Team Trump Spins American History

Hot off the presses and tossed right into the trash can goes the White House’s “1776 Report,” which was created by Team Trump “to combat the “dispositive rebuttal of reckless ‘re-education’ attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the US is not an exceptional country but an evil one.”

The Report, which equates the progressive movement with fascism, is not worth the 41 pages that it is written on.

It “skillfully weaves together myths, distortions, deliberate silences and both blatant and subtle misreading of evidence to create a narrative and an argument that few respectable professional historians, even across a wide interpretive spectrum, would consider plausible, never mind convincing,” James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Assn. told the New York Times.

Released on Martin Luther King Day, the Report trashes the civil rights struggle for putting the country on the road to “group rights” and “identity politics.”

There is one part of the Report that resonates in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol by a Trump-loving mob.

That is delivered by America’s No. 1 president, Abraham Lincoln, who warned about mob violence during his 1838 Lyceum Address in Springfield, IL.

He said: “Whenever the vicious portion of [our] population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing-presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend upon it, this government cannot last.”

Lincoln also sounded the alarm about those with great ambition and a thirst for power who would acquire it by “doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”

The 16th president could have been speaking about the 45th who tried to pull down American democracy by overturning one of the freest elections in US history.

TC Energy, developer of the Keystone XL pipeline, on Jan. 17 heaved a desperate Hail Mary PR pass downfield in the hopes of improving the prospects of the controversial project.

The pass fell incomplete.

Days before Joe Biden, who plans to cancel Keystone's permit, was to be sworn in as president, TC promised Keystone would be “the first pipeline powered by renewable energy.” Where have you been?

The Canadian company claimed the pipeline would “achieve net zero emissions" once it was placed into service in 2023. TC would hit the emissions goal by purchasing renewable energy from electricity providers.

“Climate change is a serious issue and we have an important role to play in managing greenhouse gas emissions while balancing the need for safe, reliable and economic energy,” said TC Energy CEO Francois Poirier.

TC Energy's pledge is too little way too late.

Environmental groups have been battling and raising money by lining up against Keystone since the project was announced in 2008.

They object to transporting 830K barrels of dirty tar sands oil daily from Canada to Texas refineries for shipment overseas. The EPA says tar sands emit 17 percent more carbon into the atmosphere than other types of crude.

That's only part of it. The National Resources Defense Council calls tar sands mines “a blight on Canada’s boreal, where operations dig up and flatten forests to access the oil below, destroying wildlife habitat.”

The mines pollute freshwater resources, create massive ponds of toxic waste and threaten the livelihoods of First Nations people who live near, according to the green group.

TC Energy should have made the renewable energy project ten years ago to incorporate it into the overall debate about the project. Making the pledge now is a sign of pure desperation.

President Obama refused to grant a permit to Keystone in 2015. Anti-Obama Trump okayed the pipeline in 2017. Biden will kill Keystone as part of his effort to restore US leadership to the fight against global warming.

TC Energy, which may have grown complacent during the business-friendly Trump administration, lost the PR battle over Keystone.