Guerrilla History - From the Archives - The 1776 Report

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

Guerrilla History "From the Archives" is a new series of episodes, consisting of previously patreon-exclusive episodes that we are unlocking for the general public after one year.  This From the Archives episode was originally released on Patreon on January 29, 2021, and is about the (at the time) recently released, ahistorical 1776 Report by the sham 1776 Commission.  Join us as we rant about this report and talk about its potential impact.  The report itself can be viewed here. You can support Guerrilla History by joining us at patreon.com/guerrillahistory, where you will also get bonus content!

Hello, guerrilla history listeners. This is Adnan Hussein, one of the co-hosts of guerrilla history. Every month, as you know, we record a reconnaissance report, a major episode with a guest about their historical work, as well as an intelligence briefing, a shorter discussion, usually among the three of us. Occasionally, we also post a dispatch from the field of contemporary left history, often with a guest about a breaking story or a recent set of events or issues, and provide some historical analysis. We also typically record a second intelligence briefing as an exclusive episode for patrons, subscribers at patreon.com slash gorilla history.

We have decided to unlock an intelligence briefing each month after a year has passed as special from the archive episodes for you to enjoy. We hope you'll find these a useful resource. Of course, if you'd like to subscribe and have early access to intelligence, and all the other additional content like readings and discussions of classic texts, primary sources, reviews and discussions, do become a patron at patreon.com slash gorilla history with our gratitude. We do this because we love to make history a resource in our political education as an activist global left and in our struggles for justice. So we're happy to share

these older episodes with you in this series from the archive. As ever, Solidarity. You remember Den Van Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to a guerrilla history intelligence briefing.

For those of you who don't remember, intelligence briefings are our bonus episodes that we produce for Patreon. Half go out on a delay to our general feed, and the other half, like this episode, will remain Patreon exclusive. So the only way that you'll ever hear this episode is by being on our Patreon. So if you know other folks that would enjoy this sort of content, encourage them to join our Patreon, their contributions are going to be what make the show able to succeed and continue into the future. In any case, I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki. I'm joined by my co-hosts, Professor

Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. Great to be with you, Henry. It's nice to see you, as always. And I'm also joined by Brett O'Shea, a host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brow. has the snow stopped falling there where you are? Weirdly, no. Last night we got another inch or so it keeps coming. And I was going to say, I wasn't a really good mood until I had to read this piece of

propaganda. Yeah, well, I guess that's a good way to get right into the topic. So our topic for this intelligence briefing today is the 1776 Commission and the 1776 report. Some of you have probably seen this report. I doubt too many of you have read through it. but you've probably seen it. You've probably heard about it.

And we're going to kind of tear it into shreds right now. So I'll open up with what the 1776 Commission and the 1776 report were. So the 1776 Commission was a committee that was put together towards the end, later half of 2020 by Donald Trump, because basically what they were intending to do was to combat liberal historiography. They wanted to combat the likes of Howard Zinn, combat the 1619 project, combat critical race theory. And so what they intended on doing

was putting together a commission to write a patriotic reading of American history. Now, what's interesting about that is that you'd think that if you were trying to put together a reading of history, you would maybe try to get some historians on the panel, But it turns out there was a grand total of zero historians that were involved with the creation of this report. At least none that could be described as historians of any sort of conventional stripe.

In any case, this commission then put together a report. And it was intended, the commission was intended to stay together for a couple of years and continue to make reports. but two days before Donald Trump was to leave office, which ironically was Martin Luther King Day, they released their report, which covers a wide variety of topics, which we're going to get into shortly. But it's fair to say that this report has been widely renounced, widely mocked, and I think that that's what we're going to do in just a second. And also needless to say, two days later when Joe Biden,

came into office. One of the first things that he did was dissolved the commission, this this pseudo intellectual, pseudo historical commission that was that was put together by Donald Trump. So without further ado, I'm just going to pitch it over to you guys to give your thoughts and talk about what the contents of this report were. So maybe Adnan, why don't we start with you? What did you see in the 1776 report? What really jumped out to you and what are your initial thoughts here? Well, I first wanted to say before we get into the actual contents such as they were of this report is just to expand a little bit on the context that you offered, Henry, in terms of how we

should see this report, what it's responding to, the politics of it, before we go into the nitty-gritties. And that is just to observe that, as you said, there was the, there's been some other public histories that have been significant in American political and intellectual circles like the 1619 project that has generated a lot of controversy has generated a lot of controversy in the New York Times sponsored project so in historical circles and so on but I think also we have to see this commission that was established I believe in September of 2020. So it's only been around for a very short period of time and is clearly in response to Black Lives Matters and protests over the summer. Many of the themes and issues show that

there are commitments here that go way back beyond those particular events, but it's clear that there's some sense of crisis that they're responding to that includes not just intellectual activities, but actual protest in the streets that is driving, that they are trying to see in terms of a longer cultural decadence and problem that needs severely to be addressed right now because it's clearly leading to a fragmentation of public law and order and commitment to what they see as the American project. And I think another component of it also is the calls for reparations, for example, you know, that have emerged a long time,

but have gathered steam in the last couple of years with movements like the American descendants of slaves, putting the, you know, the consequences in financial terms of slavery, Jim Crow, of the way in which the New Deal did not fully incorporate or, you know, support African Americans, in its policies and so on, you know, are making a case and this is seemingly dangerous.

