1619 Project

[Kathianne]

I've been so pissed since I read about this in NYT, that I was hoping someone else would start the discussion, alas.

So, the NYT has decided we should all look at American history through the slave perspective. It is only they, that have done anything towards making America a semi-decent place to be. Any accomplishments have been on their backs or by them. Seriously. They have even come up with lesson plans made in conjunction with the Smithsonian, thus using all of our money to change history.

Oh the Founding Fathers? )They don't capitalize that title, they were just lucky heirs to what had already been done with the slaves. The entire Revolution was a response to England wanting to end slavery. There is no mention of the thousands of years that slavery existed prior to 1619, it was all those English colonists doing.

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60532.html#comment-1021541


Retconned America – The 1619 Project
Posted by Sgt. Mom on August 19th, 2019 (All posts by Sgt. Mom)

It appears that this week, the New York Times, the so-called paper of record, upon whom the self-directed spotlight of smug superiority ever shines – has now taken that final, irrevocable step from the business of reporting news and current events, matters cultural and artistic to becoming a purveyor of progressive propaganda. Of course, as characters in British procedural mysteries often say, ‘they have form’ when it comes to progressive propaganda; all the way from Walter Duranty’s reporting on famine in the Soviet Union through the drumbeat of ‘worst war-crime evah!’ in coverage when it came to Abu Ghraib, and the current bête noir – or rather ‘bête orange’ man bad. It seems that it has now become necessary for the Times to make the issue of chattel slavery of black Africans the centerpiece, the foundation stone, the sum and total of American history. Everything – absolutely everything in American history and culture now must be filtered through the pitiless lens of slavery.


Never mind that as a human institution, slavery has existed at least as long as war, prostitution, and agriculture itself. Never mind that black slaves from Africa went largely to the middle east, to the Caribbean and to South America, where they labored in such horrible conditions that few survived, let alone reproduced. Never mind that at least as many English, Irish and Scots arrived in those English colonies in North America as indentured servants laboring under the same brutal conditions. Never mind that at least half of the founding fathers had strong objections to chattel slavery, and less than a hundred years into the great experiment in self-rule, sufficient numbers of Northerners felt strongly enough about it to fight a brutal civil war in order to bring it to an end. And never mind that slavery itself kept the South inefficient, relatively poor, largely inhospitable to industrialization and unattractive to poor and working-class immigrants.


No, all must be reframed and ret-conned; the concept of the United States is fatally stained with the new version of original sin; slavery and racism. There must be nothing left of our traditions and culture in which we can take honest and openly expressed pride. Not throwing off the last ragged remnants of feudal rule, and establishing a democratic republic, wherein the common, ordinary citizen could, by voting, exercise political control of his or her own life. Industrial innovation and creativity in everything from weaving cloth to taming the wild atom, setting up trade networks, exploring and settling a continent, reaching out into space, encouraging social mobility in a manner practically unknown to any other nation … no, all of that and more. Everything about America – that part of it occupied by the United States of – is now marred by the stain of slavery, in the eyes of the NY Times. All because better than half of us who live in it and honor those traditions had the temerity to vote for the ‘bête orange’.


The NY Times, the so-called, duly anointed and authoritative ‘paper of record’ has now taken up the heavy job of entirely re-writing American history. Will they have any luck at this, given the death-grip that the establishment media has on current culture? Or are there enough of us still left who actually read history that we can pull pop culture the other way? Discuss as you wish.




https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/new-goal-for-new-york-times-reframe-american-history-and-target-trump-too


New goal for New York Times: 'Reframe' American history, and target Trump, too by Byron York | August 17, 2019 07:18 PM

by Perhaps when you think of the founding of the United States, you think of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers. Now, the New York Times wants to "reframe" your understanding of the nation's founding.


In the Times' view (which it hopes to make the view of millions of Americans), the country was actually founded in 1619, when the first Africans were brought to North America, to Virginia, to be sold as slaves.


This year marks the 400th anniversary of that event, and the Times has created something called the 1619 Project. This is what the paper hopes the project will accomplish: "It aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."




Another, more concise statement from the Times: "The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history."


The basic thrust of the 1619 Project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It begins with an overview of race in America — "Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true." — written by Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who on Twitter uses the identity Ida Bae Wells, from the crusading late 19th-early 20th century African American journalist Ida B. Wells.


The essays go on to cover the economy ("If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation."), the food we eat ("The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the 'white gold' that fueled slavery."), the nation's physical health ("Why doesn't the United States have universal healthcare? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War."), politics ("America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others."), daily life ("What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot."), and much more.


The Times promises more 1619 Project stories in the future, not just in the paper's news sections, but in the business, sports, travel, and other sections. The Times' popular podcast, The Daily, will also devote time to it.


But a project with the aim of reframing U.S. history has to be more than a bunch of articles and podcasts. A major goal of the 1619 Project is to take the reframing message to schools. The Times has joined an organization called the Pulitzer Center (which, it should be noted, is not the organization that hands out the Pulitzer Prize) to create a 1619 Project curriculum. "Here you will find reading guides, activities, and other resources to bring The 1619 Project into your classroom," the center says in a message to teachers.


The paper also wants to reach into schools itself. "We will be sending some of our writers on multi-city tours to talk to students," Hannah-Jones said recently, "and we will be sending copies of the magazine to high schools and colleges. Because to us, this project really takes wing when young people are able to read this and understand the way that slavery has shaped their country's history."


The project rollout just happened to come at the same time as the leak of a transcript of a Times employee town hall in which the paper's executive editor, Dean Baquet, discussed his "vision" of making race the central theme of Times coverage for the remaining two years of President Trump's term in office.


Baquet spoke frankly about the paper's approach to Trump. For two years, he explained, the Times made a very, very big deal of the Trump-Russia affair. "We built our newsroom to cover one story," Baquet said. But then came the Mueller report, which failed to establish the core allegation against the president: that he and his campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to fix the 2016 election.




