8 “Patriotic Education”

The matter of the need for Patriotic Education really starts into motion after the 1619 Project which was published as and intended to be supplementary materials to e used in education institutions. The Project was done by investigative journalists and researchers with substantive credentials in the sciences & humanities. The Project sought to put more emphasis on the early history of slavery --- first load of slaves brought in 1619 to the shores of what would become America after the 1776 Revolution, and the formation of America with the 1787 Constitution. 

1619 Project Became Contentious

Notably, in providing the material intended as supplementary, the 1619 Project lays clear that the Constitution never specifically dealt with the unethical practice of owning other people as property, as in slavery. Another way to say it, while the Constitution is an empathy-with the other document, as everyone was presumed endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights, empathy-with was reserved mainly for white men who were the property owners.

1776 Commission (Project)  Even more Contentious

The MAGA New Right would not stand for the frame put forward in the 1619 Project.  To counter it, alternative stories --- many with questionable attention to serious and systematic inquiry using science and humanities --- about the history of slavery were put into a document created by an entity of right-wing conservatives known as the 1776  Commission.  The Commission document claimed the Constitution was more than adequate to the task to eventually frame the elimination of slavery, and, nothing more needed to be said about it.

Patriotic Education Re-Oriented to MAGA Right Wing “Education”

The next step was the push for that MAGA New Right framed, supposedly Patriotic Education.  Christopher Rufo played an especially key role, in claiming without empirical evidence that Critical Race Theory (CRT) was all ideology and had no empirical (science &  humanities based inquiry) foundations.  Also, it was claimed that CRT was being widely used, and taught in the schools and universities, to the detriment of America, and especially to white men who were always going to do the right thing and eliminate slavery.  The story quickly turns to why the Civil War was really a Lost Cause to be celebrated in favor of the slaveholders, and how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was totally unnecessary. 

Such claims are to compose the Patriotic Education to be applied in all schools and universities. The reality based in serious and systematic inquiry searching for the empirical facts using science and humanities is to be replaced by the cargo-cult (make-believe) stories weaved by the 1776 Commission, including the cargo-cult claim that CRT has no empirical validity. In effect, the MAGA New Right carried out an assault on free speech in America by imposing 1776 Commission cargo-cult (make-believe) conjecture on schools and universities, and government agencies, throughout the country.

Claremonters were especially vocal, along with other right-wing outlets.  And, why?  Well, more empirical research is needed in asking the questions as Field (2025, p. 171) points to:  “What was it about the 1619 Project that upset the New Right so deeply and made them respond so irrationally? Was it all just pent-up racism and white supremacy? I am sympathetic to the idea that a good deal of it was.”   Empirical questions, all.  And, unfortunately, the assault on the 1619 Project which was developed by many with traditional university affiliations led to an assault on American Universities for all manner of reasons, none of which had much in the matter of empirical reality.

Universities Under Assault Like Was Socrates: Don’t Ask Hard Questions

And, in many ways, it is really just very old news. As Field (2025, p. 174) says it:  “To put this in more Straussian (or Platonic, or Aristophanic) language: There are reasons why Socrates was seen as a destabilizing force in ancient Athens; too much critical thinking threatens to corrupt the youth and destroy the city.”  The MAGA New Right prefers beliefs in ideas that suite the New Right and not for the youth to be stirred to question what the New Right believes.  It also assures that Progressivism is not to play any role in the thinking, as in such things as Progressives drove the elimination of slavery, and, in later years, Progressive things like (Field 2025, p. 183) “ school busing, affirmative action, or same-sex marriage legislation—in fact constitute ‘reverse racism’.”  The Conservative just makes it up for purpose.

Frame is all Progressive Movements Forward are to be Reversed

As Field (2025, p.   ) sums it up:  “The New Right mode of understanding puts a theoretical vice grip on the past. It looks back at historical reality—which, like the present, is always fluid, dynamic, and difficult to navigate—and allows there, post-hoc, to only be one ‘right’ way through. Anything else—from the New Deal, to the civil rights movement, to Obamacare, to “wokeism”—is taken as a source of instability and grave injustice. For the Claremonters, almost everything is also taken as a grave departure from the founders’ intentions.

It’s a matter of applying impossible abstract standards, and discounting the real-world problems that historical figures were contending with…”  like the reality of slavery and the Jim Crow years that followed.  Insularity around such cargo-cult stories are perpetuated with an assault on University inquiry (like cutting research funding to drive the New Right agenda) focused on using the scientific method in rigorous tests of null hypotheses, which is a process abhorred by the New Right.