So I think those are some of the vectors that precipitated doing this in September 2020. But if I was to talk about the contents in, we'll go into specifics, but in a nutshell, this reminds me entirely of debates, for example, in the 1980s with the public, publication of Alan Bloom's closing of the American mind and other similar sorts of works. This is not a new discourse at all. So they're portraying and framing this commission as if it's some kind of new look at these sorts of questions, but in fact what it's doing is reproducing and recirculating aspects of the culture war and intellectual establishment from almost a half generation ago as people bemoaned the effect of the 1960s.

So this is all sort of Reagan-era attempts to purge the American culture or wage the culture war. And we can get into some of the particular elements of it, but that seems to me the core, what it comes out of, in central terms, that's what this. the signed 1776 commission is all about yeah absolutely i agree with all of that and it's really important to think of this you know not just as a response and this is sort of a semantic point but as reaction right this is a reactionary document in reaction to you know BLM 1619 project but just as well the the general

rising challenges to a u.s ideological hegemony and so it's very reactionary in that nature the other thing I would say is, you know, starting to read this and reading the history of the U.S., it's very much a work of idealism in the Marxist sense, in that American history is told basically as a story of great ideas put forth by great and moral men. It says nothing about the rising mercantile class, you know, the political and economic sort of politics going on at the time, basically no dimensions whatsoever of class struggle, even when communism or progressive era politics are explicitly mentioned, nothing about class, nothing about inequality is brought up whatsoever. At one point in the document, it says that,

you know, it even explicitly says that the prosperity that we enjoy in the U.S. as a result of these founding ideas, you know, the prosperity, the riches and wealth is not from plundering or imperial adventures abroad, but it's from the wonderful ideas put forward by these wonderful men. And in that sense, it really helps you understand the difference between idealism and materialism when you're thinking about history. And the other thing I'd say, you know, I think Adnan said most of most of the important things, but I would just mention, this is also a document of American innocence, right? We are often familiar with the phrase American exceptionalism, and I did a Rev. Left episode on this book, American exceptionalism and American innocence.

American innocence is the underside of American exceptionalism. It's basically says, you know, know, all of the rotten history, the genocides, the slavery, the nuclear bombings, the militarism, those are bugs, they're not features of American society or American politics, and that fundamentally America has nothing to apologize for. And even when it talks about the confrontations with communism and the Cold War, you know, nothing, America is not brought up at all as anything other than good guys coming to fight this, you know, global attempt to dominate. Nothing about, you know, the reaction to the depravities of capitalism, nothing about the Great Depression, et cetera.

And so I think this document says as much by what it leaves out as it does with what it puts forward. Yeah, I do want to continue talking about what it is leaving out, but I want to make sure that we get fired up here in the beginning and get our blood boiling a little bit because that'll make this fun for the listeners. So I've got a few things that I'm going to read here. And Brett, I guess I'll direct these readings at you and I'll ask you for comment because I feel like this will be fun. So, of course, much of this document is anti-communist.

So let's just read some of the information about communism that they're presenting here. First from this is within the fascism section. Though ideological cousins, the forces of fascism and communism were bitter enemies in their war to achieve world domination. What united both totalitarian movements was their utter disdain for natural rights and free peoples. This harkens back to talking about Hannah Arendt's totalitarianism and talking about how communism and fascism, they believe in different things, but they're both totalitarian and therefore, you know, you can view them more or less the same way. Then let's skip forward to the communism section. And I'm just going to read this verbatim for a bit here. communism. Communism seems to preach a radical or extreme form of human equality. But at its core,

wrote Karl Marx, is the idea of the class struggle is the immediate driving force of history, and particularly the class struggle between the bourgeois and the proletariat. That's a quote. And this is outside of the quote. In the communist mind, people are not born equal and free. They are defined entirely by their class. That's the first paragraph on communism. Brett, you want to say something about that? I mean, well, first of all, the goal of communism is the abolition of classes. So this idea that we're born into a class, and that's the defining characteristic is antithetical to what we stand for and what we're fighting for.

But yeah, I noticed those things as well, you know, even in the section on fascism, they couldn't get three sentences in without being anti-communist. You know, they just couldn't help themselves. They refer to communism as the radical rejection of human dignity. I mean, of course, we're not going to see any attempt to explain the advances for women, for oppressed minorities, for decolonial struggles that communism offered, you know, just the general equality brought about by some of these socialist struggles. It is, I mean, as I said before we started recording, Dinesh D'Souza levels of a historical nonsense. I mean, childish in its approach to these things. Calling them ideological cousins is, yeah, it's horseshoe theory.

It's completely obliterating the role that capitalism plays in the rise of fascism, as well as the response of communism. I mean, you know, there would be no socialist movement if there wasn't capitalist depravity and imperialism to oppose in the first place. And there would be no fascism if it wasn't for the hierarchies of wealth and class and race fostered by the capitalist system. So, you know, the utter eradication is just another example of the deep-seated idealism inherent. And the last thing I would say is there's another little quote that they said very early on. And it's just, they just snuck it in there. But it says, it is important to note that by design, there is room in the Constitution for significant change and reform. Indeed, great reforms like abolition, women's suffrage, anti-communism, the civil rights movement and the pro-life movement have often come forward that improve our dedication to the principles, blah, blah, blah.

