracy, international law, international institutions, and so forth. Even if this ``in the name of'' is still merely an assertion and a purely verbal comittment. Even in its most cynical mode, such an assertion still lets resonate within it an invincible promise. I don't hear any such promise coming from ``bin Laden,'' at least not one in this world.''
``Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides'' _Philosophy in a Time of Terror_ p.113
Oh noes! Not enough talk about identity politics and race!
"Several states have legislation restricting lessons on systemic racism." Where is this "systemic racism," actually?
Good because the race crap force fed into Ken Burns work is insufferable.
Meade said...
"Always great to get MORE history to give balance to bad history used for indoctrination and propaganda:
https://union.wisc.edu/about/land-acknowledgement"
Trivia from Wikipedia (yeah, I know):
Red Banks (Wisconsin) is the traditional homeland of the Hocąk Nation. It is situated on Green Bay, which the Hocągara called Te-rok, the "Within Lake". Lake Michigan as a whole was called Te-šišik, "Bad Lake", which may well have led the Algonquian peoples round about Lake Winnebago to call them "the people of the Bad Waters", or Winnibégo in Menominee.
I've heard "Winnebago" translated as "Stinking Waters," which is in line with how some tribes used derogatory names for their neighbors. Likewise, "Sioux" - the name "Sioux" is a shortened French corruption of Nadouessioux, which itself derives from Nadowe, an Ojibwe term meaning "little snakes" or "foreigners".
I give the Hocąk props for making the most of their exile and working hard to earn money to buy back their lands in Wisconsin. I read about it in a book called "Wau-Bun: The Early Day in the Northwest" by Mrs. John H. Kinzie, wife of the Indian Agency in Portage in the 1830s. Available in Project Gutenberg.
Rage fueled lie-buying Soros leftists only need bad news and negative history. They must fuel their rage non-stop. Like a drug addiction.
Addendum:
The Indians Were Right, and So Are We
"In Defense of the Right of Conquest"
- Publius Americus
"liberal efforts in recent years — in classrooms, museums, national parks and media — to ***lift up*** discussion of systemic racism and highlight chapters where America has failed to live up to its ideals."
"Lift up"?
It's seemed to me that the effort hasn't been to "lift up" the concept of systemic racism and how American ideals have not been met perfectly, but rather to *replace* any other possible motive or circumstance with a narrative that all things stem from systemic racism. Which is a theory of history (and not a well-supported one), just as much as "everything the US has ever done has been motivated solely by a burning desire for liberty."
Stupid. Simplistic. But it does serve the purposes of the left, to keep people unhappy, in their siloes, convinced that the present system is not only hopeless but actively malevolent, so that there's a groundswell of support for its replacement. The state, after all, must fall away... eventually.
Thanks, MTG!
rh inspired me to ask grok to write a rebuttal in the style of Derrida to the UW’s “land acknowledgement” sketch:
“ What presents itself under the title “the early years” already bears the trace of its other—the supplement of dispossession that both constitutes and exceeds the university’s claimed origin. The 1832 treaty, signed in the wake of war yet marked by the annuity as pharmakon (at once compensation and the mark of a violence that cannot be fully present), exposes the undecidability between “conquest & contract” that the page would stabilize into pure theft. Its “reckoning,” in restoring the absent Ho-Chunk to the center, reinscribes another hierarchy: presence of the victim versus the settler’s bad conscience, while marginalizing the demographic différance that kept Native enrollment negligible, the iterable legal trace of standard cessions and support provisions, and the supplementary arrival of women in 1863 that already troubles any simple story of exclusion. The Pipe of Peace ceremony, far from a stable parody, enacts the iterability of a romantic trace that both appropriates and is appropriated, revealing how the institution’s self-critique remains haunted by the very logocentrism it would deconstruct. Perhaps the future it invokes is not yet written precisely because every origin is already divided by its others.”
And then I fell down a “pharmakon” rabbit hole. Very interesting.
