On Constitution Day (Sept. 17) in 2020, the White House convened a Conference on American History. The speakers took aim at the Zinn Education Project, Howard Zinn, and the New York Times 1619 Project. President Trump said, “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.” He contended that a “twisted web of lies” regarding systemic racism was currently being taught in U.S. schools, calling it “a form of child abuse.”
Source: Anna Rachwalski / The Southerner
At the event, Trump announced the 1776 Commission to support what he called “patriotic education” in public schools, national parks, landmarks, and monuments. The 18 commission members (appointed in December of 2020), included Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College; Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA; Phil Bryant, Republican former governor of Mississippi; and HUD secretary Ben Carson.
Educators and scholars responded to the statements at the White House convening. Here some some examples from social media.
Thank you for always sneaking all those free resources under my door.
If by “sneaking under my door” he means I actively engage with your website and resources regularly in order to become a better teacher then yes, sure, that’s what happened.
— Mrs. Byars (@mrsbyarshistory) September 17, 2020
“A People’s History of the United States” was my assigned US history textbook at Mountain View High School.
Professor Howard Zinn’s scholarship has informed my life and my life’s work ever since.
— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) September 17, 2020
My high school civics teacher, the late Betty Swicord, bought a stack of Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” with her own money and encouraged us to read it on our own. I owe her more than I can express. https://t.co/eKMYEthmPr
— Sanho Tree (@SanhoTree) September 17, 2020
Trump trashed Howard Zinn today…as good a time as any to learn more about his important legacy. Here is the forward I wrote to his autobiography a few years ago. https://t.co/smqGsv0BCP
— Keeanga-Yamahtta T. (@KeeangaYamahtta) September 17, 2020
It may not seem like a big deal to liberal elites. But here in this Ohio diner in the middle of a pandemic with massive unemployment, all anyone wants to talk about is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
— Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer) September 17, 2020
Howard died in 2010. His writings have taught millions of people the idea that history is made by ordinary people who perform extraordinary acts of dissent. That he and his philosophy haunt Trump fills me with joy. https://t.co/N0nQT4xkhi
— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) September 17, 2020
A good day to pull out #HowardZinn’s “SNCC: The New Abolitionists.” In it Zinn argues that people like John Lewis, Diane Nash, Jim Lawson, the Greensboro Four and their SNCC sisters & brothers were carrying on the work of abolitionists because slavery hadn’t really ended #History pic.twitter.com/7TCLnP0dYr
— Christopher Wilson (@wolverinewilson) September 17, 2020
This is a great time to learn more about @ZinnEdProject and support them. They offer an astonishing array of free resources and lesson plans for learning and teaching about the history most don’t get in school or textbooks. https://t.co/061uB5r0bt
— Ashley D. Farmer (@drashleyfarmer) September 17, 2020
Howard Zinn’s book, “A People’s History of The United States,” was the only piece of curriculum in my K-12 schooling that I felt a connection with. It informed my view of the world, my education philosophy, & my commitment to education for social justice. #HowardZinn https://t.co/yRIQHm4dFt
— Kimi Waite (@KimberlyWaite8) September 17, 2020
The Commission’s report was widely ridiculed by historians, but it served its purpose: it became the blueprint for the wave of book bans, anti-history laws, and censorship policies that spread in 2021 and continue today. Teachers responded with a Teach Truth campaign — including an annual day of action in June.
The 1776 Commission was dissolved by Biden in 2021 — and then reestablished by Trump in 2025.
In September of 2025, hundreds of teachers signed up to participate in the Teach Truth on Constitution Day, hosted by the Zinn Education Project.
In his book Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, Jesse Hagopian describes the White House convening and the 1776 Commission. Here is an excerpt.
By Jesse Hagopian
[In 2020], the Trump administration turned its sights on K–12 public schools and hosted the White House Conference on American History. The summit assembled many of the most base uncritical race theorists in the country to establish Trump’s version of the Ministry of Truth: the “President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.”
Trump described it as a “national commission to promote patriotic education” and counter the 1619 Project’s work that demonstrates the ways enslavement was fundamental to the U.S. political and economic structure. The event featured a panel of memory hole historians who attempted to replace past events that inconveniently revealed structural racism with what we could call MAGA (Make America Great Again) schooling. In his opening remarks, Trump fumed that antiracist education was contributing to the 2020 uprising:
The left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long. Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.
The left has warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies. There is no better example than the New York Times’ totally discredited 1619 Project. This project rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.
Nothing could be further from the truth. America’s founding set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history. . . . Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and all of their soul.
Trump made it clear that he not only wanted children’s minds, but also wanted to strike a Faustian bargain for their souls to stop any critical analysis of race. Curiously, for all the venom he spat against CRT being taught in schools, he didn’t name a single critical race theorist or a CRT book that was being used in schools. He did attack one of the most beloved historians in America, Howard Zinn, who’s A People’s History of the United States provides accounts of history about the struggles of oppressed and marginalized groups that are often left out of corporate textbooks.
After Trump launched the event by filling up the room with the smoke of deception, his panel of uncritical race theorists spoke, including the anti–people’s historian Allen Guelzo (former staff member at the Heritage Foundation), who put a target on the back of the Zinn Education Project with the pitiful lie that the organization’s materials are “snuck under the door of unsuspecting teachers.”
In fact, rather than try to sneak lessons under teacher’s doors, the Zinn Education Project makes free, interactive people’s history lessons available for download on their website. But what was truly infuriating to Guelzo, so much so that it led him into telling this lie, was the fact that 170,000 teachers, all across the country, have registered on their own volition to use these antiracist, antisexist, social justice lessons.
In his book Art of the Deal, Trump invented the concept of “truthful hyperbole” — also known colloquially as bald-faced lies — which he clearly applied to the 1776 Report that came out of the White House Summit on History. The American Historical Association ridiculed the misleading document, saying it was “[w]ritten hastily in one month after two desultory and tendentious ‘hearings,’ without any consultation with professional historians of the United States”; it contained “falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements”; and it was “an apparent attempt to reject recent efforts to understand the multiple ways the institution of slavery shaped our nation’s history.”
The 1776 Report wasn’t only god-awful for what was included in the document, but also for what was left out. The American Historical Association wrote, “In listing threats to the ideals of the nation, the report ignores the Confederate States of America, whose leaders, many clearly guilty of treason, initiated a civil war that claimed more than 700,000 lives — more American lives than all other conflicts in the history of the country combined.”
Now, equipped with a pseudohistorical document that uncritical race theorists understood as holy text absolving America of sin, they were ready to spread the good word.
Fox News led the crusade, attacking “critical race theory” nearly 1,300 times in a three-and-a-half month period from mid-March through June 2021. With the 1776 Project playbook in hand and liberals on their heels, the GOP and their right-wing billionaire sponsors went on a violence of organized forgetting blitzkrieg.
“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” Rufo wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
That was the plan. But the plan was complicated by the fact that Trump lost the 2020 election. Had Trump won reelection, the crusade would have continued from the executive branch, but when Joe Biden was elected president, he quickly annulled the 1776 Commission. At this point, many liberals believed that would be the end of this particular story. Surely now that the post-truth president was gone, some of the more impolite and overt attacks on honest education would subside. Or so they thought.
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