Facebook Posts
Excellent summary of the main points at play here, and in the anti-vaccine movement as a whole.
It would have been much better if religious and philosophical exemptions had been allowed in the modern era. But after COVID, could we trust the military even with that responsibility? Did you know that while the military branches allowed airmen and soldiers to apply for a religious exemption, they effectively approved none of the COVID vaccine requests? A request could be approved by the chaplain, a required step in the process, and still be denied at the final level. It was a clown show. A system that invites people to apply while never granting relief is difficult to view as a meaningful exemption process. It assumes people’s religious convictions never change and creates the appearance of due process without the reality of it. Second, the COVID vaccine mandate was a tragic demonstration of why trust matters. The vaccines were introduced under Emergency Use Authorization, meaning there was necessarily no long-term safety data available at the time they became mandatory. Members who refused were threatened with punitive consequences, including dishonorable discharges that ultimately were not imposed. From the inside, many service members experienced the process as coercive. Enlisted members were separated while officers often remained in lengthy administrative proceedings, in part because of the greater likelihood of litigation. Have an autoimmune disease and know you have vaccine reactions? For many members, that wasn’t enough to receive a medical exemption. Third, having the same institution responsible for maintaining readiness also decide who qualifies for medical exemptions creates an inherent conflict of interest. If your reaction wasn’t immediate and obvious, but instead involved a psoriasis flare, prolonged autoimmune symptoms, or weeks of flu-like illness severe enough to keep you in bed and out of work, obtaining an exemption could still be extraordinarily difficult. Even when such exemptions were granted, they often required annual renewal. Imagine facing the same decision every year while knowing it could trigger another serious reaction. A military member moves to a new base and they might get a new doctor who won’t give the exemption. The flu vaccine itself is a separate question. It provides moderate protection, but its effectiveness varies widely from year to year because influenza changes rapidly. Even in good years, outbreaks still occur among highly vaccinated populations. That doesn’t necessarily mean the vaccine has no value, but it does mean an outbreak by itself isn’t evidence that mandates are necessary. Moderate effectiveness can support voluntary vaccination just as easily as someone else might argue it supports mandates. The study on efficacy: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7188082/ Ultimately, my objection isn’t primarily about the flu vaccine. It’s about trust. A government can only justify overriding individual medical and religious decisions when people have confidence that the system is transparent, fair, and acting in their best interest. The military damaged that trust during the COVID mandate by presenting religious exemptions that were, in practice, unavailable, by handling medical exemptions through a process many viewed as conflicted, and by relying on coercive tactics that alienated thousands of service members. COVID made many Americans less interested in military service. Removing the flu vaccine mandate may have been politically advantageous, but it also acknowledged a deeper problem. Before asking service members to trust another medical mandate, the military first has to earn back the trust it lost.
George Washington was wrong.
Interesting. I wonder how many who caught the flu had and how many had not received a flu vaccine.
Localized military surveillance data from Lackland AFB reported a baseline trend of a few hundred cumulative cases over typical seasonal outbreaks each year. The vast majority of flu-related deaths occur in adults aged 65 and older, with this group accounting for 70% to 85% of seasonal flu-related deaths.
On Juneteenth, I feel the need to speak out (again) about the selective history being pushed by the current administration.
My objections are twofold.
First--and every administration we've ever had has been guilty of this to a lesser or great degree--the White House has no business decreeing or enforcing one particular historical narrative over another. The executive branch has no training in historiography. The bureaucrats who run it don't know what they're talking about.
Second, the particular story now being shaped by executive decree tells us that we can only be a great nation if we ignore the evils done in the past.
As a historian, I find that to be dishonest and manipulative. As a Christian, I find that it goes against a central gospel message: that confession and repentance open up the path to new life.
I'm going to borrow from Nathalie Baptiste's insightful opinion piece posted yesterday--please read the excerpts and visit the original (linked below).
And also consider downloading the Well-Trained Mind Press's free Juneteenth resource packet. It's our support for real history study.
welltrainedmind.com/p/juneteenth-booklist-activities/
**
Conservatives have long failed to really reckon with America’s racial history, and politicians have often tried to downplay its significance and cover up some of the more appalling parts of the past. But the Trump administration has largely dispensed with the whitewashing and instead has taken to trying to completely rewrite history.
