You’ll recall that in the early days of the Trump administration the very stable genius said this:
He obviously had no idea who Frederick Douglass was and he assumed nobody else did either. And when it comes to his MAGA followers, that seems to be the case:
Now check this out:
Amid a flurry of bills nationwide that seek to ban the teaching of critical race theory in schools, one such proposal in Virginia stood out.
Tucked inside a bill introduced by Wren Williams, a Republican delegate, was a glaring error: Among the concepts that school boards would be required to ensure students understood was “the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.”
But as scholars, Mr. Williams’s colleagues in the House of Delegates and others on social media noted, that debate was between not Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, but Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois.
“The gross mistake in this bill is indicative of the need to have scholars and teachers, not legislators/politicians, shaping what students at every level learn in the classroom,” Caroline Janney, a professor of Civil War history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said in an email.
On Friday, Addison Merryman, a spokesman for Mr. Williams, released a statement from the state’s Division of Legislative Services, which took the blame for the error.
The mistake was inserted at the “drafting level following receipt of a historically accurate request from the office of Delegate Wren Williams,” according to the division, which described itself as a nonpartisan state agency that drafts, edits and releases “thousands of legislative drafts” for the General Assembly each session.
Mr. Merryman did not respond to additional questions about whether a historian had been consulted on the legislation or about concerns that the proposal could run afoul of the First Amendment. (Parts of that bill, such as a section that tells school boards not to “teach or incorporate into any course or class any divisive concept,” have been criticized as overly broad and likely to infringe on the free speech of students and educators.)
Instead, he referred to statements that he and Mr. Williams had made on Townhall, a conservative website. Mr. Merryman told Townhall that Mr. Williams had submitted an “anti-discrimination bill” that correctly referred to the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
[…]
The error should not distract the public from the general contents of the bill, which would keep conversations about the United States’ racial history out of classrooms, said Lara Schwartz, a professor of government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington.
“If this so-called divisive concepts bill became law, all of Virginia’s students would be the worse for it, and ignorance of our history would not just be a sad punchline — it would become more the norm,” she said in an email.
Critical race theory — an advanced academic concept generally not introduced until college — is not part of classroom teaching in Virginia. But during the statewide race last year, Mr. Williams, 33, a lawyer who worked on Mr. Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election results in Wisconsin, said he would ban it in schools if he won.
He won the Republican nomination last June, unseating Charles Poindexter, a longtime legislator in the district, and then won 77 percent of the vote in the November general election, beating Bridgette Craighead, a Democrat.
This is what we are going to be dealing with all over the country with Mini Trump morons in charge.