"Now we have to regroup," Baquet told the staff, "and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story."


That different story is race — and Trump. "We've got to change," Baquet said. "I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the world's reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that's become so divided by Donald Trump?"


Some on the staff appeared both anguished by the president ("it's a very scary time") and more than ready to make race a key feature of Times coverage.


"I'm wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting?" one staffer asked Baquet. "Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn't racist, I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting."


The staffer's point brought Baquet back to the paper's new initiative. "One reason we all signed off on The 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that," Baquet said. "Race in the next year ... is going to be a huge part of the American story. And I mean, race in terms of not only African Americans and their relationship with Donald Trump, but Latinos and immigration."


So the Times has two big plans. One would be big enough: to focus on the universe of racism accusations that increasingly surround the president at a time when he just happens to be running for reelection. But the other is even bigger: to "reframe" American history in accordance with the values of Times editors. It's an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking for people in what used to be known more simply as the news business.

[Kathianne]

Another.

https://nypost.com/2019/08/19/the-lefts-vile-smear-of-americas-founding/



The left’s vile smear of America’s founding
By Rich Lowry August 19, 2019 | 8:17pm

Beto O’Rourke has taken the measure of America and found it wanting.


“This country, though we would like to think otherwise,” he intoned last weekend, “was founded on racism, has persisted through racism and is racist today.”


This is now a mainstream sentiment in the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders said earlier this year that the United States was “created” in large part “on racist principles.”


The New York Times has begun its so-called 1619 Project, marking the 400th anniversary of the importation of slaves from Africa.


The series seeks nothing less than “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”


It is certainly true that an American nation existed prior to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and slavery was its great sin, with permutations still felt today. But to pretend that racism is the essence of America and constituted one of the country’s founding principles is an odious and reductive lie.


It doesn’t explain why any reference to slavery was kept out of the Constitution. James Madison, per his notes during the drafting convention, “thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”


The careful avoidance of the term was subsequently used to buttress the position of opponents of slavery from John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass. The great black abolitionist asked, “If the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument,” how could it be that “neither slavery, slaveholding nor slave . . . be anywhere found in it?”


The notion of slavery as a founding principle doesn’t explain the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, prior to the adoption of the Constitution, setting out the terms of settlement in the swath of territory between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. It stipulated that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.”


It doesn’t explain why the Constitution permitted the prohibition of the slave trade as of 1808, when it was indeed prohibited.

Beto exploits tragedy for sake of politics
Of course, in crucial respects the Constitution was indeed a compromise with slaveholders. It isn’t clear why it would be considered better if, in the absence of such a compromise, slave states had possibly gone their own way to create a rump nation-state wholly devoted to slavery and not yoked to a North that became more anti-slavery over time.


Rather than enhancing the moral standing of slavery, the Founding tended to undermine it.


“The Revolution suddenly and effectively ended the cultural climate that had allowed black slavery, as well as other forms of bondage and unfreedom, to exist throughout the colonial period without serious challenge,” the historian Gordon Wood writes. In his view, it set in motion the “ideological and social forces” that eventually led to the Civil War.


In the broadest gauge, it’s a mistake to treat the United States as an outlier in terms of its racial attitudes, when it was really an outlier in its (imperfect) embrace of liberty.


“Europeans did not outdo others in enslaving people or treating slaves viciously,” the late historians Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and *Eugene Genovese observe. “They outdid others by creating a Christian civilization that eventually stirred moral condemnation of slavery and roused mass movements against it. Perception of slavery as morally unacceptable — as sinful — did not become widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century.


“Today we ask: How could Christians or any civilized people have lived with themselves as slaveholders? But the historically appropriate question is: What, after millennia of general acceptance, made Christians — and, subsequently, those of other faiths — judge slavery an enormity not to be *endured?”


It’s not a question anyone running in the Democratic presidential primaries, or editing The New York Times, is inclined to ask.

[Kathianne]

https://spectator.org/dean-baquet-kills-the-new-york-times/


Dean Baquet Kills the New York Times
It’s hard to imagine America’s former leading newspaper recovering from what its executive editor admitted last week.
Scott McKay by SCOTT MCKAY
August 19, 2019, 12:05 AM

The revelations from an internal town hall between New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and key members of the paper’s staff, which leaked to Slate and were reported Thursday with an extensive transcript, prove everything we already knew — namely, that the paper was dedicating its coverage and its very credibility to the Trump-Russia narrative.


“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well,” Baquet told the assemblage. “Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.”


Think about that statement for a minute. Baquet says he “built our newsroom” to cover a story which turns out to have been based on a hoax spread by Democrat Party operatives and used by a corrupt Obama administration to spy on innocent American citizens while attempting to prejudice a presidential election.


Had the Times actually covered the back half of the Trump-Russia story, in which the abuses by the Obama and Clinton camps turn out to have been the meat of the thing, it might have been justified to “build our newsroom” around it. But of course that’s not what Baquet did.




Not shockingly, as Baquet admitted, things went badly.


“Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump,” he said, “not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.”


Then came Honest Bob Mueller, who it turns out was a big disappointment to Baquet and his gang.

...

In a way, Baquet has done the country a favor. Now that his performance at the Times’ internal meeting has leaked out, there can be no denying the intentions behind the nonstop accusations of Trump’s racism — and that of every one of his voters by extension — to come in the next year and change before the November 2020 elections.


If the ownership of the Times had any integrity or business sense, they would drop Dean Baquet like a radioactive turd this very day. I can’t think of anything more poisonous than a newspaper’s executive editor essentially publicly admitting his plan to stoke racial animosity in an effort to influence a presidential election when his charge is to present that publication as an objective deliverer of news. Fulfilling that mission is now impossible.


Baquet has to go, as does the newsroom he built in pursuit of a hoax perpetrated on the American people — and he has to go now, before he does any more damage to domestic stability.


