WASHINGTON — The White House announced President Joe Biden’s plans to create a commission that seeks to promote “hella good times,” “gnarly values,” and calls for Americans to “be excellent to each other.”
The new commission comes as a counter to former President Trump’s “1776 Commission,” which was formed last fall in response to Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the country and as a rebuttal to The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning project aimed at teaching American students about slavery.
The commission’s report, which included statements such as “the Black Power and black nationalist movements reimagined America as a white supremacist regime,” was released by the Trump administration on Martin Luther King Day. Critics have called the report, which was authored by 18 non-historians, a “hack job” and “not a work of history.”
President Biden issued an executive order dissolving the commission as one of his first acts after taking office. The new commission has been charged with creating a framework for a “totally tubular education” to counter the revisionist narrative of the 1776 Commission’s report and replace it with one where “Leisure Rules.”
Biden, who was in his 40s during the 1980s and old enough to run for president even then, has often expressed his love for the decade.
“Summer of ‘86 was the best year, the best,” Biden told supporters at an event in Pennsylvania. “I mean, the grass was cheap, the beer was cold, and the babes, well, come on man,” he said, lowering his aviators to wink.