International Desk


The Biden team have also announced another intention of the incoming administration – to dismantle Trump’s 1776 commission. CNN report:
Joe Biden will issue an executive order to dissolve the 1776 commission, a panel stood up by President Donald Trump as a rebuttal to schools applying a more accurate history curriculum around slavery in the US.
The commission had been formed as an apparent counter to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning project aimed at teaching American students about slavery that Trump, speaking last fall, had called “toxic propaganda.” The announcement comes just two days after the commission issued an inflammatory report on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and just hours before Biden will take over from Trump, whose time in office was marked by racist statements and actions.
In its report released Monday, the commission asserted that “the Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders,” specifically criticizing affirmative action policies and arguing that identity politics are “the opposite of King’s hope that his children would ‘live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’”
Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, who had drawn criticism for his comments in 2013, when he said state officials had visited the college to see whether enough “dark ones” were enrolled, was chosen to chair the commission. Carol Swain, who once wrote that Islam “poses an absolute danger to us and our children,” was chosen as vice chair.
Read more here: CNN – Biden to rescind 1776 commission via executive order
Trump rescinds his own ethics executive order banning his former aides from lobbying
The current banner on the White House website may be “promises made, promises kept” but that doesn’t appear to be the case when it comes to “draining the swamp’.
Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016 with that promise and energised a lot of support. One of his final acts in office though has been to undo his one concrete attempt at it.
In the early hours the president rescinded an an executive order he had issued years earlier to bar former White House employees from lobbying the government after they leave their jobs.
Originally issued in 2017, the New York Times reports that “It expanded on rules adopted during the Obama administration and included a five-year ban for former officials lobbying the agencies they once worked for.”
With the revocation of the order, Trump’s newly unemployed aides – and presumably members of his own family – are now once again free to become lobbyists or to work for foreign governments.
The new order states: “Employees and former employees subject to the commitments in Executive Order 13770 will not be subject to those commitments after noon January 20, 2021.”