So they say they see anti-communism. They frame it as a great. reform. I mean, that is an incoherent thought, no matter how you parse it out. But that anti-communism is just, that's the drumbeat of this entire thing. Yeah. And then I just want to point out some of the individuals that were at play here. And then I'll pitch it over to Adnan to talk about some of the specifics in here. But the people that were putting this in place, it's very clear why this sort of narrative was coming out of them. The chairman or whatever there, yeah, I think it was chairman is the head of the commission was larry arne who is the president of hillsdale college in

my native michigan here uh this is a guy who somehow i'm on their email list and i get emails from him periodically telling me about you know how all of the liberals and the media are terrible and whatnot but i want to give one of his quotes from about a decade ago that uh will kind of give you an idea of what kind of people we're talking about here uh he he was quoted as saying that that state officials had visited Hillsdale College to see whether enough dark ones were enrolled. That's a quote. Also, the vice chair, Carol Swain, in the past, had written that Islam poses an absolute danger to us and our children. You know, it's one of the biggest threats that we have out there is Islam. And of course, there's a lot of people that think this.

But for these sorts of people to be at the head of a body that, at least is supposed to be doing some sort of historiographic research or, you know, putting together some sort of coherent narrative. There's just no historical backing. Their historical backing is fueled by nothing more than bigotry. Adnan, you want to pick up that thread and go where you want with them? Oh, that's interesting. I didn't get around to looking up any of the participants, I assumed since I recognized none of the names as prominent American historians that they would probably be populated from the sort of organizations ideological that you mentioned. There is one person in the group who is, I would say, a historian, Victor Davis

Hansen. He writes popular histories mostly what he's noted for as ancient and classical sort of history. But yeah, this is clearly a very ideological propagandistic document that I think Brett was very correct to identify as an idealist document. That's what seemed so profound at the very outset in the very first paragraph. It was less about history, less about 1776 and America's Foundings or subsequent history than it was a statement of principles. of a certain kind of political philosophy that then is supposed to be the judge or the basis for us to evaluate the United States.

Not in historical terms for what it has done. Those are only small pre-eptic arguments that are made to ward off criticism at certain points, but there's not actually any real engagement with history, i.e., what were the circumstances and context in which these settler colonies developed, you know, a, you know, I guess we would call it at least, you know, in political terms, a revolutionary idea of breaking of republicanism and breaking away from the British Empire. You know, that's not put into real context very much

at all, but it really is about how these principles mean that, in fact, we shouldn't actually study and understand actual American history, but rather we should propagate a myth, which I think Brett was correct, that's idea of American innocence. That is really the key myth that's important or necessary. And so really this document is not about history. It is about how we need to educate and indoctrinate people to accept certain principles from 100, of years ago and without a sense of how society has changed and whether the relevance or application of those principles really needs to be subject to historical sociological reasoning to understand how we adapt these to the needs of modern of the modern world there's actually

no historical consciousness in this because there's no sense that any of the foundational ideas in the Declaration of Independence should come under any subsequent criticism or evaluation in light of history or contemporary realities. That seems to be one of the key goals of this document is to immunize a certain vision of U.S. politics from actual history. I think it's a prophylactic document really saying but of course it's very interested because it has a really a historical and mythical idea of what happened in 1776 as well it doesn't address any of the specifics of that of the revolution of the revolutionary war of the complaints that are being made and whether those have something to do

with as Brett said mercantile you know developments and changes if you look at the actual declaration of independence several of the concerns are of course about governance and democracy but many of them are about restraint on commerce and limiting you know this mercantile class from doing what they want to do you know and having to be taxed and and so on so you know this is a very strange document and I think that for for listeners the key point here is that there really isn't a sense of history. And everything that we do on guerrilla history is about context, about change, and not these abstract, idealistic principles that are supposed to make you look away from actual history. That's what I find so astonishing and perplexing about this

document, is that you cannot teach American history using these principles and using the perspective of this report. In fact, they don't want you to study and learn anything about American history, really. yeah exactly yeah i would just i would just add too when we talk about american innocence you also have to understand that as part and parcel with white innocence right it's it's almost a euphemism for white innocence and the obscuring the obscuring of the settler colonialism and white supremacy inherent in the u.s and still to this day um is part of that and the whole section on identity politics is another example of this where this document because of its obscuring of history because of its sort of white and American innocence that is inherent in the document can be seen as a form

of sort of white identity politics. Certainly the reaction, the reactionary impulse from which this document arose is a form of white identity politics. And Trump's entire, you know, run on the presidency an entire four years was rooted in a grieved whiteness. So, you know, this putting down of identity politics as if America isn't about that or it's like it's only something that people of color do is another way that this is, you know, idealist and white supremacist in its own way. And then also I thought it was very disgusting the co-option of MLK, you know, using his picture, using his quotes. I mean, MLK throughout his entire life was despised by the right, hated by the center. At the time he died, I think over two-thirds of Americans had an unfavorable view of Martin Luther King.

He was, I mean, if not outright assassinated by the FBI, which is, you know, family won a civil suit saying that pretty much yeah that did happen it was led up to supported i mean m lk lived his entire life harassed by the u.s government of course none of that is in there it's it's the white reactionaries attempt to whitewash MLK and use only a fraction of a fraction of who he was as a bludgeon against people who actually stand up for the very things that MLK stood up for in his life and so whenever i see MLK co-opted in that way i mean i can't help him get sick to my stomach well the fact that it was the fact that it was released on his birthday, the public holiday, you know,

was really a disgusting move that was a graffiti on that day. You know, there's like a, you know, a violation of MLK Day to have released this report on that day. Not to mention that his photo is one of the first images in the report. They have him, if I recall, it was from the I have a dream speech. But he's on like page two of the reporter, page three of the report. It was absolutely disgusting. It's disgusting. Yeah, go right ahead. I was just going to read this little quote, too, because I thought this was particularly racist and feeds into a different type of horseshoe theory.