The Washington Post might want to find a better verb than "sanitize" for what they're objecting to. Anyone who is not fundamentally stupid or depraved thinks that sanitation and sanitary measures are good things, and that filth, sewage, infection, and all the other things they clean and confine and disinfect are very bad things. When it comes to clean vs. dirty and healthy vs. diseased, I know which side I'm on.
I have a feeling that we're going to be treated to a series of articles on the shame that decent Americans ought to be feeling, as we celebrate its 250th birthday. We shouldn't be celebrating, really. We should be doing a lot more apologizing, and giving back, especially to NGOs.
I read an article yesterday about Plum Island, MA, where residents have been told not to fly American flags because it might disrupt protected migratory birds. Apparently gay pride flags need not worry, since they are not mentioned.
Sanitized = anything that isn't race and slavery, all the time.
(Also, I look forward to throwing around in conversation the word “logocentrism” in coming days.)
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, thirty percent of the military aged males in France were either dead or disabled and a Bourbon was on the throne again. Some thirteen percent of the Ukrainian population starved to death during Stalin's collectivization "reforms". The people who look askance at our Revolution are the kind of people who were enthusiastic supporters of the French and Russian Revolutions......I would say that, by and large, the American Revolution turned out better than the Haitian Revolt. The Haitian Revolt was the only successful slave revolt in history, but the sad truth is that the slave owners in America were more successful in establishing a durable government than the formerly enslaved people of Haiti. That sucks, but that's the way history turned out..
“ Plum Island, MA, where residents have been told not to fly American flags because it might disrupt protected migratory birds. Apparently gay pride flags need not worry, since they are not mentioned.”
Any mention of “In this house we believe…” yard signs? Maybe I can leave up our Old Glory if I add an “In this Meadhouse we believe no protected migratory bird is an illegal protected migratory bird” sign.
Meade:
Some of us had Lincoln-logocentric childhoods. Did you? Very sanitary.
Let me guess--"sanitized" means anything other than the Gospel According to St. Howard of Zinn.
Sanitation is the bane of bullshitters.
You should notice something about all ideas and teaching of the Left: everything American is bad. Just on pure probabilities, that can't be accurate.
Does anyone want to bet on which happens first: !) the end of the United Sates, or
2) The end of using racism to make victims out of the most secure, and prosperous Africans that ever existed on Earth.
This year is the nation's birthday, so I think that celebrating the positive things about the country should be allowed as a part of the celebration.
What would you think of relatives who constantly came over and aired the family's dirty laundry at birthday parties?
If children are going to be taught different history than what parents learned don't that warrant remedial update classes for the parents for family harmony and welfare.?
And here’s the rub: lift up discussion of systemic racism and highlight chapters where America has failed to live up to its ideals
This is a highly sanitized way to describe what Progressives have done to history. They never teach and articulate America’s “ideals” in the first place so the curriculum is chock full of criticism and failures, even if they have to invent it.
What would you think of relatives who constantly came over and aired the family's dirty laundry at birthday parties?
I’d invite you to my family’s holidays and birthday parties but you wouldn’t want to go…
Two thoughts:
1. It seems highly impractical to cover every historical fact in a truck museum. And it doesn't seem to me to be a huge issue if the exhibits are celebratory, given that we're celebrating a major National Birthday. (I do think it would have been cool to acknowledge the achievement of female sufferage, since it was a major achievement for a substantial percentage of our population. However, I just can't get all lathered about it.)
2. There is a time when I do think there was too much whitewashing and insufficient coverage of some of our mistakes. However, that time is long past, albeit within. my lifetime. Unless the Left would like to be required to fully include "the other side," I think it's ridiculous to insist that their side's point of view (version of history) always be foremost.
Again, it's not even practical in this specific context!
Obviously, in an ideal world there would be balance all the way around. But that's simply not the way it is; we don't live in an ideal world. And the Left really has had the balance on its side, especially but not limited to our public schools and even more so at the college level, for decades now.