So until he does, it isn’t a bad idea for those people unsatisfied with the quotes above to not just refuse to spend a single dime on the Times’ content but also to similarly refuse patronage of its advertisers.


The reason this kind of abuse of the First Amendment happens is those behind it don’t see consequences to their actions. That can’t continue. It’s time to make the Gray Lady suffer.

[Gunny]

:cuckoo:

I'm going to have to read this one a couple of times :laugh:

[Kathianne]

:cuckoo:

I'm going to have to read this one a couple of times :laugh:

Indeed. As I said, they are working on tying lesson plans around 'slavery first' as the base of the US. I don't know how they got the Smithsonian to join in, but will say that the New York Times lesson plans are widely used in high schools and private middle schools.

A few years of this and kids won't have a clue to how the Constitution came to be, it will be considered the ill gotten gains of aristocracy.

[SassyLady]

I don't read NYT. Or the Washington Post.

If it isn't free I'm not reading it.

[SassyLady]

After high school graduation I waited a few years to go to college. I was shocked at the new history books. I was an older adult and I certainly had a ton of questions because it didn't jive with what I had learned. Teachers didn't like me asking questions. When I took American History the books were from Indian and slave viewpoint and was already diminishing white accomplishments. Not quite to the shaming stage it us today though.

It's crap like this that makes me thankful I have more yesterdays than tomorrows.

[Kathianne]

I don't read NYT. Or the Washington Post.

If it isn't free I'm not reading it.

I hear that. What the point though of the upset is that it is to change how people look at the country, starting with teaching from the very start. If the Times is going there, it will become part of the news media very quickly and it would take only a generation or two to be complete.

[SassyLady]

I hear that. What the point though of the upset is that it is to change how people look at the country, starting with teaching from the very start. If the Times is going there, it will become part of the news media very quickly and it would take only a generation or two to be complete.

Yeppers. Upsets me as well.

[Kathianne]

Getting into it a bit. Like Sassy, I do not subscribe to the NYT, nor do I have time to dig into the revisionism they are writing. Luckily, others do.

BTW, this really is all about today's politics, in the sense of 'proving' the conservatives, this president in particular, are racists. That they are smearing the whole history of the United States, to make people who had no power centuries ago, the lead characters? Well that's how one revises history.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1163495003659952128.html





Dan McLaughlin
@baseballcrank
a day ago, 25 tweets, 5 min read

That's one of the more obviously a historical claims in this piece, if you know anything at all about the history of British or American abolitionism or the origins of the American revolution.



America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One

Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. For generations, black Americans have fought to make them true.


https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html

RBe
@RBPundit


Imagine hating the United States so bad that you want to rewrite history and claim that the American Revolution was started because England wanted to ban slavery.


Imagine thinking that and thinking you're the sane one.


981
9:52 AM - Aug 19, 2019


Go read on the decades of William Wilberforce's uphill battles against slavery in Parliament - @ericmetaxas tells the story very dramatically - if you think Britain was on the eve of banning slavery in 1775, much less that the colonists in Massachusetts were worried about that.


The Revolution was fought, in part, by slaveowners. It was not, for most of its participants, fought *for* slavery.


The Constitution was written, in part, by slaveowners. It avoided disrupting slavery. But it was not written *for* slavery, nor to increase its power vs 1786.


The whole reason the Republican Party exists is bc America had universal Founding principles to go back to, when opponents of expanding slavery wanted to fuse that cause with broader political movements that drew on the same sources. If that's a lie, so is everything Lincoln did.


5. Let's talk a little here about classical liberalism, the ideology of the American Founders & the Lincoln Republicans. Classical liberalism is not the same as conservatism. But by marrying it to conservatism, American conservatives created a uniquely powerful fusion. @Gunny


6. Conservatism, of course, begins with the particular & familiar and in Lincoln's words, "adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried." Community. Order. Hearth & home. Without stated principles, conservatism is tribal because humans are tribal.



7. Progressivism, as the opposite of conservatism, in theory rejects the tribe in favor of The State, but in every practical iteration, because it empowers The State to bestow favors, it not only picks favorites but develops theories to make some tribes more equal than others.


8. The greatness of classical liberalism is that it is both universal & constraining: it makes promises that defy tribal category, & it limits state power & state favor in ways that ameliorate the natural tribal tendency.


9. Classical liberalism can be reconciled, if always imperfectly, with conservatism; fusion of the two gives content & continuity to the society under classical liberal governance while restraining the tribal tendency by forcing it to work within a framework of universal ideas.


10. Classical liberalism cannot, by contrast, be reconciled with progressivism, as progressivism rejects the idea of neutral rules or their authority to restrain whatever is deemed "progress," and requires for its justification a hierarchy of groups rather than equal individuals.


11. The connection between modern progressivism & identity-politics grievance is too fundamental to be capable of restraint by neutral principles, & progressive intellectuals often reject the concept of neutral principles or of the primacy of individual over group identity.


12. Conservatism, when married to classical liberalism, preserves a natural balance: group identity exists organically in communities, but the state must stay evenhanded towards individuals. For conservatives, that equilibrium takes work. For progressives, it is anathema.


13. Discrediting neutral-principles classical liberalism as always a pretext for group identity politics is THE ballgame for progressivism; it's the biggest intellectual prize & one that pervades progressive academia. Reframing the American Founding as a lie is make-or-break.


14. For Republicans, by contrast, the party ceases to have any reason to exist if we buy into the progressive premise of an endless struggle of group identities, rather than adhering to the tried & tested Lincoln formulation of a government of universal, individual principles. ( My edit: i.e., tribalism/populism)



15. This is why so many conservative intellectuals recoil at Trumpism, aside from Trump's persona: because it cedes the first principle to progressivism, rather than wielding the legacy bequeathed us by Washington & Lincoln. In that sense, both fights are the same fight.


