Talk about futile gestures.

With his days in office rapidly dwindling, Donald Trump hurried late last month to appoint the members of his new “1776 Commission,” which he established in November by executive order. Their mission: to do battle with the radicals and socialists he says have taken over our schools.

Never mind that the commission will have almost no time to meet before Trump leaves office, or that incoming President Joe Biden could easily dismantle it. Trump is moving ahead because, as he said in his executive order, students are being “taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.”

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Unsurprisingly, the 18 commission members Trump appointed do not represent a broad mix of scholars but are drawn from the ranks of Christian conservatives, right-wing historians and Republican loyalists who presumably share his rosy view of U.S. history. They include Chairman Larry Arnn, the conservative president of a Christian college in Michigan, a professor of politics and history who made news in 2013 when he noted that his college had been accused of violating state standards for diversity “because we didn’t have enough dark ones.”

The woman Trump appointed as co-chair, a retired professor who is African American, has called the Black Lives Matter movement a “very destructive” Marxist organization.

Many of the commission members are stalwart Trump allies, such as Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA. The ultra-conservative group is known for keeping a “watchlist” of professors who “advance leftist propaganda.”

From California, Trump appointed dependable conservatives professor Charles Kesler of Claremont McKenna College, who called Joe Biden oleaginous and demagogic in 2012, and pundit-historian-classicist Victor Davis Hanson, who, unsurprisingly, is the author of a recent book (among his many) called “The Case for Trump.”

Trump hopes the commission will combat representations of the U.S. — such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project and Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” — that he believes present the country as “evil” and “wicked” and undermine the “virtue of America’s heroes” and the “nobility of the American character.” He apparently believes that too much self-criticism in our schools leads to “rioting and mayhem” in the streets and to “crippling self-doubt” as a nation.

But in their place, what? Just feel-good stories? No more of that tiresome harping on Native American genocide and African American slavery, Tuskegee experiments and Japanese internment?

The truth about history is that it’s complicated. The best intentions go awry. Bad things are done in the name of good causes or are allowed because bad causes are deemed acceptable. Yesterday’s heroes are reevaluated in light of changing values and new revelations. Historians clash over what conclusions to draw.