Trump pushes back against liberal scrutiny of US history

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has signaled his intention to sanitize American history, getting rid of critical elements in the national chronicles and education syllabus that acknowledge issues such as slavery, racism, and white privilege which he and his supporters say denigrates and undermines the country.
In a sudden move last week that comes on the heels of a growing and assertive white nationalism leading up the Presidential elections on November 3, the Trump administration instructed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address such topics, calling them "divisive, anti-American propaganda."
"All agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on 'critical race theory,' 'white privilege,' or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil," a memo issued last Friday by the Office of Management and Budget said. The memo directed federal agencies "to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert Federal dollars away from these un-American propaganda training sessions."
Trump followed it up by retweeting a report from the right-wing Breitbart News celebrating the President’s "purge" of the critical race theory from federal agencies. "This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!" Trump added, amid broad outrage from Left, liberal circles which endorse the more critical view of US history.

Separately, Trump also warned on Sunday that the federal government will investigate and could defund states that taught history that his base has issues with, after a supporter brought to his attention that California has implemented the 1619 project into the public schools, and "soon you won't recognize America."
The 1619 Project is a Pulitzer Prize-winning multi-media project developed by The New York Times Magazine to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies, with the goal of reframing American history around slavery. Many white nationalists, some of whose forbears came to America long after African slaves were settled in, resent the reexamination and reframing of US history acknowledging the role of blacks, slavery, and the genocide of Native American people that has largely been sanitized in the national narrative.
The project has received critical acclaim and also criticism, typically depending on the political and ideological spectrum of people reviewing it. While Kamala Harris praised it as "a powerful and necessary reckoning of our history" without which "we cannot understand and address the problems of today," right-wing principals have dismissed it as left-wing propaganda.
"The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded," Trump supporter and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said. Trump himself has expressed guarded scepticism about the project but this is the first time he is threatening to withhold federal dollars for what many liberals believe will lead to censoring a country’s troubled history.