Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo) and several GOP colleagues have reintroduced the Saving American History Act. Rep. Rick Allen (R-Ga.) co-sponsored the bill in the House, and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced it in the Senate.
The controversial premise behind the 1619 Project is that America’s founding deserves to be pegged to that very year, when black slaves first arrived in America, because the purpose of the Founders, and their very first documents and laws, was to build a new nation around owning and using slaves. That claim was denounced by critics as a made-up premise starving for evidence, and over time the Project was ripped by respected historians both liberal and conservative for making false or misleading claims about American history.
Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led the 1619 Project and won a Pulitzer for her employer, eventually claimed the multi-part series was missing “important context.”
Despite the controversy, the Times moved quickly to get the 1619 Project into school classrooms, where it was welcomed by liberal school leaders as an important and missing piece of American history.
"The 1619 Project aims to indoctrinate our students into believing that America is an evil country, and there is no room for that in our classrooms," Rep. Allen said in a statement. "We must teach our young folks to learn from our nation’s past in order to form a more perfect union. Teaching revisionist history and promoting divisive ideology will not move our nation forward.”
Rep. Buck’s legislation barely got noticed last year but it is hitting Capitol Hill at the same time the American public is debating and discussing the roles and goals of “anti-racism” training in schools, in corporate cubicles such as at Coca-Cola, and now in the U.S. armed forces, too.
In a Twitter post that published today, June 15, Sen. Cotton said “hundreds” of whistleblower complaints have poured in from military personnel who have been subjected to the anti-white critical race theory.
“The problem is real – and worse than we thought,” the senator, a U.S. Army veteran, added.
Sen. Cotton’s reference to complaints likely refers to a website portal, launched in late May, that allows informants to submit their personal stories without punishment.
The website was launched with help from Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), the former Navy SEAL who vowed Republicans “won’t let our military fail to woke ideology.”
Reacting to the Saving American History bill, talk show host Richard Randall tells One News Now the motive behind far-left revisionist history is not to fill the gaps about difficult periods. It is a blatant attempt by Communist-inspired academics to divide us by race instead of by class.
“If you look at our history, our history is a progression and improvements, and making this country better,” he says. “It isn't standing here and looking back at all of our mistakes, and saying that all of our mistakes are America.”