16. The conservative reaction to the 1619 Project cannot be understood outside the context of that ongoing debate over whether the classical liberal doctrines of 1776, 1787, & 1865 were, and remain, the legitimate ideological backbone of the American way.


17. You need not to be any more a friend of slavery than Abe Lincoln was to adhere to those ideas; without them his cause would have failed, as would MLK's. A society without neutral, universal principles has no language with which to persuade the majority against its interests.


18. Of course, classical liberal principles alone did not defeat slavery, nor Jim Crow; there was also an older, shared language, that of Christianity, in which to reproach the majority in the name of its own principles. Today's Right critics of Lincolnism get this half right.


19. If we lose the shared language of classical liberalism, then both Right & Left are left with no better choice than to choose the strongest fighter for their tribe. Most of human history goes this way, & we know where it ends.


20. Lincoln saw the American Founding as legitimate, and in its legitimacy he found the tools to defeat slavery. His example even helped inspire more illiberal regimes, from Egypt to Russia to Brazil, to abandon servitude.


21. Progressivism, lacking such touchstones of external legitimacy, can never impose on its own constituencies such a demand. It can only follow the logic of the tribe, by which the favored in-group is to be rewarded by sacrifice of the out-group.


22. For all these reasons, any effort to delegitimize the very ideas that were used to dismantle American slavery & segregation should be regarded with suspicion. That doesn't mean we bury the reality or history of enslavement; Lincoln & Douglass faced it graphically.


23. But it does mean that we still hold those same truths to be self-evident. And we still see America as the shining city on the hill because it was founded on them. America was never without sin, but the nature of our Founding is what allowed sin to be condemned as such.


24. In short: slavery is the "yes, but" of the American Founding. It is no basis to discredit its greatness, but rather the reason why the Founding principles remained vital to keep examining.


25. If you get that wrong, if you embrace instead the collective & the group over "ALL men are created equal" no matter who their ancestors were, then you will always be against the friends of liberty wheresoever they are found. Individual liberty was good then, and it still is.

[Kathianne]

and Jim Geraghty, always an interesting take, once you start 'reframing history, all must follow from there.' Thus black history changes too:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-1619-project-leaves-out/



What The 1619 Project Leaves Out
By JIM GERAGHTY
August 20, 2019 1:12 PM


“The goal of The 1619 Project, a major initiative from The New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates, is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year,” The New York Times Magazine editors declare. “Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

The scale of the opening offering is massive by the standards of modern journalism: 100 pages (with a few ads), ten essays, a photo essay, and a collection of original poems and stories from 16 additional writers.


But the 1619 Project’s effort to “reframe American history” requires cropping out some significant figures in African-American history. Perhaps no near-100-page collection of essays, poems and photos could cover every significant figure in African-American history, but the number of prominent figures who never even get mentioned or who get only the most cursory treatment is pretty surprising.


Early in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay, she reiterates the important point, “in every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.” The name Crispus Attucks is mentioned three times, but he is, as far as I can tell, the lone black Revolutionary War combatant mentioned. James Armistead was a spy for Lafayette who had access to General Cornwallis’s headquarters. Back in 1996, the New York Times wrote about the First Rhode Island Regiment, who fought at Newport and Pine’s Bridge, and in a regrouped form, Yorktown. By one account, one-quarter of the American forces at the battle of Yorktown were black. The 1619 Project does not mention the Battle of Yorktown.


One might argue that the essay authors preferred to focus on lesser-known African-American historical figures . . . but you really have to strain to contend James Armistead is sufficiently widely known already. Could anyone seriously argue that African-American contributions to the Revolutionary War are too well-known?


Martin Delany was an abolitionist, the first African American accepted to Harvard Medical School (white students quickly forced him out), and the first African-American field grade officer in the U.S. Army in 1865. He’s quoted once in passing.


In the early 1860s, about 179,000 black men enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops, almost 10 percent of the entire Union army. The U.S. Colored Troops are not mentioned in the 1619 Project. The Buffalo Soldiers are not mentioned in the 1619 Project. There is a brief mention of African-American soldiers heading west after the Civil War: “Even while bearing slavery’s scars, black men found themselves carrying out orders to secure white residents of Western towns, track down ‘‘outlaws’’ (many of whom were people of color), police the federally imposed boundaries of Indian reservations and quell labor strikes.”

In the seven times African-American soldiers mentioned, they are generally described as victims who have merely shifted from one system of subjugation and exploitation to another.
There’s no mention of the Harlem Hellfighters fighting in World War One, and no mention of Dorie Miller’s heroism at Pearl Harbor. The horrors of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male are discussed, but the Tuskegee Airmen are never mentioned.


African-American heroism on the battlefield doesn’t really fit the narrative that the 1619 Project is trying to tell. In fact, you could argue that the essays are so wedded to a narrative of white brutality and black victimhood that they seem to fear that spotlighting any example of a successful African-American defiance of oppression would undermine their argument. In the reframing of the 1619 Project, African-American success stories disappear. There’s no mention of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympic Games. There’s no mention of Jackie Robinson. There’s no mention of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the African-American mathematicians who worked for NASA as depicted in the film Hidden Figures. Wilberforce University in Ohio, the first college owned and operated by African Americans, is not mentioned.


The attack on Negro Fort in Florida is mentioned, but not the existence of its nearby predecessor Fort Mose, the first free African-American community in North America, founded in the 1730s.


Frederick Douglass is mentioned twice. W.E.B. du Bois is quoted once. Thurgood Marshall is mentioned once.


Harriet Tubman is never mentioned. Nor is Booker T. Washington nor is Bishop Richard Allen, who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first independent black denomination in the United States. Abolitionist Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisom (the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress), Benjamin Oliver Davis Sr. (the first African-American general for the U.S. Army), Ida Wells (a journalist who documented lynchings and co-founded the NAACP), Duke Ellington, and Rosa Parks are never mentioned.


