Jim Mamer: Fake Journalism Is Only the First Draft of Fake History
In recently crediting the slave owners who wrote the Declaration of Independence with inspiring the abolitionist movement, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was only the latest in a long line of politicians determined to purify the innocence of the American experience despite its original and enduring racist sins. It is only one of a series of inconvenient truths concerning this nation’s imperialist legacy that have been bleached out of our historical memory to leave us, as Gore Vidal once described, the United States of Amnesia.
It is a rigid bias imposed by those who select the text books and curriculum for the nation’s high schools where formative knowledge of our societal past is largely imposed. It is a bias resisted by a few heroic high school teachers such as Jim Mamer, who 30 years ago, early in his career, was honored as a national Social Science/History Teacher of the Year in 1992 by the National Council for Social Studies. Now retired after 35 years in the classroom and a decade teaching teachers at the University of California Irvine, Mamer talks to Scheer Intelligence host Robert Scheer about his concern over the disinformation of much of what passes for American education….
After the truth-shower 