"A Fetish" for Foreign Tyrants Like Stalin: Obsessed by America's Sins (Real or Alleged), 1619 Project "Historian" Lectures a Survivor of China's Cultural Revolution, Claiming Chinese Were Not Oppressed Under Mao

Unless you faced slavery and discrimination in the United States, it doesn’t count as oppression.

Lecturing a survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution on oppression, the 1619 Project Creator has alleged that the Chinese were Not Oppressed By Mao, writes Toni Williams on the Victory Girls blog (thanks to Sarah Hoyt).

Nicole Hannah-Wells, the creator of the “1619 Project”, has got her knickers in a knot because Chinese people were oppressed under Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Hannah-Jones, Twitter handle “Ida Bae Wells” got into a tweet spat with Xi Van Fleet, proud naturalized American and survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Is it just me or are naturalized citizens Super Americans? My Syrian neighbor, naturalized more than 25 years ago, is Super American to the bone. Back to the Nicole Hannah-Jones and Xi Van Fleet “Oppression Wars”.

Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote the 1619 Project in collaboration with the New York Times. Among other transgressions, it placed the beginning of the United States to 1619 when the first slaves landed in the Colony of Virginia. Hannah-Jones is such an arrogant writer that she not only tried to rewrite U.S. History, but the history of Great Britain [and, as it turns out, the history of China, i.e., the history of Asia, i.e., the history of the entire planet].

Never forget that 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, ain't "all bad."

Indeed, one of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism. Among the 1619 Defenders Is, Yes, "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin.

That is the 1619 Project for you. In a nutshell.

Needless to say, what Americans are being taught in schools is nothing short of scandalous. 

And I don't know what is worse. That American teachers are not aware of the history of the rest of the planet — being themselves the product of American "education" — or that they are aware thereof but deliberately refrain from teaching it to their students.

Toni Williams has more:

 … Let us pause to examine the life of Hannah-Jones nemesis, Xi Van Fleet. Xi got a student Visa and left China for the United States at the age of 26. She rose to fame here in the U.S. fighting against CRT (Critical Race Theory) in Loudon, Virginia:

“Growing up in Mao’s China, all of this seems very familiar,” insisted the mom, who finally fled China when she was 26.

“The Communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people. The only difference is they used class instead of race,” she said.

She recalled seeing “students and teachers turn against each other,” and school names being changed “to be politically correct” as they were “taught to denounce our heritage.”

“The Red Guards destroyed anything that is not Communist — statues, books and anything else,” she said.

“We were also encouraged to report on each other, just like the Student Equity Ambassador program and the bias reporting system,” she said of systems that other parents have sued over.

Miss Hannah-Jones is completely dismissive of an Asian difficulties. Unless you faced slavery and discrimination in the United States, it doesn’t count as oppression:

I assume what set Nicole Hannah-Jones off on Xi Van Fleet was a podcast she did on the Marxist take over of U.S. school libraries

 … The problem is Miss Nicole Hannah-Jones cannot give up her grift suffering. It’s all she’s got. That and her American privilege. Well, and her lack of knowledge about history. In other words, she doesn’t know ANYTHING. The history of the world is suffering and slavery. For China, under Mao, between 40 and 80 million people were killed. Life is still cheap there. Ask the Uighurs. Before anyone sits down to watch the 1619 project, study Mao and check your privilege.

 

RELATED: The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence 

• 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

• Can the Élites' Contempt for the Voters' Desires in the 2020s Be Traced All the Way Back to the Jamestown and Plymouth Colonies? In a sense, Lincoln chose the events of Thanksgiving 1620 as our true founding in order to repudiate the events of 1619

• 2,000% better off — Economic history is unequivocal: Jefferson’s slavery wasn’t the basis of America’s prosperity; Jefferson’s liberalism was

• 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

• 1619 is a "reframing" of the American story in mockery of our political origins, in defiance of actual history, with the expressed purpose of sabotaging our sense of national identity

• 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

• Hulu's 1619 Project Docu-Series Is Not Designed to Teach Us—and Our Kids—About (or to Hate) Slavery or Racism; It Is Designed to Teach Us to Loathe America

• In 1640, more than 5,000 English citizens were being held as slaves in North Africa: Slavery’s long, cosmopolitan history is ignored by the architects of the 1619 Project

• "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
 

As usual, the Smarter-than-Thou Left Wing Examines All Options Except the Very One Which Is Staring Them in the Face

Recently leftists have sent me articles from the New York Times and The Economist who, in the wake of the Tyre Nichols killing, purport to show how to reform police departments.