Would the country as a whole be better off with a greater understanding of slavery and its legacy in American history? Absolutely. (The country would be better off with more understanding of just about any chapter of American history.) The 1619 Project argues, with considerable justification, that most of us been seeing only one part of the portrait of the founding, formation, and growth of our country . . . and then “reframes” the portrait to leave out some of the most consequential and under-discussed African Americans in our history.

[Kathianne]

I'm aware that not everyone is going to be super interested in this topic, but I am gathering the links and gist in most cases so I can look more deeply when time permits. I'm really riled about it, but doubt many others will get all worked up. :laugh2:

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/20/ghost-john-c-calhoun-haunts-todays-american-left/



The Ghost Of John C. Calhoun Haunts Today’s American Left
The irony of the New York Times’ 1619 Project is that it embraces the critique of the American Founding espoused by the leading defender of Southern slavery, Sen. John C. Calhoun.
By John Daniel Davidson
AUGUST 20, 2019


It’s impossible to understand The New York Times’ 1619 Project as anything but sweeping historical revisionism in the service of contemporary left-wing politics.


The gist of the project, named for the year the first Africans were brought to North America to be sold as slaves, is that everything about America, from our capitalist economy to our politics to the food we eat, can be explained by slavery and race. In other words, America was conceived in sin, born of evil intent, and all its lofty ideals about equality and liberty are nothing but a sham—the hypocritical stylings of slavers and white supremacists bent on the subjugation of their fellow man.

The Times is unambiguous: “In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.” The arrival of those slaves in Virginia in 1619, we’re told, “inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years and form the basis for almost every aspect of American life.”


Everything that made America exceptional, every aspect of American life, all of it the legacy of slavery. The Times’ entire purpose here, by its own admission, is to “reframe the country’s history” by placing slavery “at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” It should come as no surprise that, in this telling, we are an irredeemably wicked people, and always have been.


The 1619 Project Is Garbage History

...

[icansayit]

Maybe we will all understand WHY, and WHO's idea this is.

Namely....this fellow.... https://images.haarets.co.il/image/upload/w_1496,q_auto,c_fill,f_auto/fl_any_format.preserve_transparency.progressive:no ne/v1556128772/1.7164627.2043494396.jpg

[Kathianne]

Getting into it a bit. Like Sassy, I do not subscribe to the NYT, nor do I have time to dig into the revisionism they are writing. Luckily, others do.

BTW, this really is all about today's politics, in the sense of 'proving' the conservatives, this president in particular, are racists. That they are smearing the whole history of the United States, to make people who had no power centuries ago, the lead characters? Well that's how one revises history.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1163495003659952128.html

Interesting article I found in light of the above. Read the sections on 'progressives' and then this written a couple years ago. The legacy of Calhoun:

https://thefederalist.com/2017/08/03/confederacy-still-lingers-within-progressivism-birthed/



The Confederacy Still Lingers Within The Progressivism That Birthed It


Progressives are outraged that a new HBO series will depict a modern-day Confederacy. But they have more in common with the Confederacy than they realize.


By John Daniel Davidson
AUGUST 3, 2017


What if the South had won the Civil War? That’s the premise of a new HBO series from “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, called “Confederate.” The series will be set in a present-day America in which slavery is legal, the secession of 1861 was successful, and another civil war is brewing.


Although still in its infancy, the project has already drawn backlash from progressives who are offended at the idea of two white men producing a show about modern-day slavery. A grassroots effort to quash the series spring up on Twitter under the hashtag #NoConfederate, and some have called it “slavery fanfic” despite assurances to the contrary from Benioff and Weiss that the show won’t be some kind of weird alt-right fantasy.




But progressives shouldn’t be so quick to denounce dramatic depictions of a sci-fi Confederacy. After all, modern-day progressivism is one of the Confederacy’s most enduring legacies in America today. Whether they realize it or not, progressives themselves are among the inheritors of the political ideology that led to the Civil War.


Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo wrote this week that the real-life Confederacy wasn’t the caricature of a rural backwater so often in popular depictions of the Civil War but an economically vibrant, industrializing region that had more in common with the modern-day administrative state than most Americans realize. But Guelzo only hints at the deeper links between Confederate governance and present-day progressivism:


The Confederate government centralized political authority in ways that made a hash of states’ rights, nationalized industries in ways historians have compared to ‘state socialism,’ and imposed the first compulsory national draft in American history. If Benioff and Weiss are successful in creating an alternative world in Confederate, it will shock us fully as much as Game of Thrones has — not for how much of the Confederate future we avoided, but how little.


If that sounds crazy to you, it’s because the dominant narratives about the Civil War and the South are by now so familiar, even if they’re largely wrong. Adding to the confusion is the mainstream media’s penchant for portraying Republican voters in the South as a bunch of Confederate flag-waving racists, while casting progressive Democrats as defenders of equality and sincere advocates for social justice.


John C. Calhoun Sowed Modern Progressivism


The truth is more complicated — and more uncomfortable for progressives, should they choose to face it. And no, I’m not talking about the facile argument that the Civil War was “really about states’ rights.” The war was most certainly about slavery. So much so, in fact, that decades before the war came, southern leaders were thinking about how best to preserve it in a country that was expanding westward.




Chief among them was John C. Calhoun, who could see as early as 1846 that unless more slave states were added to the nation, a growing number of new free states would eventually make it impossible for southern states to veto antislavery legislation in the Senate, as they repeatedly had done to the Wilmot Proviso in the late 1840s. Eventually, free states would have a three-fourths majority to abolish slavery by amending the Constitution without the consent of any southern states.


Calhoun considered this a “tyranny of the majority,” and developed a novel political theory that would preserve the “minority” rights of the slave states: the doctrine of the concurrent majority. Stated simply, the doctrine maintained that within the framework of American constitutionalism, certain minority groups (like slave states) had the right to veto decisions of the majority, which could only act with the acquiescence of the minority. Hence, these minorities also had the right to secede from the union — secession was merely a form of veto.