“It’s more than just trying to erase Black history,” said Bryan Stevenson, the co-founder and executive director at the Equal Justice Initiative. “It’s trying to alter American history.”
“The story of slavery is a critically important story to the history of this country. We had a civil war where hundreds of thousands of people were killed. It shaped the constitutional amendments that have been so impactful in the 20th Century,” he said. “And to not be honest about that history just creates a misunderstanding of who we are as a nation.”
...Two months after returning to the White House, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History,” which ordered federal institutions to deemphasize slavery and racism when talking about American history.
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the order says. “Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.”
...The federal government has also attempted to remove Black history from public view by taking down exhibits in our national parks, and by using rhetoric that routinely downplays and scoffs at the reality of the nation’s historic horrors.
George Washington, one of the founding fathers, enslaved nine Black people at the President’s House in Philadelphia, where he lived and governed before Washington, D.C., was built. There has long been an exhibit at Independence Hall memorializing the people Washington enslaved, a depiction of the contradiction between espousing liberty for all while holding people in bondage.
But in January, National Parks Service workers removed the exhibit, with a spokesperson saying the agency was abiding by the March 2025 executive order. The city sued the federal government, and a judge ordered the display to be restored. A federal judge then blocked the administration from removing it again while lawsuits make their way through the courts...
There was a similar incident in West Virginia when National Park employees were reportedly instructed to remove information about slavery abolitionist John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park.
At another unnamed park, a photo of the scarred back of a man who escaped slavery in Louisiana was also set to be taken down, according to the Washington Post. The removals were related to Trump’s executive order. (A federal judge ordered the Trump administration last week to reinstall any historical or scientific displays it had removed.)
“If they’re able to seize hold of and create a dominant narrative of U.S. history that excludes many of the people who lived that history, then our students, our museum visitors, our national park visitors, and all Americans will not have access to the entirety of their history,” Weicksel said...
When Nazi Germany fell, a new government took over, and today all Germans get comprehensive education about the horrors of the Holocaust. When apartheid, government-sanctioned racial segregation, ended in South Africa, the new regime made sure to create a museum that detailed their country’s racist history.
The U.S. still has never had such a reckoning.
“I think people in this country have been reluctant to talk about this because the people who benefited from slavery continued to be in power after the Civil War,” Stevenson said. “The people who benefited from terror violence and Jim Crow laws never had to give up power.”
www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-admin-rewrite-black-history_n_6a32d2ade4b057a50ce923a4
Juneteenth Resource Packets - Well-Trained Mind
welltrainedmind.com
Age-appropriate book lists, lessons, discussion questions, and activities to help you and your family learn more about Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. PDF Download.1 week ago
I think there are two different issues getting mixed together here. First, I agree that the federal government shouldn’t be enforcing a single historical narrative. The executive branch isn’t a historical authority, and when political institutions pick a preferred lens, history starts to function more like messaging than study. Second, I don’t think American history should be sanitized. Slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice are central parts of it, and I don’t support removing any exhibits or historical figures from public view, be it Frederick Douglas or Robert E. Lee. Even in other countries, like China with Mao, many different figures stay part of the public record rather than being erased. Where I start to disagree is how this history gets used in present-day interpretation. The argument here is that we need to emphasize racial injustice more to understand who we are as a nation, and that not doing so risks erasing history. My concern is what happens when that becomes the main lens for interpreting modern events. At what point does that shift from teaching history to filtering everything through it? Because what I see is that a lot of current events get quickly framed through race, sometimes before we even know what happened. The recent track meet case is an example. A situation that would normally be judged on the facts gets pulled into racial interpretation. It became national news because the potential for racism was sensational. Even without evidence of racial motivation, people start assigning it anyway. I think the internet makes that worse because it rewards the most charged interpretation. That raises a bigger question. Are we seeing more division because race is actually more central now, or because we constantly reinforce it in how we talk about events? Either way, it becomes a feedback loop. I’m not denying there are real racial injustices that still exist and need to be addressed. That’s not my point. My point is that using history as the default explanation for present behavior can become a shortcut that crowds out other explanations. Not because history doesn’t matter, but because it can be over-applied. I don’t support removing any monuments or historical displays, and I mean ANY. I think Robert E. Lee shouldn’t have been torn down either. So my question is this: How would you approach leading a country where division is already increasing, and one of the major fault lines is how we interpret and present racial history, without making that division worse?
