President Trump’s recent Executive Order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” is extremely significant not only in terms of the practical steps that the current administration plans to undertake but also symbolically and morally.
The Executive Order states:
Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.
The nearly ubiquitous explosion of DEI, CRT, ESG, and other revisionist sentiments and policies that we have witnessed over the past 15 years is the culmination of decades-long communist, Marxist, and anti-Western propaganda that has become the predominant narrative in our education, media, and culture in general.
This narrative has one purpose—to weaken and destroy our country as well as Western civilization. It relies on a toxic combination of ignorance and self-doubt by disseminating half-truths and outright lies and shaming innocent young minds into believing the worst about their nation and heritage.
The very study of history as a coherent and inspiring story of noteworthy events that have shaped a people’s consciousness has been replaced by the vague field of “social studies,” which provides an excuse for cherry-picking factoids to blindly discredit the past.
A wise person once said that “a family, as well as a state, are destroyed from within”—and so the pervasive anti-American indoctrination that has been bombarding our children, practically since infancy, has been unsurpassed in its self-eroding and demoralizing effects.
Of course, a meaningful historical education that imparts good values should not be devoid of self-criticism, nor should it omit a civilization’s serious errors. In the Introduction to his balanced and judicious history of the United States, Wilfred McClay explains:
[History] is not the sum of the whole past…. Instead, it is a selection out of that expansive river of the past, like a carefully cropped photograph, organized wisely and truthfully, which allows us to focus in with clarity on a particular story, with particular objects in mind[:]…to help us learn, above all else, the things we must know to become informed, self-aware, and dedicated citizens of the United States of America, capable of understanding and appreciating the nation in the midst of which we find ourselves, of carrying out our duties as citizens, including protecting and defending what is best in its institutions and ideals. The goal, in short, is to help us be full members of the society of which we are already a part. (emphasis mine)
A key phrase in the above statement is that the story a historian tells must be “organized wisely and truthfully.” This is the key difference between the narrative promoted by the anti-Western left and the traditional study of history that is part of a classical liberal arts curriculum, for example.
Everyone has a system of values and an ideology, but there are fundamental differences between the ideology pushed by the left and the values present in the traditional study of Western civilization. Leftist ideologues are driven by the goal of destructive criticism at any cost; they do not care about objective truth, as admitted time and again by Marxist scholars and as revealed by the shocking lack of objectivity in leftist media. This lack of objectivity has reached unparalleled heights in the past decade or so, reminding us of the witty aphorism, likely misattributed to Mark Twain, that those who don’t read the newspaper are uninformed, while those who do read it are misinformed.
Traditional historians of the United States may also have a system of beliefs in demonstrating the advantages of Western values. Unlike their leftist counterparts, however, they must be profoundly knowledgeable and truthful about the facts, as the values they espouse are rooted in objective truth and the education they promote provides not a superficial anachronistic rejection of the past but a deep understanding of the world and the cultural specifics of various epochs.
Good historians must possess a superb knowledge of the events they describe as well as correctly interpret the context in which they have occurred. In Chapter One of her fascinating memoir titled Ten Years to Save the West, Liz Truss remarks:
The scientific, industrial, and technological advances that made the West and now most of the world prosperous are turned into parables on the evils of capitalism and racism. This repudiation of the Enlightenment is astonishingly self-defeating. There is a distinct air of self-loathing about it that is characteristic of the left.The most pernicious part of this ideology is the suggestion that in the modern world, there is no need for our children to be taught facts. After all, they can look things up on the Internet….[Children] need to be taught the basics, warts and all, without having the facts conditioned and censored by left-wing ideology….[W]e need to rediscover the basis of a classical education: the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Under this curriculum, students are first taught the facts (grammar), before learning how to analyse them critically (logic), and then they acquire the skills to craft and present a convincing argument (rhetoric). This approach does far more to encourage their intellectual and creative development than bombarding them with precooked ideological interpretations from the very beginning of their schooldays.
The Executive Order on restoring truth and sanity to American history is a long-overdue official endorsement of a noble, yet fierce battle for reversing decades’ worth of spiritual damage and moral rot that the anti-Western indoctrination has caused. It is a battle for restoring our society’s existential hope as well as an enlightened sense of patriotic awareness.
Winning this battle is a task that we need to accomplish time and time again, in each generation, since, in Reagan’s immortal words, “freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”
We need to keep winning this battle by continually exposing and marginalizing the toxic falsehoods and ill intent of destructive anti-Western propaganda. Marxist and anti-American historians know only too well that he “who controls the past controls the future,” and he “who controls the present controls the past,” as Orwell warned in 1984. Reclaiming and spreading a truthful and meaningful historical education that emphasizes our foundational ideals and enduring values is the most crucial step in the long-term struggle for saving America and the West.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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