Saturday, July 04, 2020

1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?



It is not just the 1619 Project that has turned the (self-proclaimed) newspaper of record into a college campus paper or the "New Woke Times". Succinctly, Instapundit's Ed Driscoll summarizes the developments of the past few years:
Beginning
• their 2017 pieces praising the glories of capital-C Communism
on the anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union,
• the “1619 Project” last year, and
• more recently, meltdowns over Tom Cotton and Bari Weiss,
• endorsement of statue toppling,
• attempted doxxing of the Slate Star Codex blogger and
• now the glorification of Andy Warhol’s would-be assassin,
the New York Times has descended into something resembling
the student newspaper at Oberlin. (Or as one wag quipped on Facebook
at the start of the month, “We are coming ever closer to the singularity
where the New York Times and Teen Vogue are indistinguishable.”)
I’m worried that their young staffers are reading Rob Long’s
“New York Times Autonomous Zone” article as a how-to guide,
rather than satire.

Meanwhile, in its perennial the-grass-is-always-greener-anywhere-but-here outlook, the New York Times manages to praise the French Revolution in an attempt, moreover, to school and mock an allegedly unenlightened Republican, ignoring in the process the far more unjust and far bloodier antics of the French upheaval (and not in battle, but in cold-blooded murder, dismemberment, beheadings, mass drownings, and other types of massacres, of women and children as well as of men), known as the … Reign of Terror, than those of its American predecessor.

After Sen. Lindsey Graham said that the results of elections in New York and Kentucky showed that “the French Revolution has now come to the Democratic Party”, New York Times editor Dan Salzstein thought he was making a sharp-witted comeback:
Leading to the tongue-in-cheek replies,
along with the comments
and finally
 and
Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds summarizes the 1619 Project and the rest of the ballyhoo in two sentences:
The goal is to convince Americans that they have nothing to be proud of. The purpose of this is to facilitate turning America into something else.
In that perspective, here are Some Thoughts on American Patriotism…

Which leads to Robby Soaves's insight at Reason that we should be less focused on the 1619 Project than on what he calls the 1793 project:
Intercept journalist Lee Fang, a man of the left by any measure, was denounced as a racist and publicly shamed by a colleague for daring to interview a black protester who criticized violent tactics … Fang was plainly terrified, and not unreasonably fearful of losing his job and being branded a racist forever. The Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein called Fang's forced apology "Maoist-style." It's a hyperbolic analogy, referencing the infamous "struggle sessions" of Mao Zedong's totalitarian communism regime.
Thankfully, the dissenters from woke orthodoxy are not being tortured or executed for wrongthink. But they do face tremendous pressure to avoid saying anything that might provoke an online mob, or an illiberal colleague, or an activist with different priorities—even if that thing they want to say is plainly true. This new reality has important social consequences: for the individuals caught in the crosshairs, but also the institutions attempting to navigate these very treacherous waters.

Given that so many cancellations hinge on the accusation that safety is being undermined, I would suggest a different metaphor than Mao. Mine is no less hyperbolic, but it puts the focus where my reporting—and Haidt and Lukianoff's research—suggest it should be. In 1793, the Committee of Public Safety took charge of the French Revolution on a promise to "make terror the order of the day." Evidence-free show trials and ideological purges followed, consistent with the radical leaders' belief that public safety requires public terror.

 … Ironically, the same subset of people ostensibly exercised about emotional safety—the woke left—seem frequently inclined to level unsubstantiated accusations that inflict emotional harm. This makes it difficult to believe that these Twitter warriors' true aim is the promotion of psychological comfort. Did any of them consider Uhlig's mental health after the man was baselessly accused? Does anyone care about Roman, who probably did not expect her enemies to ransack her Myspace page for evidence of racism and then pillory her for a photo taken when she was 23? What about Shor, thrown to the wolves for making a reasonable objection to what one wing of the protesters was doing?

That sounds like terror, not safety. Call it the 1793 Project.

