Thursday, July 30, 2020

The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"


After learning that the New York Times’ 1619 Project has a conflicted relationship with history, the truth comes out – at last.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is forced to admit that the 1619 Project is not history, but a “work of journalism.”

 On Legal Insurrection, points out the change in tone (thanks to Glenn Reynolds, to Ed Driscoll, to Stephen Green, and to Sarah Hoyt)
Shouldn’t the nation’s shared memory be historical facts?
Jones also said they “explicitly stated” their aims in the piece. The last sentence of the introduction (my emphasis): “On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”

Truthfully. When I read “truthfully” I expect facts and history.

Even if Jones wanted the 1619 Project to be a “work in journalism” she chose the wrong term. Journalism, like history, should report the truth. Not your truth. Not alternative facts.
Idonttweet asks what "work of journalism" is supposed to mean: 
It’s not ‘history” or ‘journalism’ but a work of fiction. An attempt to “Control the National Narrative” sounds an awful lot like ‘propaganda’ to me. Against the backdrop of the current Marxist-led riots being justified as a response to historic racism and slavery, it might plausibly be described as seditious propaganda.
Regarding the former Nicole Hannah, JHogan notes that 
She’s admitting it’s propaganda, while calling it ‘journalism’.

There you have it. It’s okay to use ‘journalism’ to spread propaganda. It should even be encouraged.
“The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.” ~ Vladimir Lenin
KC Johnson points out the double standards — with the 1619 Project trying to have it both ways:
The tweets are part of a pattern w/the #1619Project in which it’s presented as “history” when convenient, to give it credibility (as in the curriculum description) but deemed non-history when its lack of historical rigor has been challenged.
Adds Tyler O'Neil:
Of course, the 1619 Project is also false in a much deeper sense. Its narrative delegitimizes the very real benefits of American freedom and prosperity by claiming that racist oppression is the central truth behind the country’s ideals, while in truth the country was founded in pursuit of freedom and equality but the Founders allowed slavery to persist, laying the groundwork to defeat it eventually.

What do they have to fear of the 1619 Project?

The pernicious narrative of the 1619 Project also carries devastating effects. At its heart, the project aims to demonize America’s founding and heritage.

The 1619 Project uses Marxist critical theory to demonize America and inspire an unguided and destructive revolution.

 … Yet the “1619 riots” have arguably oppressed black people far more than the U.S. supposedly does. The riots have destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments. At least 22 Americans have died in the riots, most of them black.

This narrative undermines the positive aspects of America and encourages hatred toward the very country that provides its citizens with an unprecedented degree of freedom and prosperity. It encourages violent riots in the name of racial justice, even though those riots make life concretely worse for black Americans.
 
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

• 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


Sunday, July 26, 2020

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


Who can argue with the Navy SEAL who oversaw the bin Laden raid when he says that America's biggest national security issue is the K-12 education system (thanks to Instapundit)? Business Insider David Choi reports that
Retired Adm. William McRaven, a former US Navy SEAL commander and head of US Special Operations Command, said he was "the biggest fan" of the younger generation of Americans and that education in grade school played a broader role in national security.

"It was because I recognized that unless we are giving opportunity and a quality education to the young men and women in the United States, then we won't have the right people to be able to make the right decisions about our national security," McRaven said. "They won't have an understanding of different cultures. They won't have an understand[ing] of different ideas. They won't be critical thinkers."

"So we have got to have an education system within the United States that really does teach and educate young men and women to think critically, to look outside their kind of small microcosm because if we don't develop those great folks, then our national security in the long run may be in jeopardy," McRaven added.

 … His remarks echo those of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who in 2013 said the "crisis in K-12 education is our greatest national security crisis today."

As a member of a Council on Foreign Relations education task force in 2012, Rice helped develop a report that found "educational failure puts the United States' future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk."
(Thanks for the Instalanche)

Nothing could illustrate William McRaven (and Condoleezza Rice)'s words better than a black B.A. who, on the the College Fix, testifies that My professors tried to convince me that America is racist (thanks to Instapundit).
I proudly look at myself as an American and nothing more, no hyphen, no preceding identity. However, I was told during college that as a so-called student of color I had to think a certain way, vote a certain way and believe certain things about my country and its duly elected officials.