I think the outrage on the part of the Left is misplaced, exaggerated, and a too performative. I appreciate the Birthday Party analogy.
Regards,
Lori (reader_iam)
@Doc Weevil — Honest Abe reading the Holy Bible by fireplace light? You better believe it, brother! Abesolutely. .
In 1976 we had a whole Freedom Train. In 1876 there was a World's Fair. Things are going downhill.
Howard Zinn was an USA hating communist. I mean an honest to God member of CPUSA. His textbook is still being used in US classrooms. The WaPo/NYT/MSM only does this "We need to hear both sides" when someone tries to present the Pro-American side. When someone is pushing hate White Americans, Pro-left propaganda its not a problem. We don't get cries of "Where's the other side".
Every version of history has been edited or curated. 2020 was the year of "systemic racism." 2026 doesn't have to be. WaPo's version of American history isn't going away, but it doesn't have to be the focus all the time.
Given that Zinn was athiest Jewish Communist, mocking him as St. Howard probably stings.
BTW, why aren't we teaching "both sides" of the Holocaust? Or "Both sides" of the Civil rights movement. We only get "one side" and everyone seems to be fine with that.
Its only when someone wants to be Pro-American that we get cries for both sides. The USA education system should be teaching patriotism. And the values of Western Civilization. Teaching people to hate themselves and their Country is counter-productive.
Also in today's news:
"Plum Island Beach in Newburyport closed due to ongoing sewage discharge into Merrimack River"
Karma? Newburyport is an affluent, touristy old town, once home to Cabots and Lowells and novelist John P. Marquand. The last time I was up there they were protesting the nuclear power plant over the border in New Hampshire.
Sanitary napkins in the boys room so why not "sanitized" history in the Freedom Trucks?
“Sanitized”?? Without evidence? Perhaps people should adapt a 3 blind men and an elephant approach or Nietzsche’s perspectivism approach. The “other side” is sanitized as well.
“Sanitized For Your Protection”
After what we learned in 2020, don't we want everything sanitized?!
I've read that it was the Cold War of the 1950s that made so many refuse to consider the wrongs that had been done by the U.S.
Back in 1937, the Saturday Evening Post had no trouble publishing "The Devil and Daniel Webster" in which the wrongs to Indians and the enslaved are told: "He admitted all the wrong that had ever been done. But he showed how, out of the wrong and the right, the suffering and the starvations, something new had come. And everybody had played a part in it"
I hate to explain a joke, but a "Lincoln-logocentric" childhood is one spent building stuff with Lincoln Logs.
Democratic slavers. Native American colonists. Minority racists. Diversity writ large.
Masculinists, feminists, oh my.
National and Democratic Socialists, too.
A "burden" when they could afford its entertainment, often relieved in darkness.
“Lincoln Logs.“
Doh!
"(They are) telling a patriotic, positive story of core American values and exceptionalism."
Well, we can't have that, obviously.
The most important thing to teach about slavery is that most blacks in the U.S. today would not be here if the colonies and then the states didn’t have slavery.
They don’t qualify under the 1965 Immigration Act. The U.S. is picky when it comes to giving Africans green cards.
Psychedelicized!
Trump can make his Freedom Trucks but nothing is preventing someone on the left from making their own Doom Trucks. May the best trucks win!
DEIsm has a liberal legacy with progressive promulgations. #HateLovesAbortion
Where is this "systemic racism," actually?
Until quite recently, the only de jure racism left in America was called "affirmative action", disfavoring those of white and sometimes Asian ancestry. Now there is none, although the Left is working just as hard as rural Southern sheriffs and juries did in the 1950's and 60's to undermine the law.
What is important to remember about slavery in America is that we, the colonies, were last in line for the slave trade. Brazil, Cuba and the sugar producing Caribbean Island got the first pick and that was usually a death sentence. They would be worked to death in the cane fields. Or in the mines of Peru and Mexico.
The reason that we were last is that compared to other slave holding counties we were poor. A Slave cost a great deal and it was just good economy to take care of them.
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