“Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future… history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage.”
– George Orwell, 1984
The necessity to the regime of re-writing history to suit itself explains the vehemence of the “history wars”. With the left almost completely dominating history faculties by 33.5:1, the teaching of history is being skewed entirely to suit a left-wing narrative. Consider, for instance, New Zealand’s bowdlerised history curriculum, or Australian schools that teach Bruce Pascoe’s risible fantasies as historical fact.
Or teachers’ union bosses who tell ludicrous lies about American history.
Conservatives bombarded teachers’ union boss Randi Weingarten for her tweet about slavery in America on Wednesday, accusing her of butchering history.
Weingarten’s tweet insisted that America’s founding fathers didn’t question the morality of slavery when forming the nation, saying, “If America’s founders questioned slavery there would not have been the heinous ‘3/5 compromise’ in the US Constitution.”
“I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of [slavery].”
George Washington
Like teachers peddling Bruce Pascoe’s ludicrous fictions, Weingarten is trying, and failing, to defend bad “history”. Namely, the widely debunked taradiddle that is The 1619 Project.
Weingarten wrote her tweet to debunk a recent claim from Gov Ron DeSantis, R-Fla. Last week, he bashed Critical Race Theory indoctrination in public schools, namely “The 1619 Project,” the collection of essays asserting that the nation was founded to protect the institution of slavery.
In a video, the governor claimed, “They want to teach our kids that the [American] Revolution was fought to protect slavery and that’s false.” He also stated, “It was the American Revolution that caused people to question slavery. No one had questioned it before we decided as Americans that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights.”
Weingarten provided her own supposed fact-check of DeSantis’ claims, tweeting, “The American Revolution was about leaving Britain.”
Spot the straw-man? DeSantis never said it wasn’t, or claimed that it was about abolishing slavery. What he said – absolutely correctly – was that it was their own rhetoric and experiences in the war that led the Founding Fathers to question what they’d previously taken for granted. Men like Washington and Jefferson acknowledged that they couldn’t talk about being “slaves” to the British, when they owned slaves themselves.
Jefferson condemned slavery in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence. Washington wrote, “Among my first wishes [is] to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this Country may be abolished.”
Weingarten specifically, and inaccurately, tried to cite the “Three-Fifths Compromise” of the Constitution. The Three-Fifths Compromise essentially counted slave populations of states at three-fifths of free populations. This was a compromise between those who wanted slaves counted as full citizens (without voting rights), which would have given slave-owning states enormously outsized influence, and those who didn’t want them counted at all, which would have diminished the power of slave states.
National Review reporter Isaac Schorr asked, “@rweingarten, do you think it was the pro or anti-slavery advocates at the constitutional convention who wanted slaves to count as a full citizen for representation purposes? This is basic history.”
Nate Madden, the communications director for Rep Chip Roy, R-Texas, tweeted, “… if nobody was questioning it, why was it a ‘compromise’? Read Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the declaration and get back to me. ‘Basic history.’ The teachers unions are not sending us their best and brightest…”
Conservative journalist Kyle Becker wrote, “It’s downright scary how historically illiterate these teacher’s union hacks are – and they teach children!” […]
Texas GOP chair Matt Rinaldi pointed out, “The head of the teachers’ union having zero understanding of history explains a lot about the state of our public schools.”
Fox News
And that, apparently, is just how the teachers’ unions want it.
It’s not for nothing that they’re one of the Top 20 organisational donors to the Democrats. The American Federation of Teachers donated over $15 million to the Democrats last year. Oh, they donated to Republicans, too, though: $20.
Not $20 million. $20.