My professors fervently insisted that the United States of America is an inherently racist country and that I am one of its oppressed victims.
Donovan Newkirk rejected — and rejects — that fallacy. Wholeheartedly.
America is predicated on the notion that all men are equally created and possess the same inalienable rights. Here, it doesn’t matter who you are, where you came from, what you believe in (or don’t believe in), or what you look like—anyone can succeed.

America is a nation in which everyone is afforded both equal opportunity and equal protection under the law.

On Columbus Day in 1915, former President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a prominent speech at Carnegie Hall. In this speech, he spoke contemptuously about “hyphenated Americanism,” or the idea that a U.S. citizen or an immigrant to the U.S. should view themselves as having more than one nationality.
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all… The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities… There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”
Teddy Roosevelt speaks for me, yet his statue is targeted for removal and vandalism by those who act like they speak for me and countless others. They don’t.

The Black Lives Matter movement is perhaps the epitome of tribalism and is antithetical to the very basic principles this nation was founded on.

 …  The immoral and violent actions of Black Lives Matter advocates only increase polarization in America and reinforce negative stereotypes about blacks.
BLM proponents don’t actually care about black lives—if they did, they would support the defunding of Planned Parenthood rather than police departments, or they would care about black-on-black crime rather than the single-digit anomalies of white police officers killing unarmed blacks, or they wouldn’t loot local small businesses in their cities.

  … The left uses the extremely racist idea of white privilege as a way to manipulate whites. … White privilege doesn’t exist. In reality, with affirmative action programs and such a prodigious desire for diversity and inclusion in the workplace, one could argue that a form of non-white privilege may exist.

No person, or group, in America is oppressed anymore—not blacks, not gays, not women.

Of course America’s past is not perfect, and it allowed slavery like every other nation on the planet at the time. America has atoned for its mistakes and continues to strive for pefection.

In order to make America even better, we must—collectively—embrace our history and move forward. Not a single person alive today is a slave. Not a single person alive today is a slave owner. The idea that blacks deserve slavery reparations is absurd; no one should be responsible for the actions of their ancestors or relatives. In America, we are responsible for our own actions.

 … don’t submit to the mob; despite what BLM proponents say, we are all equal. It’s time to put an end to tribalism, drop the hyphens, and realize that we are Americans.
And in America, all lives matter.

Of course, Teen Vogue is telling teen girls, Marx Good, Reagan Bad — leading Sarah Hoyt to erupt
OH, HECK, THEY’RE GETTING IT IN THEIR SCHOOL BOOKS TOO. IF YOU’RE NOT READING YOUR KIDS’ SCHOOLBOOKS AND COUNTERING THE POISON, YOU ONLY HAVE YOURSELF TO BLAME IF THEY GROW UP TO BE DYSFUNCTIONAL ANTIFIDIOTS
But at an even earlier age, writes the Post Millenial's Libby Emmons, in places like the New York School system, 10-year-olds are taught that they, their parents, and their grand-parents are racist (thanks to Instapundit).
My son learned that he is perpetuating the problem of racism, and that he doesn’t even know how he’s doing it, and that his whole family is racist, even if they don’t think they are. The kids also learned that there’s no way to fix it.

Other than a few packets during Black History Month, fourth graders have not yet learned about the Civil Rights movement or the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in bondage. But they are now learning that the United States is founded on racism, that racism is the pervasive undercurrent in American governance, law enforcement, social interaction, employment, literature, arts, entertainment, real estate, and education.

 … One boy asked why there is still racism, since everyone knows about it.

“Unfortunately,” a teacher said, “a lot of racism stems from the home. And just like the video, a lot of people’s grandparents were raised a certain way, and things were different back then, and then their parents learn it and their children learn it, and we need to stop it. And it’s hard, too, because you learn first from your parents and from your family, and we need to learn how to love everyone, and skin color should not matter at all, so this is what we’re trying to do, we need to be the change, and we need to make a difference. And you need to form your own opinions.”