Please do one for the founding of our country, 1776. And please produce a critique, and speak out against the administration that pushed the 1619 project, and the people removing our history in favor or their version, like this piece. That would be equally helpful.
As a so called "historian" who has published books to 'prove it', you need to be shown the simple basic facts as it relates to race and conservatives (Republicans) in this country. The 1854 Party of Lincoln, fought a Civil War and over 360.000 Union Soldiers lost their lives, abolishing slavery in this country. That includes granting blacks the right to vote and later on after a 55 year fight with democrats, who opposed it every step of the way, Republicans also won women the right to vote. Insofar as the KKK, Jim Crow Lawa, lynchings and segrigation, that was all democrats. Insofar as the 1960 and '64 Civil Rights Act, that was all Republicans. Democrats of the south whose white slave ownership and racist society are pointed to by modern day democratsto be the behavior of the entire overall caucasian race. Painting all white people as racists instead of just those Dixiecrats who still fight the Civil war, is now mainstream democrat narrative and ideology. The Norman Lear, All In The Family view of history is on display here, there being a great portion of the democrat Party who have obtained their entire knowledge of history and civics from these TV reruns. Television being America;s great political and historic rewrite brainwash...
Ask your average teen to tell you one FACT about president Thomas Jefferson, OTHER than he had sex with a slave named Sally. Their responses will be instructive about how history is taught today.
Do you know what's happening in South Africa now?
This makes me think about Turkey, where a majority of the population doesn’t believe the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Genocide ever happened, because it has been erased from their history by their government. Woe to us if we allow the horrors of slavery to be forgotten!
You mischaracterize Washington's views on slavery. Why should we think you are the one neutral and objective historian? Everyone should read Washington's own will and understand the context. He inherited slaves and could not at the time legally free them, nor his wife's slaves from her first marriage. One scholar has quoted great quantities of Washington's actual correspondence and other writing on this and other topics, rooted in 20+ years of research at the LOC. Dr. Catherine Millard. All, go to Millard's primary sources and don't rely on these half baked interpretations. Also see the facts and historical context at mountvernon.org www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/george-washingtons-will
I think to say that the “US has never had such a reckoning” is honestly unfair.. As one example, I’ve been to the beautiful Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C and it is very well done.
Absolutely. You are correct. Confession and repentance are means of grace. Pride and denial fool only ourselves.
(1) Have you spoken elsewhere to a tendency for homeschool curricula to do the same sort of whitewashing? I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on that or reading a fuller treatment elsewhere. It would be great to have a sort of annotated bibliography of textbooks and curricula that do this well (or maybe a list of the egregious ones). Thanks for the Juneteenth resource you have provided! (2) I think of this administration as capitalizing on a sort of grievance over people feeling constantly shamed or perhaps overstatements of racism (or sometimes talking past each other on what even someone means by accusations of "racism"). So I think of this as a pendulum swing. If you agree with that characterization at all, how do we avoid a pendulum that overstates or paints with too broad a brush? I'm not looking to excuse anything, nor am I implying that white Americans are close to perfectly appreciating past wrongs. I am simply interested in how to press toward greater education, maintaining accuracy and avoiding the pendulum swing.
Thank you, Dr. Bauer. I continue to be grateful for your great gifts as a historian and writer.
Wow! I had no idea that memorials were being taken down by the Trump administration. I knew it was happening under Democratic control. It’s a good reminder that we need to remain in the balanced center —no side is perfect. And America’s history isn’t perfect either —but it is the greatest nation that we know of who has provided more rights and more opportunity than any other formation of government before . Slavery has been part of the history of the world. There have always been evil men and good men too. No history is perfect —and no one party is perfect either. We won’t get that until Christ returns to the earth some day.
Thank you for speaking up and gifting us this resource.
Thanks so much for making this free! I’ve been looking for a resource to share with my kids.
Thank you for offering the educational materials about Juneteenth for free!❤️
Thank you for speaking to this.
Thank you for posting and thank you for the packet!
Thank you.
Thank you for this fantastic resource! Vince is about to dig into the high school packet!
Thank you for passing knowledge and truth on.
Thank you for sharing this!
Thank you for offering this resource for free! It is greatly appreciated!
Thank you for posting this
He can try to hide it all he wants. We still know the truth.