It says in the document, the civil rights movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of non-discrimination and equal opportunity. in favor of quote unquote group rights not unlike those advanced by calhoun and his followers so this is an explicit tying of the civil rights movement to a hardcore white supremacists from the 1800s i mean you know that it's nothing more disgusting it's basically saying the civil rights movement black identity politics just the idea that there is special considerations to be made around race in this country is synonymous with white supremacy morally and i found that particularly repulsive as well Like I said at the beginning, one of the stated goals of this project was to combat critical race theory, which is a pretty benign theory when you really think about what critical race theory is. And it's not as if the education system in the United States fully integrates critical race theory into its teachings. I know that my education was not based on critical race theory, but even if it was, it's not like some radical theory that's going to fundamentally change the way that every child is going to

think. And even if it did, it would be in a, it would be in a positive way. But they take these concepts that they've vaguely heard of in the past. And this is something that conservatives in general do quite a bit. They've heard of something in the past. And therefore, they have to react against it. I mean, they're born reactionaries. It's the same way that any time a conservative hears, here's the word communism, even though if you ask them to define communism, they would not have anything even remotely approaching some sort of coherent explanation of what communism is. They're just innately born to react harshly against it. Anytime they hear the word communism, they have to have some reaction, be it physical, mental, you know, emotional,

whatever, they're going to react against it. And so when they see something like critical race theory, if you went out into the street in my town, for example, which is 80% conservative, I live in a Trump plus 27 district here. If you went out in my street and asked 100 people what critical race theory is, that you would probably have 90, five of them have no idea what you were talking about. But if you ask the same hundred people are, is the education system teaching our students critical race theory? I'd say probably 85 of them would say that it was, even though they don't know what it is. And so then what do they want? They want this sort of patriotic, nationalistic education that this report is trying to push.

So yeah, I mean, this is a very, very racist document and it's rooted in racism. And one of the stated goals was to combat critical race theory, which is a very, very mild, anti-racist way of, you know, trying to teach children, the future generation. But there is, I want to advance this to another point in here that I thought was relatively interesting, and I'd like your comment on it. It's in the section, Reverence for the Laws. And I found this very interesting and ironic that this report came out two days before Donald Trump was leaving office. And of course, all of the, uh, the hullabaloo around that and, and what's going on. But if you go right to the beginning of the section of reverence for the laws, it reads, the principles of equality and

consent mean that all are equal before the law. No one is above the law and no one is privileged to ignore the law, just as no one is outside law in terms of its protection. I find that to be a very interesting statement that this was something that was commissioned by Donald Trump. I'm sure that they were working very closely with the White House. And at the moment that he's going to be leaving office and is finally going to be susceptible to some sort of litigation for anything, they have this statement that nobody's above the law. But you know, nonetheless, that even though that this is in that first sentence of that section, that nobody's above the law, they still are going to say that, Don,

Donald Trump is above the law. You know that they're not going to hold him accountable or, you know, just the same way that Democrats aren't going to hold Barack Obama accountable for any of the crimes that he did, be it bombing weddings or, you know, targeted assassinations of American citizens abroad or, you know, we have this litany of list. Of course, George W. Bush, the list is too long to even try to start recounting now. But these people aren't going to be held accountable. And the people that commissioned this report have no intention of ever holding these powerful people accountable, but yet that's what they want to highlight here. And the title of that section alone is worth comment on, reverence for the laws. I find that to be very, I mean, it's very thinly veiled what they're really trying to get at here, which is to try to kind of uphold the security state, the police state that we live in, unquestioning loyalty to the laws that we have and no real consideration for the way that these laws are applied differently to people. I don't know if either of you want to comment on that, but I did find that to be a very interesting section of this report. Adnan, you look like you

want to talk. Well, I think you've put your finger on something very important here in the contradictions in that section. And also the way in which there's a language and a discourse that represents essentially the Declaration of Independence as like a sacred document that's like a form of revelation, a scripture almost, you know, sort of equal there with the Bible, and that leads me to think about, and that's why I can't be questioned. That's why it's eternal, right? So there are all these like scriptural qualities that they're investing the Declaration of Independence, you know, with, rather than thinking of it as. a political document of its time that may have enunciated certain political principles, certain political, you know, values in universalistic language, even though, of course, in the Constitution, you know, many of these were not fulfilled and, you know, the Constitution, it's something that it works very hard to try and reconcile the relationship between a more radical liberal political theory, classical liberal political theory of this Lockean,

Jeffersonian, you know, declaration with the practical realities of a constitution that enshrined settler colonial powers in particular way and narrowed and limited democracy. But this idea that this is like a sacred document and we can't, and thus it has authority that can't really be critiqued and likewise about laws as if laws under this system are sacred and cannot be questioned and changed. And there's no discourse in here about unjust laws or their unjust application and how that has constantly been an endemic part of the U.S. system is to unjustly apply unjust laws that are often not capable of being reformed because you have a very undemocratic system that, you know, up until, you know, the end of Jim Crow in the 1960s on a formal

legal and institutional level, as some have called the United States is essentially an apartheid state until that time. And of course, it's a long process to try and overcome the consequences of that inequity that was in law, that even when you just remove the law, it doesn't mean society changes. And we have, you know, no commitment in this document to continuing and expanding that rather slow process this is a rear-guard attempt to protect the powers and privileges that have been weakened by that subsequent period basically of the civil rights they cannot even talk about civil rights for two paragraphs before raising the way in which it's all been derailed because of attempts to redress the outcomes and the consequences of systemic racism for many years through

some small alleviations in programs like affirmative action that have not achieved the more radical goals that are necessary to actually have genuine equality and democracy in this country. So they're already, you know, claiming that there's been equal victimization. You know, that's put in the same level, in the same paragraphs, with generations and hundreds of years of slavery and established discrimination. So, you know, none of this is allowed to reflect upon the injustice of these laws. So there is only reverence for these laws. And when, you know, a white majority is willing to change some of them, then those have to be regarded as, you know, remarkable achievements, you know, that have to now be respected.