What my son heard was that he is racist and doesn’t even know it, and that his parents and grandparents provided this legacy to him. I told him that we need to treat all people with respect, kindness, and with a generosity of heart, and that skin colour is not indicative of a person’s heart.
And when the Post Millenial's Libby Emmons reached out to her son’s teachers for comment, and they responded by saying, “I am not comfortable and cannot comment on the record … I feel that it's not really appropriate to be using our classroom as research,” what was the Brooklyn mother's  reaction?
I can totally relate, since the indoctrination of my 10-year-old into the world of critical race theory seems “not really appropriate” to me.

In the Old Dominion, it gets even better (sic):
When elementary students near Washington, D.C., return to school [in Virginia] in the fall, either virtually or in-person, they may learn about race and race-based slavery at the tender age of 5 years
writes PJ Media's Tyler O'Neill;
Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) has encouraged teachers to adopt an elementary curriculum from the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) — a curriculum that includes lessons on race, slavery, and “hard history” for the K-2 age bracket.
The Free Beacon's (thanks to Stephen Green) provides all the details:
Virginia kindergarten students will learn about institutional racism alongside the alphabet, according to new curriculum recommendations created for the upcoming school year.
Loudoun County is adding "social justice" to the mission of teaching elementary school students reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Washington, D.C., suburb—the richest county in the country—has teamed up with the Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) education arm Teaching Tolerance to develop its new curriculum. The proposed lesson plan recommends restructuring history and social studies classes to emphasize slavery as fundamental to American society for students from kindergarten to the fifth grade.

 … Not every Loudoun County educator is on board with the administration's direction. A longtime elementary school teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said that the school system had always taught students about the reality of slavery—lessons that typically begin in the fourth grade. She said the administrative focus to push racial politics on students who do not yet know how to read is motivated by politics, rather than education.

"I teach lower grades in elementary school.… [Never before] did I have to teach about slavery," the teacher said. "Our standards were always [to] teach about famous Americans, George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., people like that. But, it was all very general and the bigger picture, we highlighted their accomplishments."

The new Teaching Tolerance kindergarten curriculum urges teachers to explain social justice theories to five-year-olds. The Loudoun County elementary school teacher believes this curriculum will prove divisive for children who lack the maturity to deal with the subject.

"What they're really trying to do is divide people as early as they can, starting now with kindergarteners. They're really going to be inciting hate," the teacher said. "They're pointing out that there's ‘whiteness' and ‘blackness' and that's crazy. We never taught about that in school…. We learn about how to get along with one another and be kind and respect others. But now, with this new curriculum that they're adding, it's going to do the total opposite."

 … Max Eden, an education policy expert at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, said the curriculum's focus on political activism and the horrors of slavery is not suitable for kindergarten students. He said the movement to inject politics into elementary school classrooms has gained momentum since the New York Times launched its controversial 1619 Project.

"Students aren't prepared when they're five years old to develop a nuanced sense of history and political processes, and pros and cons of different side effects, and unintended consequences," Eden said. "What the real goal of this is, by introducing [slavery] this young, is to try to get the left-wing, Nikole Hannah-Jones, [SPLC] meta-political narrative into kids' heads as soon as possible, which is basically trying to compel them to believe that because slavery happened, therefore, America is evil and you must follow the leftist idea of … how we need to overturn power in society."

Parents are also upset that social justice would explicitly be taught in a public elementary school. A Loudoun County parent of two—who also spoke on the condition of anonymity—told the Free Beacon he was disappointed in the school district.

"SPLC is pushing Marxist ideology more or less. They're really pushing those concepts of ‘revolution' and ‘dismantling the system' that we have," the father said.  
PJ Media's Tyler O'Neill, again:

Marxism and corruption

The “1619 Project” claims that America’s true founding came with the arrival of the first slaves, rather than with the Declaration of Independence. This view justifies upending American society in the name of racial justice. When vandals toppled a statue of George Washington in Portland, they spray-painted “1619” on the statue. Claremont’s Charles Kesler wrote in The New York Post, “Call them the 1619 riots,”  and the project’s founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, responded (in a since-deleted tweet) that “it would be an honor” to claim responsibility for the destructive riots and the demonization of Washington.