The Times goes on to make an astonishing comparison, that "America’s enduring caste system puts it on par with India and Nazi Germany" (thanks to Instapundit).
It is hard to top that "America’s enduring caste system" phrase, but never doubt the mainstream media: While MSNBC Dubs Mount Rushmore as a ‘Racist’ ‘Symbol of White Supremacy, the Times opines, in all seriousness, that
Mount Rushmore was built on land that belonged to the Lakota tribe and sculpted by a man who had strong bonds with the Ku Klux Klan. It features the faces of 2 U.S. presidents who were slaveholders
This on the heels, as Twitchy points out, of the deleted DNC tweet about Trump’s upcoming visit “glorifying white supremacy at Mt. Rushmore”
Twitchy's concluding comment:
It’s almost as if this all has nothing to do with just Confederate monuments. *Eye roll*

In the perspective of the Gray Lady losing its mind over Donald Trump's Mount Rushmore speech, writes American Thinker's Monica Showalter, Rich Lowry points out the newspaper's double standards
Let the final word go to Ted Cruz, whose tweet was reported by The Daily Wire:
President Donald Trump gave “a majestic speech before Mt. Rushmore, celebrating America & recounting the magnificent champions for Liberty Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln & Teddy Roosevelt,” said [Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)].

“He vows to defend America,” continued the Texas senator, who then pointed out that The New York Times characterized the speech as “dark & divisive.” Cruz added: “We are living in parallel universes.”

“Only in the mind of deranged Leftists is defending Mt. Rushmore, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, & Teddy Roosevelt ‘leaning in to the culture wars.’ The culture warriors are the mobs burning our cities, defacing American heroes,” concluded Cruz.

Another group thinking that leftists of the NYT type live on another planet, and this one composed mainly of blacks, would be the founders of the 1776 initiative:
Bob Woodson, a leader in the African-American community who has spent his career fighting to stave off the cycle of poverty and crime, [argues] that the 1619 Project’s message—that life outcomes for African Americans are shaped by the history of slavery and Jim Crow—is a "lethal" narrative that perpetuates a culture of victimhood in the African-American community. During the launch of his new 1776 initiative, named for the year America was founded, Woodson said the new group would challenge those who assert America is forever defined by past failures.

 … The fatalistic narrative of the 1619 Project, which is already taught in "thousands of classrooms" across the country, according to the partnering Pulitzer Center, deprives African Americans of the agency to improve their lives, Woodson said.

"This garbage that is coming down from the scholars and writers from 1619 is most hypocritical because they don’t live in communities [that are] suffering," he continued. "They are advocating something they don’t have to pay the penalty for."

Glenn Loury, a professor of economics at Brown University and a 1776 contributor, echoed Woodson on the damaging impact the 1619 Project's message would have on future generations.

"The idea that the specter of slavery still determines the character of life among African Americans is an affront to me," Loury said at the Friday event. "We have shown, and will continue to show, that we are not merely bobbles at the end of a historical string, being pushed this way and that by forces beyond our control."

"I believe in America, and I believe in black people," Loury added. "Something tells me when I read that document that the 1619 Project authors don’t. They don’t believe in America … and I’m sorry to have to report, I get the impression they don’t believe in black people."

"The 1619 project offers a very crippling message to our children," said Dr. Carol Swain, a former professor of political science at Princeton and Vanderbilt University.

 … 1776 will promote success stories designed to counter the message of 1619, such as "slaves who became millionaires through entrepreneurial determination" or who went on to buy the "plantations on which they once worked," Woodson explains on the group's website.

  … In the months since [New York Times Magazine editor in chief Jake Silverstein’s] response, Princeton's Wilentz and journalist Cathy Young have highlighted historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project. Young also argues that the project has a "fairly clear present-day agenda of furthering progressive-left ideology."

In one of the earliest critiques of the 1619 Project, American historian Wilfred McClay identified a "highly questionable" agenda motivating the Times‘s embrace of unsubstantiated historical claims, describing the project as a "political gambit of attributing comprehensive bred-in-the-bone racism to the overwhelming majority of Americans."

Let the final word regarding "the rot in our institutions" go to William Jacobson, who wrote a Legal Insurrection post that is being used to try to get the Cornell law professor fired:
This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.

You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.

When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.

There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.

The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.

Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.

We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.

All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.

The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.

The goal is to destroy capitalism, and to seek revenge. The Black Lives Matter movement, founded based on fraudulent narratives of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases, is led by anti-American, anti-capitalist activists. They have concocted a false narrative of mass murder of Blacks at the hands of police, when the statistics show otherwise. They will exploit George Floyd’s death mercilessly to drive that agenda. And they will have some success, because all the institutions listed above are behind them.

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise


THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• When was the last time protests in America were marred by police violence? 1970, according to Ann Coulter, who asks "Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes?" (Compare with, say, China…)

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

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1 comment:

  1. Bird of Paradise1:34 PM

    The New York Pravda covered up for Lenin,Stalin and Castro and no doupt for Mao as well

    ReplyDelete