And the last thing I would say, and this is something I would pose to you all as well, there was also a section. that we haven't discussed at all, which is about religion and sort of religious values and civic values where there's some complications in here. I think there's one or two interesting points that are being made about the fact that some of the progress that had been made, like the struggle for abolition, was rooted in a certain religious criticism of slavery and a commitment to universal human dignity and equality that is important we had an episode about John Brown and we talked about how his faith was very important in his radical you know vision of equality so of course one cannot ignore in historical terms contributions that have been made at various times by religious thought

but likewise there's very you know you have to also understand that there that you know certain religious ideas have also used to constrain liberty equality and all these as well, it's not just some positive force that shouldn't be subject to historical understanding and criticism. But what it does seem to do is really make a strong case for Christianity as the basis. You know, it doesn't quite go into dominionist sort of ideas that suggest that secular laws should be replaced by religious law that trumps all, including the Constitution. Because as I said, they've invested the constitution and declaration of independence with this kind of sacred status of its own but they are arguing in this somehow that it is particular contributions of christianity

and the necessity of faith that i would say really in some ways undermines we would think of a secular state they even say at some point that the state wasn't meant to be secular now i could talk a little bit about the absurd history that they claim here, about not having private sphere and private, you know, areas of life that government couldn't intrude upon only as a result of Christianity. It's a ridiculous sort of sense of history. And also, their strange understanding of the reformation and its consequences, you know, so, you know, if there's interest, we can come back to that. But I'm more interested also in what you thought about. this section and whether you see it as really a radical undermining of the secular nature of

the state yeah sure i mean i can i can definitely touch on that and come back to some points that henry made as well um you know so much of this document the things that they're putting forth are you know like freedom democracy liberty there are things that are challenged to this day by the very segment of society that this document comes out of and and the whole christianization of the founding fathers, it's true that there was a lot of religious, you know, aspects to the founding fathers, but some of them like Jefferson, like Thomas Payne, they were so sort of agnostic, almost leaning towards atheist. I mean, Jefferson did this famous thing where he cut out only Jesus' words that skewed all metaphysical speculation or magic and just try to take the moral

thing out. If somebody tried to do that today, this is the exact sort of people that these Christian reactionaries would call, you know, a heretic. Their fear, and trembling over Sharia law is this another form of projection because what they want to do is just the Christian version of that. And so, you know, it's always going to be that sort of a historical revisionism when it comes to understanding the founder's religion, understanding religion itself. I mean, these are people that claim to love Jesus Christ, to listen to Jesus' word. And so much about the American capitalism that they love and value is antithetical to the exact things that that Jesus taught. I mean, right-wing Christianity in the United States today, if Jesus could come

back and see these people that are marching in his name, I think he would be as bewildered as he would be sort of heartbroken. So that's my say on that. I'd love to hear Henry's thoughts on that, but I just wanted to scoot back around to something Henry said about the irony of no one is above the law. This is at the exact time when Trump not only is inciting a fascist insurrection at the Capitol, but is going through a multitude of criminal pardons showing nakedly that if you are well connected, if you are favored by a certain segment of the American elite, laws literally don't apply to you. Bannon was pardoned, right? Those war criminals that gunned down babies in the Middle East pardoned.

Anybody that could get to Trump's ear on Fox News was pardoned. So, you know, the fact that they're saying no one is above the law as they're doing those actions is somewhat historically analogous to Jefferson writing all men are created equal why he has slaves at home I mean it's that level of detachment from reality and putting forth the exact opposite of the truth now if you're a black man selling untaxed cigarettes execution on site if you're thought that you might have a $20 bill that's counterfeit you get a knee on your neck until you fucking die if you're a little boy playing with a toy gun and you happen to be black you know a Cleveland police officer

will gun you down within three seconds of being on the scene. If you're Sandra Bland and you have a broken tail light, you're going to end up dead in a prison cell a day later, two days later. But if you're Donald Trump, if you're rich, if you have the resources and the connections, the law doesn't apply to you at all. And so this is just another grotesque element of this document. The last thing I would say touching on the discussion of reactionaries

we described earlier is a core element of reactionaryism and this document portrays that, is that they advance no vision for the future. They are only reacting to other people advancing visions. They have no solutions to our problems. Look at the Republican Party today, the right wing in America. What is their solution to inequality, to the carceral state, to the problem of health care, to environmental degradation, to political instability?

They have literally no solutions and they've stopped pretending like they even do. It is a completely full-on reactionary movement against any. that wants to do anything to solve any of our problems. And that is another core feature of what it means to be a reactionary. And we see it all over this document and all over the American right. Speaking of things that we see all over the reactionary right, did anybody notice what Appendix 1 was in this document? If you go down in this document to Appendix 1, the entire appendix 1 is nothing more than the Declaration of Independence. This is something that we see among the reactionary right all the time. And it's something that certain politicians in the past have

tried to prevent from happening on the liberal center. But these right-wing individuals try to wrap themselves in the flag. And they use that sort of, they use the flag and their patriotism as a way of trying to suck in people that wouldn't necessarily have been receptive to this sort of argument in the past. Now, we have had examples in the past of where candidates from the liberal center have also wrapped themselves in the flag. FDR did it to some extent. Yeah, you know, there has been these liberal politicians that have done it, but it's something particularly in recent years that this extreme, they call it patriotism, but let's be frank, it's nationalism. This ultranationalism is something that we see over and over again.