 … Teaching Tolerance does indeed seem to push “Marxist ideology.” Last week, the SPLC program published a blog post entitled, “Confronting the Weaponization of Whiteness in Classrooms.” This article clearly uses critical theory to claim that hidden racism pervades America. “

 … This echoes the Smithsonian’s horrifying Marxist lesson on “whiteness” that “deconstructed” various aspects of American and Western culture, including capitalism, science, the nuclear family, and Christianity, as nefarious relics of white supremacy. The lesson also claims that a work ethic, delayed gratification, being polite, and getting to meetings on time are aspects of the “whiteness” culture that must be deconstructed and rejected.

If this is what “decolonizing” the mind looks like, it is a recipe for failure in the workplace and destruction in the public square. While this ideology claims to champion black people, it has inspired riots that have destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments. At least 22 Americans have died in the riots, most of them black.

Of course, it's not just history and the 1619 Project; what the school system is today, according to Peachy Keenan, is "an intense culture of early sexualization at home and school", i.e., "kiddie porn-adjacent sex ed lessons'" thanks to "the grip of rapacious “health consultants” who wish to fill your daughter’s Frozen backpack with dildos and sample tubes of anal lube and pamphlets on sterilization" (hat tip to Ed Driscoll):
The schools do their part by forcing children into mandatory early sex education classes that often include graphic illustrations of sexual positions and expose even kindergarteners to the infinite array of gender variants and sexual orientations newly discovered in the human genome.

Condom demonstrations on bananas? That’s so 1999.

High school sophomores now know how to prepare each other’s rectums for “safe anal play,” which is pitched as a zesty, natural activity for all genders. In 2019, California approved a terrifying, dystopian new statewide curriculum that includes a seventh-grade lesson that “identified sexual activities such as bathing together and mutual masturbation as safe options to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.”

Whew! I don’t know about you, but I’m always relieved when I finish preparing some organic, gluten free, plant-based after-school snacks and discover my sixth-grade daughter in the bath with her classmates! Because, you know, it’s much harder to transmit chlamydia in water than through intercourse. Bless you, Governor Newsom!

When it comes to sex ed, I live by a very simple rule: if an adult who is not our pediatrician tries to talk to my child about their genitals, this person’s kneecaps should expect to meet my crowbar. Normal adults do not wish to talk about children’s genitals or discuss children having sex with children in front of other children.
 …
Drag Queen Story Hour—And Beyond!
Forget drag queens reading gender-queer fairy tales to boys in Elsa gowns and their confused, giggly mothers. That’s so 2019.

A public library in Maryland hosted a “lesbian pole dancer’s teens-only sex ed class for 12- to 17-year-olds” [in April]. “Teens have questions about sexual health, whether its [sic] birth control, lubricants, STI testing, LGBTQ relationships, or something else completely. This will be an informal workshop where your teen can ask ANY sexual health question you want and get an honest answer.”

What happens when the 12-year-olds know more about sex than the most syphilitic Parisian madames of the 18th century? Does this ensure they will marry young and well, and be good and loving parents?

As the problems with education seem to be never-ending (see the Cecilia Iglesias Prager University video), now come reports that, amidst the deadly riots (after Claremont’s Charles Kesler wrote in The New York Post, “Call them the 1619 riots,” Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted that “it would be an honor” for the riots to be called “the 1619 riots”), Oprah Winfrey has teamed up with Lionsgate and the Times
to launch a grand multi-media campaign to turn the 1619 Project into “multiple feature films, TV series, documentaries and other cross-platform content for a global audience,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s been almost a year since we published the [1619 Project], the most important work of my life, and I am so excited to announce that we will be partnering with [Lionsgate] and the one and only [Oprah Winfrey] to bring this work on slavery’s legacy to tv and film!” Hannah-Jones tweeted.
Is it possible to be more clueless? Imagine: a black woman who has become a major television star for years, for decades, and a beloved authority on the culture, as well as a millionaire (a billionaire?) thanks to the American people, wants to show what a racist country the United States is.
Leave it the Washington Times' Everett Piper, to state the obvious: America burns while our schools hold the match — The nation's educational establishment is responsible for current chaos and lack of restraint.
I have said it a thousand times.