The late political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa wrote that Calhoun’s theory was the antithesis of the Founders’ and Abraham Lincoln’s understanding of the Constitution, which held that states could only secede for just causes — they could “alter or abolish” a tyrannical government, essentially by making the same case the Declaration of Independence made. Secession on any other basis could only lead to anarchy.

...

[Kathianne]

Ted Cruz on NYT, Trump

https://victorygirlsblog.com/ted-cruz-takes-new-york-times-to-the-woodshed/



August 18, 2019
Ted Cruz Takes New York Times To The Woodshed
by Nina Bookout in politics


Ted Cruz ripped into the New York Times today. He took the Old Gray Lady to the woodshed for their blatant Trump hatred and for going all in to further stoke racial tensions across the country.

“Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Sunday joined President Trump in lashing out at the New York Times over the paper’s coverage of the president.

“The NYT is destroying itself w/ Trump hatred. And it’s ultimately bad for freedom of the press when ‘journalists’ openly revel in being partisan propagandists. When our Nation is so tribalised that each side has their own ‘news’ & ‘facts’ and we don’t even talk to each other,” Cruz tweeted.

He called the paper a “propaganda outlet by liberals, for liberals.””

Cruz is correct. The New York Times is destroying itself from within all because Trump won and Hillary didn’t. Since the election, numerous news items printed by the Gray Lady have been found to be hiding facts, taking speeches and incidents completely out of context in order to fit the narrative, and fanning the flames of Trump Bad!

Just last week, as the New York Times was triumphantly announcing their 1619 Project, a contentious internal NY Times town hall became public. Multiple staffers asked the SAME question.

“Could you explain your decision not to more regularly use the word racist in reference to the president’s actions?” [Emphasis Added]

Read the entire town hall dialogue here. I promise you, it isn’t a waste of your time and will illustrate just how incredibly biased the New York Times is. Journalism for them means go after Trump, no holds barred. Facts? To hell with facts.


Baquet is all worried that overusing words like racist, lying, liar, racism will diffuse their meaning, so he wants the news room to be cautious in their use of those words. The news room was having none of it. Furthermore, that 1619 Project of theirs is one that is being urged upon school districts and the NY Times is here to tell us that the ONLY reason this country was founded was because of it’s racist past that started with the first slave ship arriving in 1619.


But sure! Let’s be careful to not overuse those ugly words shall we?


@tedcruz
It’s also deeply cynical—at a time when racial tensions are raw, for the NYT to be deliberately stoking the fires of racial tension & hatred. Ironically, their approach is the obverse of their original headline (before they succumbed to the mob): “NYT Urges Racism Vs Unity.” https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1163137145218973696 …


@tedcruz
The NYT is destroying itself w/ Trump hatred. And it’s ultimately bad for freedom of the press when “journalists” openly revel in being partisan propagandists. When our Nation is so tribalised that each side has their own “news” & “facts” and we don’t even talk to each other. https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1163135857320235009 …
10:38 AM - Aug 18, 2019


It is indeed deeply cynical. Yet that is where the NY Times has gone. The Russia narrative isn’t working, so let’s pivot to racism! That’s the ticket!




@SharylAttkisson
The takeaway? The NYT says it is mapping out a narrative in advance of any naturally-occurring, true news events, and plans to shape all natural-occurring, true news events so that they are reported in the context of racism. This is what they believe their readers want. https://twitter.com/SaraCarterDC/status/1162344323712802817 …




@SaraCarterDC
Read this and you’ll understand what’s happened in top newsrooms and why Independent investigative journalism is so important - these editors are shaping narratives at the expense of truth - to line their pockets and push political agendas. Very sad. https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1162339895135940608 …
6:22 PM - Aug 16, 2019


There are some readers who do want this horrible kind of dialogue. In fact, someone got the memo early.
Yes, O’Rourke in his REBOOT the other day also called Trump a racist. However, it seems he’s adopted the NY Times narrative 100%. Here’s the relevant clip if you don’t want to watch all 30 minutes of his arm flailing pandering.


@BetoORourke
Our country was founded on racism—and is still racist today. In Arkansas, I said why I believe there’s no denying this reality; and why it’s on all of us to change it.
8:16 AM - Aug 18, 2019

Other “journalists” have gotten the memo as well. Salon is here to tell us that all Republicans and Trump are the ones that hate America. Why? Because Trump keeps pointing out all the crime problems in cities like Baltimore and Chicago. Cities that have a higher population of blacks. Hey Salon? Pointing out the high crime issues and the fact that those cities have been Democrat run for decades is NOT hatred of America. Pointing out the failures of those city governments is actual TRUTH, not hatred. Nice try at the narrative though.


Ted Cruz is correct. The New York Times would rather spend all their time in full frothed hatred of Trump instead of engaging in reporting the NEWS. There must always be a spin. The NY Times town hall has made it clear. ‘We are crafting and deciding what is news. You’d better like it…or else.’


What’s ironic is that all the liberal media outlets and Democrat Presidential candidates are running around parroting Fake News and telling the world that Republicans and Trump are the racist ones. Tell me again which party worked to free the slaves?

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Ted Cruz on NYT, Trump

https://victorygirlsblog.com/ted-cruz-takes-new-york-times-to-the-woodshed/

The New York Slimes, yes I spit on them all-- the entire bunch of arrogant elitist asshats that push their leftist ideology and smug views as fact, as truth, as reality.
Such worthless vermin make me want to vomit....--Tyr

[Gunny]

Indeed. As I said, they are working on tying lesson plans around 'slavery first' as the base of the US. I don't know how they got the Smithsonian to join in, but will say that the New York Times lesson plans are widely used in high schools and private middle schools.