And I just found it amusing that Appendix 1 is just verbatim, the Declaration of Independence, to kind of give this document some sort of historical credo, as it were, to give it some sort of, you know, here, look, we're making citations, and here you go. And I don't know, I found that to be very amusing. And I see both of you laughing at the fact that the Declaration of independence is appendix one.

Adnan, you want to say... Well, usually in appendix, you know, is where relevant documents are placed so you could understand that. However, in a, what should be a report on history and some level, might have had some citations in here. There's no list of, you know, who they're drawing any of this. So this appendix is because this is the only evidence that they're using, because it's an idealist document, just as, as Brett said, at the end.

outset, it's not actually based in history. So they're proving, see everything we said is true. Just look, it's right there in the Declaration of Independence. It says, you know, all people are equal, et cetera. So that's America, you know, no assessment of the actual reality of history, of other evidence. We are to judge America based on this idealist document that we don't even put in its own history. And in fact, we don't even read the whole document. Because if you go down you see that complaints against the king is he has a domestic insurrections amongst us which many historians you know read that as the you know sort of encouragement of slaves to join you know for their freedom they can join the british military and receive mannumission and you know when conflicts

start to emerge, there is also an interest in recruitment and this is being represented as treason, even though it's loyalty to the crown, which is the established government. So this is how some people read and understand this exciting domestic insurrection amongst us is partly both loyalists, but also black slaves are encouraged to receive their freedom if they will join the loyalist cause. And they're complaining about that, of course. And has envisioned endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages sexes and conditions so you're exposing us to this horrible savage not letting us go in and just expropriate dispossess and

slaughter the Native Americans because sometimes the British crown makes treaties you know with with these native peoples and doesn't allow us to expand on our frontiers but instead is allowing them to sometimes in response to our aggressive expropriation and dispossession and savage genocide of them that sometimes they attack us and that we're you know one of the complaints about the taxation in 1776 what's happened is that the what's you know the seven years war or what's called the french and indian war in north america you know is very expensive and as a result the British Crown tries to recover some of the costs of this through the Stamp Act through the tax on tea all of these things that you know we hear about and this

principle of no taxation without representation what it is is that the Crown spent a lot of money protecting these colonies and expanding the you know territory and then wanted the colonies to you know pay for it or help pay for it and this is seen as outrageous by, you know, the colonists who instead blame the crown that you're not protecting us enough, you know, from these savages and not allowing us to dispossess them. And that's one part that's just so absent in this report as we've been talking about, any real sense of history, you know, that this nation was founded on dispossession, like other settler colonial, you know, countries. There's no discussion of U.S. imperialism, you know, as Brett,

you know has mentioned and so it's almost like in a vacuum these principles in appendix one the declaration of independence are supposed to be the testimony for the truth of everything this report is claiming it's i wouldn't even give this report to junior high this is like not even junior high level of american myth making in history because it just so ignores so many realities Yeah. And I love the fact that you pointed out what appendices or appendices are typically used for. That's including relevant citations and other documents to help explain the material that's inside the document. And that's not at all what was done here. So like we said, Appendix 1 was the Declaration of Independence to basically say, we have some historical grounding for this document. But then the rest, it's not citations. It's just further sections of the, text itself but written in a in a fashion to make it look like they're citing things even though it's not a citation it's just further stuff that's written and so for example appendix three i'm looking at it right now created equal or identity politics now i know that uh you know we

identity politics is a tricky subject and something that perhaps we'll talk about in the future the history of the usage of identity politics which would be much more relevant than what they have here. You'd think that in this sort of historical document, they bring up identity politics. There'd be some sort of historical note of identity politics through history, but it's not. It's all ideological. They talk about what identity politics is. It has three features. First, the creed of identity politics defines and divides Americans in terms of collective social identities. According to this new creed, our racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as individuals equally endowed with fundamental rights.

I don't think that anybody that thinks about identity politics thinks that other than, you know, you have some crazy people that go way overboard with identity politics. But I don't think that people that do take a viewpoint that everything is interconnected, you know, there are aspects of class at play. There's aspects of race, sexuality at play. I don't think that anybody has ever taking the view that has this sort of nuanced look at how the world functions, that these identities override your inherent humanity? I really don't see that. But yet this is put in an appendix, which as Auddon pointed out, is where you would typically be putting like hard citations and whatnot to explain the documents from the inside. This is nothing more than

ideology. And this is perhaps one of the best examples of it. They put it in the appendix. to give it the appearance of being some sort of academic text, but it is absolutely nothing of the sort. I think that they didn't expect people to read past the first few pages, so they wanted to have a kind of executive summary of all of what they wanted to say in condensed form in the first 15 pages or whatever it was and then but they knew they weren't finished spinning out these ridiculous ideas so they put them in this appendix for the really hardcore ideal law may want to and actually read the whole thing but they know that so many people will just want to get the summary digest you know of the first few pages that condenses this material these are not append this whole thing is so strange i have to