What follows below is based on a letter I wrote back to them:

This is amazing. And it is typical of the mainstream media. Totally typical.

The MSM (the Mainstream Media) examines an entire problem, and looks everywhere for the solution to the problem, except the very spot where it is staring them in the face — just as it is staring in the face of their readers.

Here are three typical examples, one from the past month and two (very) famous ones from America's past

1)  BRUTALITY AMONG POLICE OFFICERS (2023)

I am sent articles in the New York Times, in The Economist, as mentioned, on what must be done to solve the problem, on how to better train policemen ("How to hold bad police officers to account"), etc…

The Left's point being this is an insidious problem within the USA itself, within American society, a dark recess of said society, a problem that America itself is overlooking, and one more problem that the forward-looking, enlightened activists on the left must spring forward to solve (just like these knights in shining armor do with everything else).

Guess what problem/solution they miss entirely?

The one —  the very one — that is staring them in the face.

It is the DIVERSITY ideology.

There you have it:  that's the cause of the problem.  Nothing else.

When hiring policemen, the city of Memphis — a town where, incidentally, the police chief is black, the assistant police chief is black, and nearly 60 percent of the police force is black — followed the Left's deranged modus operandi: they were more interested in DIVERSITY than in getting competent workers — in attracting and hiring the best workers. And any doubts they had, or might have had, about the half dozen gangster-type police cadets they hired (whom they would have definitely swept aside if the cadets were white — and rightly so), they brushed aside aside in favor of D.E.I. (Diversity Equity Inclusion).

As Matthew Boose of American Greatness points out, 

What one sees in the video is a group of poorly trained, impulsive mercenaries beating a fellow hood to a bloody pulp. It is the viciousness of the inner city in all its ugliness laid bare. How many incidents just like this happen without a peep of protest every Saturday night on the South Side of Chicago?

 … The entire public framing of the issue is skewed by the suppression of awkward truths.

 … In the era of Black Lives Matter, this chaos is officially encouraged by the state and its warped “social justice” agenda, which makes cops into demons and criminals into angels. … [The Left's] specious crusade against “police brutality” is one large and costly exercise in evasion.

Before you accuse a conservative of racism, it's totally possible that a black candidate can be the best in a certain environment or that a white can be the worst in same environment.  But that was not the case in this Tennessee city police department.

Sure, if the blacks are good enough by all means hire them.

There is a second reason mediocrities (black or white) are being hired, according to Tucker Carlson.  That is because in the past two or three years, with all the anti-police demonstrations going on, many police officers (black as well as white) are resigning.

"Police are responsible for all the violence in black communities" said Joe Biden in the State of the Union, which "is a lie", a "provable" lie (plain ol' statistics).

How do you think these "mediocrities got the job?!" asks Tucker Carlson.  "Because normal people quit"

So, leftist friends, you — and everybody else — you holler about George Floyd.  Fine.  Why does that mean that all other police officers should be painted with the same brush?!  And that we should all be told to "defund the police"? And that police officers should operate under so much pressure that their jobs are impossible to perform?

There are obvious people (black or white) who are not fit for a job, whether it is policeman, cook, architect. or doctor and nurse.  So:  do not choose them!

But everywhere this DIVERSITY insanity is being implemented.

With architects and builders and lawyers, universities are asking for more DIVERSITY among students.

In hospitals and clinics they want diversity.

What would you say if you came to Dr Smith's cabinet and he was gone, replaced by a black person or a woman or a homosexual (male or female) or two or more of the above combined?

I wouldn't mind, personally, provided that the black lesbian was more competent, or at least as competent, as the white professional.