Ideas matter.

What is taught today in our classrooms will be practiced tomorrow in our culture. Teach self-actualization rather than self-restraint in your schools, and you are going to get a bunch of self-obsessed, perpetual children throwing tantrums in your streets.

Garbage in. Garbage out.

Teach narcissism, and you get a bunch of narcissists.

Spend more time showing young boys how to use a condom than teaching them how to be men of character and don’t be surprised with Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein.

Teach lechery, and you get lechers.
Teach rape culture and the 1619 Project, and you get men, as well as women, who are ashamed of their country.

Indeed, writes The Federalist's Joy Pullman, Abolitionist Monuments Defaced By ‘Anti-Racism’ Rioters Is What Teaching Fake History Gets America
The last wave of monument destruction, in 2017, largely focused on Confederates and slave holders, erasing all the accomplishments of figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with a scarlet S, for slave-holder. This time, the ignorance has descended even further.

The rioters are now tearing down and defacing memorials wantonly, apparently assuming that if someone is being celebrated that person is “probably a racist,” as the image below says.

 … This prejudiced ignorance appears to be widespread, and unchecked by local authorities. Several of the defaced monuments are of abolitionists, including the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln, as Tristan Justice reported

 … The anti-American group of recent graduates is not a fringe element. It is a substantial and ominously growing group of voting-age adults.

The recent riots have given us many more indications that America’s education institutions do not merely keep kids ignorant, but actively teach them to hate their country. Just refer to any of the emails and website banners you’ve been subjected to from every company you’ve ever purchased from online, detailing about how they’re all “fighting racism” by frantically donating to people and organizations that make a living off heightened racial tensions.

 … These messages reveal that the nation’s leadership class has all been re-educated extremely successfully to believe a pack of things that just aren’t true about American history and ideals. They are well-catechized in what is billed as anti-racist attitudes and activities that are rooted in false information and more likely to instead increase racial tensions.

Hardly a one of them, or any other American, can tell you much about George Washington besides he was a slave owner. Hardly one of them can identify Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as bona fide, deep-dyed racists. Not one of them know one of the first acts of Congress — the Congress that existed before today’s Congress, the one that pre-dates the Constitution — was to pass a massive document outlawing slavery in territory newly acquired from Great Britain during postwar negotiations.

But they all have heard of Audre Lorde, whose great contribution to society is basically being black and gay. They are all up on movies directed by black women like Ava DuVernay and books by pathos-filled but fact-challenged black writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. They all know Michael Brown put his hands up and said “Don’t shoot” even though he didn’t. They’re passing around discredited fake history like The New York Times’s 1619 Project as if it were accurate, and using it to justify supporting totalitarian thought policing because a black guy says this will solve racism.

These people’s heads aren’t empty. Their hate isn’t blind. It’s very well-formed. And it’s been deliberately aimed at the very country that has paid for and overseen their indoctrination into political violence.

I’ve now spent about a decade tracking information like this, and have researched and written about it in more detail than most, and therefore can assure you there is much more to find. Entire books have and could be written to detail more. Each generation of American children has learned less real history than the generation before it. Each generation of American children has instead been subject to greater levels of indoctrination in place of genuine education. The alarms have been sounded for decades, even a century, and nothing effective has been done.

 … How many more statues and American minds have to get smashed before people who genuinely love their country gain the courage to start fighting effectively for her restoration before it’s too late? Here’s part of what that would look like: Civil authorities first stopping vandalism and pursuing the vandals to mete out their just, legally determined penalties; second, politicians who claim to love America fighting for her by refusing to send public funds to institutions that fail to prove their graduates honor the country that pays for their education. At this point, that’s just about all of them.
As  Glenn Reynolds writes,
DEFUND THE THOUGHT POLICE
Again: Who can argue with the Navy SEAL who oversaw the bin Laden raid when he says that America's biggest national security issue is the K-12 education system?