say. Even the very outset, I thought the first page, I thought this is written so poorly. And I saw that in the first line, it's so portentous and pretentious, you know, that they start with a kind of rephrasing of the first line of the Declaration of Independence, which actually, I would say if I saw something like that in a history essay of an undergraduate, you know, I would be appalled. It's one of these since the dawn of time, you know, since the, you know, man has ever, you know, attempted to blah, blah. Now, okay, the Declaration of Independence stopped with that, but it's kind of like because they're announcing on the world stage something, you know, and that's for a political document, but this thing started out with a very, very awkward first sentence attempting to

reproduce something of the language of the Declaration of Independence, and it's almost like the people who authored this believe that they have come up with something, it's not as great as the Declaration of Independence, but it's a kind of corollary document that really is attempting to live up to this level of pronouncement of political philosophy in the American ideals. And it's really, to be honest, amazingly pathetic. I can't see this having much purchase among anybody who isn't already completely within this ideological framework. But what I do think is, is that it may advertise the Frankfurt School, Howard Zin's writings, and others that people might say, well, if these people are hyperventilating

so much in this ridiculous fashion about some of these ideas, maybe I should go check out, you know, Herbert Marcusa and Howard Zinn and especially Antonio Gramsci. I hope people will see that the prominent place of, you know, Gramsci's theories of hegemony, you know, feature so prominently in this document in that appendix, maybe it'll advertise it to a few, you know, inquisitive souls and they'll learn something. Well, we're coming up towards an hour, so I want to make sure that we get any final thoughts in on this document and the commission more generally that we each have. So I guess let's go around the horn one more time with everybody's kind of concluding thoughts on this document,

the historical relevance of it and historical importance of it. And I guess I'll just have a very quick statement here is that I bring up the historical relevance and historical importance of this, not because the information on the inside of the document is important, but the creation of this document in itself is historically relevant. The fact that you have a government mental body, putting together this sort of pseudo-historographic narrative of the country's history and the foundations of this country, the culture of this country, this is very historically relevant, even though everything on the inside is nothing more than ideology with very little historic grounding.

What I mean by that is that you're not going to be able to pass this document down through the generations and have anyone get anything of importance or any relevance out of it. You're not going to be able to use this for teaching. You're not going to be able to use it for anything. But the creation of the document in itself is historic because I don't know of too many other commissions that put together ideological based histories to more or less indoctrinate people, but I don't know, with this commission, I can't even say that it really looks like their intended goal was really to brainwash people. It's almost like they never

expected anybody to read it at all. It's just this bizarre document, but the fact that the government actually commissioned this report is historically relevant and is historically important, because you know that once this precedent is set, that you're going to have government-sponsored history, government, you know, allowed history, what the government is allowing to be the narrative that's put out into schools, that it's going to be used again and again by different forces, maybe sometimes for the forces of good, putting together an honest historiographic narrative of this country and its founding and the things that made it what it is, all the warts and wrinkles and scabs and all that, you know, the nasty stuff that people don't like to think about when they

think about this country. Maybe we'll have forces that do that. But we're more likely to have forces like the ones exemplified within the Trump administration, putting together these sort of pseudo intellectual, completely false documents to, I don't know, just drive a narrative more than anything else. And I think that in my mind, that's really the historical importance of this document. It's not what's in the document. but just the creation of the document itself. Yeah, I'll make one point, and then I'll do my concluding thoughts. One point I did want to get to is we talked about the absurdity of the communist section.

But if you look at the progressive section, what they really do, they do two things there, they're very Trumpian. One, they ally it completely with elites. So they make the progressive movement, which was a populist movement, often like undergirded by like farmers and stuff, into a conspiracy of the, elites, right, which is a big favorite buzzword for the far right. And they even use the word shadow government, that the progressive era was about building a bureaucracy that amounted to a shadow government, which is just code word for a deep state. And so that stuff is leaking

through here. And then on the section on fascism, we talked about they can't get three sentences without mentioning communism, but what was their actual analysis of fascism? Well, it was just that it's state power. There was really no other descriptor. It mentioned an offhand remark about pseudo-scientific Aryan superiority that the Nazis specifically and the Nazis added that to fascism basically, but pretty much all fascism was with state power. And so you can see how you can, if you have that conception of fascism, how it easily elies itself with horseshoe theory, with libertarianism, states rights, government is bad, et cetera. So I thought that was very interesting. Again, what they leave out is almost as important, if not more so, than what they include.

But then my final thoughts on this document, you know, Sinclair Lewis, or at least the quote is often attributed to Sinclair Lewis, he says, when fascism comes to America, it will be draped in the American flag and carrying a cross. That's repeatedly proven to be correct with the recent fascist movements in the streets all the way to documents like these, which reify nationalism, reify a very deformed version of reactionary Christianity. And in that sense, understanding fascism as we do, this can be seen as a fascist document. It's reactionary. It's anti-intellectual. The whole segment on universities and knowledge and public education. It's anti-communist to the core. I mean, that's the opening salvo almost.

It's historical revisionism. And it's rabidly nationalist. So in those senses of the term, it can be seen as a fascist document. And Henry said, it will never be used. And you're right. In any serious historical education, it'll never be used. But you know where it will be used in homeschooling by far right white evangelicals, right? It'll be the founding document of their history lessons. And so for that subsect of American society, I think it will be weaponized in some interesting ways. Not a huge chunk, but I think in those areas of life, it will live on as a propaganda sort of piece that can be drilled into the heads of children that are innocent but have terrible shitty parents. And that's my big fear, you know. Yeah, those are some excellent remarks, Brett. I think that is the way it will be used.

