The Left's ugly view of the nation’s soul: Spoiled Brats? The NYT defends the 1619 project while (and by) trivializing or outright insulting its critics, with N-word user Hannah-Jones going as far as doxxing one reporter

While the Left is constantly giving conservatives lessons on history, on ethics, and on language (which words are permissable and which are not), history "expert" Nicole Hannah-Jones doxxes (!) a reporter — inquiring about her use of the… N-word (!) — by revealing his cel phone number. Which was promptly defended (and shrugged off) by the New York Times.

The journalist, Aaron Sibarium, was then accused of slander by a Yale professor (who had to immediately backtrack when called out). In the meantime, Hannah-Jones had decided to wipe her twitter slate clean. ("Trying to rewrite history" again? asks Twitchy.)

The doxxing, and the rest of the story, comes in the wake of the Heritage Foundation's Mike Gonzalez writing (read a more lengthy excerpt below) about how all the drama queens — sorry, how all the thinkers, scholars, and polymaths — behind the 1619 Project at the New York Times have dealt with criticism from the start:

From Hannah-Jones, to [Jake] Silverstein, to the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, all have closed ranks and defended the project while trivializing or outright insulting their critics. Hannah-Jones has perfected provocation into something of an art form …

At any rate, it seems clear that the person behind the (preposterous) 1619 Project has not an iota of understanding of the basic tenets of the past — then again, what can you expect from a woman who is presumably, or who has been, a follower of the Reverend Farrakhan? — such as the reverence for the Constitution that filled the heart of Frederick Douglass, "the escaped slave, abolitionist, author, and towering figure in American history" who (by contrast with the "ever amused" Hannah-Jones) never smiled in photographs (for a good reason) and who happens to be the subject of a new biography.

In his new book, A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution, Reason Senior Editor Damon Root explicates Douglass's classical liberal reading of the Constitution. Far from seeing it as a morally ambiguous document that sanctioned white supremacism, Douglass extolled it as "a glorious liberty document" that justified the ending of slavery and other forms of race- and gender-based inequality. Douglass's message, says Root, is as vital to the current moment as it was in the 19th century.

But the people at the "newspaper of record" are little better than their history "expert," writes Jonathan Leaf in his City Journal review of Peter W. Wood's 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project:

The New York Times, so dogged in refusing to admit error, remains bedeviled by a mix of arrogance, entitlement, and radicalism. … like MSNBC, the Times now pursues radical messaging for financial reasons, which precludes journalistic objectivity as a guiding light. The New York Times’s motives, in other words, appear to be as much mercenary as devotional. This dynamic is likely contributing to the paper’s obstinacy about the errors of the 1619 Project, notwithstanding the damage it is doing to our educational system and even to the fabric of our democracy.

That said, there have been a plethora of problems from the very start with the Gray Lady, with its double standards, and with the history "expert" who believes that 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). 

To go back a couple of months: In an October op-ed, the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette took on the 1619 Project, calling it Counterfactual history. 

[An attempt] to “reframe American history” [is] is the aim of Nikole Hannah-Jones, architect of The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Ms. Hannah-Jones’ contention, that slavery and racism are the foundations of American history, may have been unquestionably embraced by the Times, but it was met with vigorous dissent from leading scholars. 

Among the three claims the newspaper refutes is the assertion that

it was the year 1619, when the first slaves were brought to Virginia, not 1776 that was the “true founding” of the United States. This claim, the project’s central argument, has since been redacted from the 1619 website. When pressed, Ms. Hannah-Jones emphasized that she is a journalist, not a historian, and that her claims of the founding were a bit of “rhetorical flourish.”

As usual, leftists cheat. And manipulate. And mislead. And lie. 

So the history expert born Nicole Hannah claims to have backtracked, but as a visit to Nikole Hannah-Jones' Twitter page (needless to say, No Pasarán is blocked) will confirm — especially the cover panoramic photo — the bit of “rhetorical flourish” is still front and center. (Mike Gonzalez has more below.)

As San Francisco decides to rename several of its schools, Robert Zimmerman points out that

They’re coming for you next: Even as Democrats nationwide embrace blacklists of ordinary Americans for daring to express dissent from that party’s leftist agenda, the extremely leftwing school board in San Francisco is moving to blacklist as many of America’s historical national figures as possible, including Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Paul Revere.