A few years of this and kids won't have a clue to how the Constitution came to be, it will be considered the ill gotten gains of aristocracy.I've kind of been pointing out this topic for years (decades). THE biggest problem is mainstream, middle class white (and anyone that doesn't want to be called Uncle Tom or racist) won't discuss the topic. Post thread after thread and it's crickets chirping time. A topic cannot be discussed if you won't say the name out of fear of being called a name.

Blacks are disproportionately represented to mainstream America in every facet of our lives. It is and has been a concerted effort by the apologetic left who claim to have a cause. I'm still waiting for the Dems to actually deliver anything meaningful. Anyone who wants a good look at the future where this is going need only look at what "entitled" blacks with no skills did to South Africa. That country is now so far behind the 8 ball Greece looks like a wealthy haven by comparison.

Blacks make up between 13-15% of the US population, depending on whose numbers you want to use. 13-15%. You would think they were 70% and the majority they way they are presented and/or forced into everything from something as simple as comic book characters suddenly becoming black who were white for decades to the number of black representatives in our government.

I will add the same strategy is being used for gays. By the time it's said and done if they have their way, gays will have populated the Earth :rolleyes:

There isn't a black, a female and a gay white male in every damned social group; yet, to listen to the media, and I mean ALL forms of media, you would think so. All anyone that doesn't want to see blacks has to do is get away from their rat-infested cities. You go out in the country where one has to work constantly to get by and there is no audience to feel sorry for the plight of their ancestors 2 centuries ago and blacks are few and far between.

Just like the nameless, not wealthy socialists that are all for socialism, one has to wonder just where all these whites like O'Rourke and Warren think they fit in the big scheme of things after they have enabled the unworthy to dispossess those that worked to build this country. How stupid and blind do you have to be to realize "hey, I'm white and cutting my own throat"?

When numbers are presented proportionally, blacks just aren't really part of the big picture. Unfortunately, the progressive left has been rewriting our history since Day One. They aren't going to stop and nobody is going to stop them. If this continues as is, whites will be dispossessed just because they are white and owe blacks, the very reason given by the black government of S Africa to do it.

Why? Because whites are afraid to say enough and call a spade a spade (pun intended). Wouldn't want to save our history and heritage from being rewritten by actually saying the progressive blacks on the left are out to destroy white America the same as the progressive left is out to destroy free America.

[Kathianne]

I've kind of been pointing out this topic for years (decades). THE biggest problem is mainstream, middle class white (and anyone that doesn't want to be called Uncle Tom or racist) won't discuss the topic. Post thread after thread and it's crickets chirping time. A topic cannot be discussed if you won't say the name out of fear of being called a name.

Blacks are disproportionately represented to mainstream America in every facet of our lives. It is and has been a concerted effort by the apologetic left who claim to have a cause. I'm still waiting for the Dems to actually deliver anything meaningful. Anyone who wants a good look at the future where this is going need only look at what "entitled" blacks with no skills did to South Africa. That country is now so far behind the 8 ball Greece looks like a wealthy haven by comparison.

Blacks make up between 13-15% of the US population, depending on whose numbers you want to use. 13-15%. You would think they were 70% and the majority they way they are presented and/or forced into everything from something as simple as comic book characters suddenly becoming black who were white for decades to the number of black representatives in our government.

I will add the same strategy is being used for gays. By the time it's said and done if they have their way, gays will have populated the Earth :rolleyes:

There isn't a black, a female and a gay white male in every damned social group; yet, to listen to the media, and I mean ALL forms of media, you would think so. All anyone that doesn't want to see blacks has to do is get away from their rat-infested cities. You go out in the country where one has to work constantly to get by and there is no audience to feel sorry for the plight of their ancestors 2 centuries ago and blacks are few and far between.

Just like the nameless, not wealthy socialists that are all for socialism, one has to wonder just where all these whites like O'Rourke and Warren think they fit in the big scheme of things after they have enabled the unworthy to dispossess those that worked to build this country. How stupid and blind do you have to be to realize "hey, I'm white and cutting my own throat"?

When numbers are presented proportionally, blacks just aren't really part of the big picture. Unfortunately, the progressive left has been rewriting our history since Day One. They aren't going to stop and nobody is going to stop them. If this continues as is, whites will be dispossessed just because they are white and owe blacks, the very reason given by the black government of S Africa to do it.

Why? Because whites are afraid to say enough and call a spade a spade (pun intended). Wouldn't want to save our history and heritage from being rewritten by actually saying the progressive blacks on the left are out to destroy white America the same as the progressive left is out to destroy free America.


Gunny, I'm not certain I'm understanding you here? If it were blacks that came up with this idea, then I think I'd get it, but it's quite obvious this is seems to be coming from a group of middle aged Ivy alumni who sat around drinking for years and ended up at the NYT, one of them as an editor.

When the Russian plan failed, someone said, "Hey, we can dust off the slave perspective thing we used to do while playing beer pong years ago. We'll use it as the base of how all the white supremacists that voted Trump are throwing the heroes of country under the bus and they will lose and be forever the pariahs they deserve. We'll always have the people of color votes!"

[FakeNewsSux]

Gunny, I'm not certain I'm understanding you here? If it were blacks that came up with this idea, then I think I'd get it, but it's quite obvious this is seems to be coming from a group of middle aged Ivy alumni who sat around drinking for years and ended up at the NYT, one of them as an editor.