And I think, Henry, you're right that really the contents, we had a fun time disabusing people, you know, I'm sure hardly any of our audience actually would have taken it seriously any of the arguments made, but we had some fun pilloring, its limitations and absurdities, but I think it really is about the politics of the moment that could put institutionally together this kind of a statement, and it is authorizing, since really so much of it is also one of the appendices is about civic education and how we cannot allow basically liberal, humanistic, and leftist education, especially in the institutional bases of the

university system go unchallenged. So this will be used to reinforce a rather narrow perspective and circulate among people who already buy into these principles. But, you know, I guess what I would say is just this reminded me also a little bit of a kind of polemical document that would be, it just had a sensibility to me of what I am familiar with. in medieval heresiography, study of heresy, and the sort of sense that the challenges to this mythic narrative and the right orthodox way to be an American and to understand America over history is actually a story. It's a counter history that they're offering of all of these deviations, all of these heresies coming up and trying to destroy the true.

pure faith. And it reminds me of that kind of paranoid. We've talked a little bit about right-wing conspiracies. This is a document that really fits into the paranoid imagination, that the true America is beset on all sides by external and internal critics and foes, and some of whom who are perverting or departing from a true Orthodox belief in America. That's what it is. It's a very much like an inquisitor's document. It's a manual of heresiology against which to judge critiques, challenges, progress, changes to a recrudescent, revanchist sort of view and understanding of America. And it really feeds into a very civilizational sort of discourse. This is a work of extreme ultranationalism, as you both have been suggesting. It also is one

that reinforces this kind of clash of civilization's ideology, even if its focus is much more internal with these internal, you know, dissents, you know, forms of dissent that need to be crushed. It is based on a sense of America's position in the world as the leading power of and paragon an epitome of Western civilization. Their ideas for what should be, you know, educate in how education should take place is that people should read this canon. Obviously the Bible, but in terms of civic understandings, there's a canon of Western philosophy and of great works, almost all written by white men, that is the foundation for a proper education. You have to start with Plato. You might throw in some Walt Whitman. These people

have not read Walt Whitman. They don't know anything about Walt Whitman. So it's even absurd and stupid in its assertion of this kind of core curriculum that is a valorization of the unique culturally uh yeah the culture so exceptional culturally unique uh understanding of western civilization that its ideas are the basis for why it is uh successful and hegemonic even though i think this is a document of fear that's acknowledging on some level that that hegemony has been challenged and is crumbling. And this is this attempt to reinforce it in this crude and silly sort of way. Well, on that note, if there's no further comments from either of you, well, in that case, we'll wrap up this intelligence briefing. Again, this was a guerrilla history intelligence

briefing, our bonus episodes that go out on Patreon. You're all on Patreon already because this is a Patreon exclusive episode, but if you have friends, comrades, family members, people with extra money that have burning holes in their pocket and don't know what to do with it, encourage them to join our Patreon. Your contributions allow us to continue to do the show and allow us to bring you more content. So do spread the word of our show around to people. We're a new show, so word of mouth really does help. Let them know about our show, send them our public feed episodes. And if they like it, encourage them to join our Patreon. Adnan, how can our listeners find you on social media and the other projects that you're working on right now?

Well, they can find me, especially on Twitter, at Adnan A. Hussein, all one word, H-U-S-A-I-N. And I would encourage listeners to check out my other podcast, The M-Gi-Lis. You can find that at anchor.fm slash the dash muddilis. A. J. L.I.S. And we have new episodes that have come out, one on the Oil War, a new documentary film. I discussed it with the filmmaker. It's based on Andrew Basevich's, the U.S. war for the Middle East. And so I discuss it with David Schiskel, who's the filmmaker, and then also give some commentary about, you know, elements that I think are missing or lacking in this particular perspective on U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. And we also have an episode about

Islamophobia and remembering the Quebec City Mosque massacre from four years ago where six people were killed, 19 injured, and something that was very similar to the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh or Dylan Roof's attack on, you know, a black church in South Carolina. So we're putting it in that context. I talk about that with one of the foremost scholars of Islamophobia in Canada and North America, Jasmine Zine, Dr. Jasmine Zine. So check out the Mudgellus. Yeah, and that episode, I believe, just came out today as of the time of recording. So Wednesday, for those of you listening on our Patreon.

So, yeah, definitely do check out Adnan's other podcasts. It's very, very informative. I've learned a lot from that. Brent, how can our listeners find you in the work you're doing? For all other shows, Red Menace and Rev. Left, you can go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. and I would definitely urge you to check out that book I mentioned earlier in this episode. It's called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence, a people's history of fake news from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror

by Roberto Servant and Danny HaFong. And we did a Rev Left episode as well if you'd like to listen to that as a great way to get in, but it really touches on a lot of what we discussed today and really contextualizes this document and the ideas put forward in it in the broader context of American history. So check that out. Couldn't agree more. That was a really excellent episode.

I remember that one quite well. So, well done, Brett. As for myself, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. You can also follow me on Patreon, where I write about science and public health to help get me through this pandemic. You can find that at patreon.com forward slash Huck 1995. Follow the show on Twitter. We share random stuff that we see on there, as well as updates from each of the hosts. You can find us at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-E-R-I-L-A-U-Skore pod.

And you can support this show. Well, you're already on our Patreon, so I guess I won't read it off. But like I said, share it with people that you think might be interested to help support our show. All right, everybody, it was nice doing this episode with you. I'll talk to you again very soon. And listeners, we'll talk to you soon as well, Solidarity. You know, So,

Thank you.