 … what this school board is doing is banning history, so that the students it “educates” will be guaranteed to know nothing about the past noble Americans who made this country a great and free land, for all. Instead, San Fransisco students will be indoctrinated into the Marxist philosophy of hate and envy, hating anyone who doesn’t agree with that ideology and having envy for anyone who works hard to achieve success instead of relying on the central government to feed them.

And most of all, they will be taught that America is, was, and always will be an evil land. They will be taught to hate it, so they can be enlisted in the war to destroy it.

The Left does not hate slavery; its members hate America. Commentary's Christine Rosen adds that

the idea that Western Civilization needs defending is not wrong

Defending from such leftists as Nikole Hannah-Jones, who would do well to listen to the half-black conservative Amala and take the time to watch Lucas Morel's podcast at Hillsdale College, Race in America: Colorblind Constitution? 

As PJMedia's Tyler O'Neil points out, 

Many black leaders have denounced the Black Lives Matter movement, noting that the activists do not focus on the black people who die every year from black-on-black crime.

In that perspetive, Nikole Hannah-Jones might do well to read the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Robert L. Woodson Sr and Joshua Mitchell, How the Left Hijacked Civil Rights. 

The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency, sought liberation, and rejected despair.

 … Exit, voice, loyalty—however different these strategies were, each supposed that human agency mattered, that oppression wasn’t destiny. That is why, even amid great struggle, black Americans responded by building their own institutions and businesses. Great universities, medical schools, hotels, restaurants, movie companies and even a flight school sprung up. All of this was self-financed—and made possible by two-parent families, churches and other cultural institutions that provided shelter against the outside storm of racism.

 … the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. … paid a heavy personal price for his hope that America was redeemable … but he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence. He united black Americans behind the proposition that racism is evil in itself, not simply because white people visited it upon blacks, and that all must unite to combat evil. He warned us about the self-destructive path of violence, not only for blacks but for the whole nation.

 … Today many black leaders defer to angry white progressives who make the same arguments about blacks’ lack of moral agency, reject the country’s founding principles, and seek to undermine its institutions. For months, the radical left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white supremacists. The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”

Civil-rights organizations and their leadership, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus, need to wake up before it’s too late. A faction of black leaders has been silent about, or complicit in, the takeover of the civil-rights movement by the radical left. The effect of this is not to glorify black achievement but to crucify low-income blacks, who are represented in national media outlets by their worst-behaved members, and bear the brunt of the attacks by the woke radical left on the cities where they live.

“Justice” for black America cannot be achieved by framing it solely through the distorted lens of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others in fatal police encounters. For every unarmed black American killed by the police, hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides.

Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America must be overthrown. 

 … Like all Americans, blacks have triumphed over their circumstances only when they have adopted bourgeois virtues such as hard work, respect for learning, self-discipline, faith and personal responsibility. In the 19th century, Frederick Douglass found reading to be the key to his own personal liberation amid slavery, and he understood that whites deliberately withheld literacy from blacks precisely because it was so valuable. Bourgeois values drove blacks to build the powerful religious, fraternal, and other voluntary associations that helped them thrive in the worst days of Jim Crow and cultivated the essential virtues in the next generation. 

There would have been no civil-rights movement without this.  

When it comes to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, anthropologist Peter Wood minces no words

writes the Heritage Foundation's Mike Gonzalez.

Toward the end of his book, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, he makes abundantly clear why such a response is essential. “The 1619 Project is, arguably, part of a larger effort to destroy America by people who find it unbearably bad,” writes Wood. “The project treats the founding principles of our nation as an illusion—a contemptible illusion. In their place is a single idea: that America was founded on racist exploitation.”

In other words, as he methodically demolishes its main arguments, Wood pays the project a compliment: he takes it seriously, but as a threat to our national wellbeing. The 1619 Project, he avers, “poses a particular danger to America.”

 … My colleagues at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin J. Feulner Institute, which includes as visiting scholars the historians Allen Guelzo and Wilfred McClay, have also led a campaign to spotlight the many problems with the 1619 Project. I have written a few of these arguments myself. Robert Woodson, the founder of the Woodson Center, has assembled a number of black academics to join the campaign against what the New York Times is doing, and formed what is now known as 1776 Unites.