Do you get it now?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Pulitzer2018-dean-baquet-20180530-wp.jpg/220px-Pulitzer2018-dean-baquet-20180530-wp.jpg
Dean P. Baquet (/bæˈkeɪ/ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English);[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baquet#cite_note-1) born September 21, 1956)[2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baquet#cite_note-localreporting-2) is an American (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_America) journalist. He has been the executive editor of The New York Times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times) since May 14, 2014. Between 2011 and 2014 Baquet was managing editor under the previous executive editor Jill Abramson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Abramson). He is the first black American to serve as executive editor.[3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baquet#cite_note-3)

[Kathianne]

Do you get it now?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Pulitzer2018-dean-baquet-20180530-wp.jpg/220px-Pulitzer2018-dean-baquet-20180530-wp.jpg
Dean P. Baquet (/bæˈkeɪ/ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English);[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baquet#cite_note-1) born September 21, 1956)[2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baquet#cite_note-localreporting-2) is an American (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_America) journalist. He has been the executive editor of The New York Times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times) since May 14, 2014. Between 2011 and 2014 Baquet was managing editor under the previous executive editor Jill Abramson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Abramson). He is the first black American to serve as executive editor.[3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baquet#cite_note-3)


Do you get it now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baquet



Baquet graduated from St. Augustine High School (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Augustine_High_School_(New_Orleans)) in 1974.[6] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baquet#cite_note-6) Baquet studied English at Columbia University (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University) from 1974 to 1978; he dropped out to pursue a career in journalism.[7 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baquet#cite_note-7)

[Kathianne]

When the NYT loses The Week:

https://theweek.com/articles/859776/new-york-times-surrenders-left-race



The New York Times surrenders to the left on race
Damon Linker
August 20, 2019


There's no denying that the much-lauded "1619 Project" at The New York Times is a remarkable achievement. Whether it's an achievement that the paper and its staff should be proud of is another matter.


For those who haven't been following along, this past weekend the paper devoted the entirety (just under 100 pages) of The New York Times Magazine, along with a separate stand-alone section of the Sunday paper, to a breathtakingly ambitious and ideologically radical undertaking — nothing less than the telling of the story of American history, perhaps for the very first time, "truthfully."


Inside, a note from NYTM editor Jake Silverstein informs his readers that it is wrong to trace the true origin of the United States to the founding of the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, or to the landing of the Puritans at Plymouth Rock in 1620, or to the publication of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Instead, the Times proposes to overturn such mythmaking in favor of an effort to "reframe American history," treating 1619 as "our nation's birth year."

Why 1619? Because that's when the first ship carrying African slaves arrived on American shores, and the Times intends to place "the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country." This reframing is necessary because out of slavery "grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional."


Now, there is a lot to admire in the paper's presentation of the 1619 Project — searing photographs, illuminating quotations from archival material, samples of poetry and fiction giving powerful voice to the black experience, and gripping journalistic summaries of scholarly histories. Much of it is wrenching, moving, and infuriating. The country's treatment of the slaves and their descendants through the century following emancipation and, in some respects, on down to the present was and is appalling — and the story of how it happened, and keeps happening, is extremely important for understanding the United States. Bringing this story to a wide audience is a worthwhile public service.


Yet that isn't the point of the 1619 project. The point, once again, is to "reframe American history" so that this appalling history stands at the very center of who we are as a country. Achieving that goal has required the Times to treat history in a highly sensationalistic, reductionistic, and tendentious way, with the cumulative result resembling agitprop more than responsible journalism or scholarship. Putting aside any pretense toward nuance or complexity, the paper has surrendered to the sensibility of left-wing political activists. The result is unpersuasive — and a sad comment on the state of our country's public life.


Throughout the issue of the NYTM, headlines make, with just slight variations, the same rhetorical move over and over again: "Here is something unpleasant, unjust, or even downright evil about life in the present-day United States. Bet you didn't realize that slavery is ultimately to blame." Lack of universal access to health care? High rates of sugar consumption? Callous treatment of incarcerated prisoners? White recording artists "stealing" black music? Harsh labor practices? That's right — all of it, and far more, follows from slavery.

...

And the 1619 Project is all about advancing a radical political agenda. The message it aims to convey is clear: The United States is and always has been, from its very origin, a racist country infected by a white supremacist ideology that has birthed and nurtured institutions and systems — from Congress to capitalism — that systematically disadvantage black Americans. Political actors of the present have a simple choice: They can either embrace (invariably left-liberal or socialist) policies that will begin the process of dismantling these pervasive forms of structural injustice — or they can oppose doing so and ensure that the injustices continue, with toxic racism remaining where it has been for the past four centuries, at the very center of American life. Those are the choices.

...

[Gunny]

Gunny, I'm not certain I'm understanding you here? If it were blacks that came up with this idea, then I think I'd get it, but it's quite obvious this is seems to be coming from a group of middle aged Ivy alumni who sat around drinking for years and ended up at the NYT, one of them as an editor.

When the Russian plan failed, someone said, "Hey, we can dust off the slave perspective thing we used to do while playing beer pong years ago. We'll use it as the base of how all the white supremacists that voted Trump are throwing the heroes of country under the bus and they will lose and be forever the pariahs they deserve. We'll always have the people of color votes!"I mentioned that. Certainly blacks did not come up with the idea. White, apologetic progressives did. IMO, it started out mainly to punish the South post-Civil War and took on a life of its own. Lincoln promised freed blacks 40 acres and a mule they're still waiting on.

You see this as a Trump thing and I see it at something that has been fostered by the welfare mentality and telling blacks they are entitled to reparation for their ancestors being slaves. Trump had nothing to do with the discussion before Trump and I was already having it. It could be both.

The issue has been there since the end of the US Civil War, and groomed by revisionists since. If it's a handy topic to regurgitate so the NYT than can get the focus on anything but itself, I have no issue with that point. The NYT is not going to get the spotlight off itself covering something that isn't progressive and above all controversial enough to shift the focus.

SO if you're saying the NYT sucks, I would have agreed with you before this thread :) The issue itself irks the crap out of me. You should know by now what I think about revising history. It's no wonder we can't learn from it. We don't know what it is.

It does not surprise me that public schools would use the trash the NYT provides them. Want to bet the schools are jumping on free books (gifts or grants) with little regard to content? You would know better than I.

[Kathianne]

I mentioned that. Certainly blacks did not come up with the idea. White, apologetic progressives did. IMO, it started out mainly to punish the South post-Civil War and took on a life of its own. