The 1776 Citizen Pledge Is Scaring More Democrats Than You Realize

As more state governors wake up to the horrors of Critical Race Theory, others are pledging their endorsement of the 1776 Citizen Pledge, which is a direct attack on the dangers of teaching CRT in schools. The 1776 Action Initiative was inspired and endorsed by the Trump Administration to reinforce America’s founding documents and principles.

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson recently endorsed the 1776 Citizen Pledge, saying American children should still understand that the United States is the place of dreams for everybody. Robinson is the ninth of ten children and lost his father when he was 12. He shared that his mother raised him and his siblings to believe that all opportunities are possible.

“It’s still the greatest nation on earth. We want to teach that to our children. We want to make sure that our children understand the greatness of this nation, they understand the greatness of their founding documents and those who founded the nation as well,” Robinson said.

He even initiated a task force called FACTS (Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students) to prevent indoctrination in North Carolina schools.

The largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association (NEA) has continued to strongly advocate for the Critical Race Theory curriculum to be taught in schools nationwide. They’ve pledged to fight back against “anti-CRT rhetoric” with longtime NEA members President Joe Biden and his wife Jill praising their every move.

The NEA said they would continue to critique and push against forms of “power and oppression at the intersections of our society,” including white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cis heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, and anthropocentrism. They said they would oppose attempts to ban Critical Race Theory and/or the New York Times “1619 Project.”

Things have gotten so Orwellian that an op-ed on Critical Race Theory and the support of the “1776 Pledge” was censored in the Kansas City Star. Attorney General Derek Schmidt penned a piece titled “1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools” but was told by the publication that they would not accept a “straw man argument.”

The paper would not let him defend his position for signing the 1776 Pledge or allow it in the paper. While he edited his piece with a few revisions, editor Derek Donovan wrote that his paper should focus on his support of the 1776 Project rather than his opposition to Critical Race Theory.

The Kansas City Star went on to release an article attacking the 1776 Pledge and saying it ignored the country’s “full history.” It said that the Constitution and all other U.S institutions emerged in a context where slavery was legal. But Schmidt argued that we should be celebrating the truths by the Declaration of Independence that we are all created equal and with certain unalienable rights.

Schmidt said kids should celebrate Martin Luther King’s dream that a person is judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. He emphasized that the schools should not promote antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi’s vision that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

While Kansas City Editor Donovan said he is not opposed to publishing stories that are critical of Critical Race Theory, the censorship of Schmidt tells otherwise. People are seeing what’s happening in America’s institutions and schools and aren’t having it. Schmidt is one of those people. Hate always loses in the end and Democrats are losing the argument that people of color are too uneducated or unintelligent to do well in the U.S.