Mandatory “Founding Documents”?

A bill before the South Carolina legislature would make teaching America’s “founding documents” a requirement at public colleges and universities.

This sounds like a great idea on the surface. After all, the progressive left continually works around the Constitution in order to advance their agenda.

The problem is, so does the neoconservative right.

And who would be teaching these “founding documents” which include the Federalist Papers and the Emancipation Proclamation?

That’s right. According to the conservative authors of the bill–and they are conservative–the (dubiously legal) Emancipation Proclamation from 1863 is a “founding document.”

Which founding? The actual founding of the United States or Lincoln’s recreation of America during the War?

This is where conservatives get caught in a very dangerous trap, and it makes their attempts at sanity both short sighted and worthless.

One of the authors of the bill argued that is was important because “An idea of liberty for all, that whole idea in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, those things are found in the Constitution. It flows, it goes together, it was meant to do that….”

Except it doesn’t and it never did.

This type of neoconservative rhetoric, even if supplemented by a discussion of federalism as the same representative later suggests, would augment, not combat, the 1619 Project’s laser beam focus on a “racist” and “usable” past.

Progressives at the 1619 Project would like you to believe in the “proposition nation” because if this is true, then the American founding was nothing but hypocrisy until the twentieth century at the earliest (and maybe not until 2008), a lie told by “white supremacists” who spoke out of both sides of their mouth.

That’s why Biden can run around saying recent voter laws are an attempt to bring back “Jim Crow.” Anything that might threaten “all mean are created equal” in any way, even if fabricated by political opportunists, is now putting blacks “back in chains” as he said just a few years ago.

It must also be asked who will be teaching this new mandated course? College and university political science history departments, the very same departments that constantly churn out courses on “gender studies,” “slavery and racism in American history,” “class conflict in modern society.” They are the progenitors of the 1619 Project’s garbage.

Do we want someone like Eric Foner or Stephanie McCurry teaching the Constitution? I don’t.

I don’t even want them teaching American history, but Karl Rove called Foner one of his favorite historians. You can see why neoconservatives are so bad.

I discuss the bill and what it means for “conservatism” in Episode 425 of The Brion McClanahan Show.


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