Crafting the Narrative

Why is this all needed? The 1619 Project is a venture by the Times to rewrite history and to put slavery at the center of America’s story. It contends that everything about our lives today still revolves around slavery and racism. Along the way, its authors have made a series of other outlandish claims.

 … As Wood makes clear at the start of 1620, “The larger aim of the 1619 Project is to change America’s understanding of itself,” and it is attempting to do that by misleading the nation’s most impressionable minds. The Pulitzer Center, which markets the curriculum, addresses itself to teachers, bypassing the elected legislators in the 50 states and the members of the school boards in the nation’s some 13,000 districts. Wood quotes the announcement by the Pulitzer Center, which is unaffiliated with the Pulitzer Prizes, as saying, “Teachers: Looking for ways to use this issue in your classroom? You can find curriculums, guides and activities for students developed by the Pulitzer Center… and it’s all free!” The lesson plans include Hannah-Jones’s essays and those of others. … 

Overcoming Racism

So with 1620, Wood seeks to take us not back to the ‘60s, nor to the decades that preceded it, but forward to a better place, one where we center our understanding of America on the ideals and customs that have allowed the country to overcome its challenges. “Surely there are ways to incorporate a forthright treatment of slavery, racism, and the black experience into the story of America’s rise as a free, self-governing, creative, and prosperous nation,” he writes. “The key to doing that is to put the pursuit of the ideals of liberty and justice at the center of the story, with ample of acknowledgement of how hard the struggle has been and how imperfect the results.” …

Endless Conflict

Wood makes a compelling case that this date and this act [the Mayflower Compact of 1620] informs what America has become. They inspire our better angels much more than the 1619 Project, which as Wood aptly writes, is “a bucket lowered into the poisoned well of identity politics.” The Mayflower Compact put the country on its way to an American “us”; it began the process of etching out a new belief-driven identity. About a year after it was signed, the Pilgrims held their first Thanksgiving to thank the Almighty for the good harvest. “A key ingredient in this emerging identity was the colony’s gratitude,” he writes.

And here Wood pivots to lower the boom on the opposite of the 1620 vision of contractual ordered liberty, and gratitude for God’s bounty: Hannah-Jones’s ugly view of the nation’s soul. “The opposites of gratitude are envy and resentment. The 1619 Project presents such feelings as righteous, justified, and to be savored as though they were delicious. Valorizing a sense of perpetual victimization can serve, like gratitude, as a social charter of sorts, but it is a charter for endless conflict and bottomless demands for reparations.”

The 1619 Project is more, however, than a national charter of grievances and despair. It is also mendacious. … From Hannah-Jones, to Silverstein, to the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, all have closed ranks and defended the project while trivializing or outright insulting their critics. Hannah-Jones has perfected provocation into something of an art form …

 … in September … Hannah-Jones and her newspaper (for the New York Times is now, for all intents and purposes, her paper) retreated in other ways. Gone from the digital copy of the project were all claims that the country’s “true founding,” was 1619, and Hannah-Jones began to assert that she had never claimed her work was history. All of this is false, of course.

The Woke and the Rest

“My guess is that she’s doing a victory lap,” Wood says of Hannah-Jones’s retreats. At this point the 1619 Project is so well established that she no longer needs to claim historical accuracy.” This is one of the few areas in 1620 where I differ with Wood. Hannah-Jones, Silverstein, and the others had expected adulation—and they certainly have been lionized in woke circles—but had not anticipated pushback from some of America’s most renowned historians, never mind from the World Socialist Website (whose opposition to 1619 owes a lot to a growing divide between cultural and economic Marxists). Their tarnished record could threaten future ventures—especially a deal currently being worked out for multiple platforms between Hannah-Jones and Oprah Winfrey.

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

• Spoiled Brats? The NYT defends the 1619 project while (and by) trivializing or outright insulting its critics, with N-word (!) user Hannah-Jones going as far as doxxing one pundit

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

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

• Secular humanistic indoctrination dumbs down children, drives wedges between them and their parents, and has grown increasingly hostile to patriotism and parental authority

• 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

• A Prager U Video and a Book, "1620," Take on the 1619 Project

• 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