Fortunately, Republicans (or, at least some Republicans) are willing to fighting back. At Mount Rushmore (which many call the president's best speech ever), Donald Trump deplored
the unhinged left-wing mob [which] is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments, tear down our statues, and punish, cancel, and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands for absolute and total control. … This cruel campaign of censorship and exclusion violates everything we hold dear as Americans. They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new oppressive régime in its place…
And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched a broadside against the "Marxist" 1619 Project, denouncing it as a gift to the Chinese Communist Party.
The New York Times’s 1619 Project is an attack on “the American way of life” that aligns with the Chinese Communist Party, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“They want you to believe Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed,” Pompeo said … at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. “The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout this ideology.”

 … And he blamed the 1619 Project for the recent wave of efforts to topple historic statues, issuing a condemnation that seemed to distinguish between monuments to Confederate leaders and memorials erected in honor of other icons of American history.

“Some people have taken these false doctrines to heart,” he said, referring to the 1619 Project. “The rioters pulling down statues thus see nothing wrong with desecrating monuments to those who fought for our unalienable rights — from our founding to the present day.”
But there are other Republicans willing to fighting back. Foremost among them is Sen. Tom Cotton who, as Tim O'Neill reported, pointed out a manifest truth about the 1619 Project writers and backers as well as about the rioters and pillagers in the streets of America. They do not love this country. They are seething with hate for it. The Arkansas Republican
delivered a powerful condemnation of the riots and the cancel culture iconoclasm of tearing down statues. He suggested that Americans should dub them the “1619 Riots,” and quoted two great American presidents in warning against the social menace the riots represent.

These rioters hate America. In Portland, where they tore down the statue of Washington, they also spray-painted on him the date ‘1619’—a reference to the New York Times’s revisionist anti-American history project. Perhaps we should call them the ‘1619 Riots,'” Cotton suggested. “After all, the architect of that execrable project said, ‘it would be an honor.'”

 … Cotton traced this “hatred for America” to the mob attack on the statue of Ulysses S. Grant, a Union general who helped quash the Confederacy. “That would also be President Grant, the political heir of Abraham Lincoln, a statesman who smashed the first Ku Klux Klan, signed the first major civil-rights legislation, and presided over the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. In one famous instance, President Grant sent in the troops to disperse a white mob in New Orleans that was terrorizing the city’s black and Republican residents, and had deposed the state’s lawful governor.”

Grant would have condemned the kind of mob rule that the riots and the iconoclasts represent. Cotton quoted Grant, who said, “neither Ku Klux Klans, White Leagues, nor any other association using arms and violence to execute their unlawful purposes can be permitted in that way to govern any part of this country.”

 … Cotton quoted another great president, Abraham Lincoln, who warned against “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the everyday news of the times.”
After comparaing Portland Antifa to Confederate Rebels (causing leftists oto lose their minds), Tom Cotton announced that he intends to Defund Schools That Indoctrinate Kids With NYT’s ‘1619 Project, aka "Marxist critical theory":
“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded,” Cotton said in a statement. “Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage.”

The Saving American History Act of 2020” aims “to prohibit Federal funds from being made available to teach the 1619 Project curriculum in elementary schools and secondary schools, and for other purposes.”

The 1619 Project redefines American history, arguing that the true founding of the United States came with the arrival of the first black slaves in 1619. America is irredeemably founded on racist oppression, so its history, culture, economy, and government must be overturned in order to achieve racial justice, according to the project.

In contrast to this effort, Cotton’s bill declares, “The true date of America’s founding is July 4, 1776, the day the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress” and “The self-evident truths set forth by that Declaration are the fundamental principles upon which America was founded.”

The bill warns that “an activist movement is now gaining momentum to deny or obfuscate this history by claiming that America was not founded on the ideals of the Declaration but rather on slavery and oppression.” Tragically, “this distortion of American history is being taught to children in public school classrooms via the New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’, which claims that ‘nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional’ grew ‘out of slavery’.”

 … This brainwashing against “colonized thought” is the natural outworking of the Marxist critical theory espoused by the 1619 Project. It is a recipe for failure in the workplace and destruction in the public square. While this ideology claims to champion black people, it has inspired riots that have destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments. At least 22 Americans have died in the riots, most of them black. 
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

• 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