Would you like to live in a house built by a black person — if he is as good as, or better, than the whites, yes!  Sure thing! If he was chosen to fulfill some (black or white) bureaucrat's bean-counting, I would offhand admit to being reluctant.

In "woke" law schools, hard exams (like the LSAT) are being taken down to allow for a more diverse student body.

Fine.  But when a citizen (black or white) like you and I needs a competent lawyer (black or white), how will that be good for us — or for him/her — if we get somebody who was not competent to pass the (now defunct) exams?

Oh, by the way, quite a number of the writers in the NYT opinion pages and of the "journalists" in the newspaper that the left celebrates are professors or were students at the "woke" universities.

To solve this Memphis problem, the race-baiters and the Left's hysterical activists have to acknowledge that they created the problem themselves.  And they cannot do that because that would preclude them from identifying, and embarking on, more pressing hysterical crusades

This is the modus operandi of the Left's hysterical crusaders.  They embark on a crusade and, if it doesn't go well, or if it becomes unpopular, they accuse everybody but themselves. 

In other words, they blame America in general.

This becomes the accepted narrative, both in America and among Europeans.

I can think of two historical examples — two major historical examples — where this applies…

2)  PROHIBITION (1920s)

Today, Prohibition (which incidentally was also pursued in Norway, Finland, and Sweden, where the difficulty of purchasing alcohol survives to this day, so the Swedes cross over the sound (i.e., the border with Denmark) to Copenhagen to buy alcohol and get drunk) is called a problem of traditional America, that the problem was that the (deep sigh) population was, and is, puritan (tch-tch).

This is how the Left rewrites history, (conveniently) forgetting its own role in the equation.

Prohibition is a typical leftist crusade, following the Left's mantra, "we need to change hearts and minds" (en français, il faut changer les mentalités).

Don't believe me?  Take two famous conservatives from the 1920s and the 1930s:  Can you imagine hard drinkers John Wayne or General Patton, first of all, being willing to give up their own whiskey?  And, second, rooting for a new armada of policemen to go around in America's streets and arresting people to stop them from buying and drinking booze?

That would be mighty hard to imagine — not No, but Hell no!

But prohibition was a failure.  And so, the Left drops the history of its participation in, indeed its central role behind, the Prohibition movement and pins the blame all the blame, on Americans, and on America itself

3) SLAVERY (first century of the republic)

Today, slavery is called a terrible American sin

Even though more than half the country (more than half the states) had abolished it by the year 1800 — and were among the first people on the planet to do it. While all the black slaves were in the South — all of them Democrat states.

Here is a question that Dinesh D'Souza asks audiences when he holds speeches:
"Name me a single Republican, dead or alive, who has ever owned a single slave"

Not one audience member can answer, because there are none. (Actually, there is one, adds DDS with a twinkle in his eye:  At one point, Captain Ulysses S Grant did own a slave. But context is key: he inherited the black man from the father of his Southern wife when he died.  But at the time, Grant was a Democrat, and within weeks, in any case, if not days, he started doing the legal work necessary to give the man his freedom.)

Just like with half a century later or so, when slavery became unpopular, Democrats put it all on the backs of the entire country and, in the process, started reinventing themselves — again — as the eternally great moral crusaders of the nation.

But never forget this:  When a Republican won the election of 1860 (Abraham Lincoln), the Democrats went berserk over the presence of such a black-hearted scoundrel in the White House and tore the country apart for four years.

Sounds like Donald Trump in 2016, does it not (although admittedly on a much more extreme level)?

Well, there you have it. 

Incidentally, this was one of Jonah Goldberg's main arguments in his book Liberal Fascism:

In the liberal telling of America's story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and "America" writ large. Progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for.

Meanwhile, real or alleged "conservative" misdeeds — say, McCarthyism — are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight "hard enough" for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for their historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

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

• The 1930s Persecution of the Jews in Europe? It's the Fault of the Nazi Party (Not Germany); The Segregation of Blacks in the South? It's the Fault of the South, or America Writ Large (Not the Democrat Party)