How President Trump plans to fund the commission’s work without Congress may be another story. The cultural Left has often openly extorted private corporations into funding its propaganda, whether or not that extortion takes the form of government power. Trump claims that his approval of a new deal between TikTok, Walmart, and Oracle is conditioned on $5 billion directed by the companies towards a patriotic-education foundation. It does not appear that this would fund the presidential commission directly, but while the cause is a good one, the government should not be in the business of conditioning regulatory approvals on the creation of slush funds for cultural causes.

We are likewise skeptical of federal efforts to ban schools from teaching the 1619 Project or other particular books or courses of study. This is not the proper role of Washington. Where federal funding is being used to finance leftist propaganda, the better solution should be to eliminate that funding or redirect it to parents to control.

Informed patriotic education was once seen as a necessary component of citizenship. No prior generation of American leaders would have argued that we should be indifferent to whether our citizens know their own history and the Founding ideals on which the nation rests. Abraham Lincoln returned often to the unique history of America, not only to hold together the nation in crisis but to call it to its highest ideals.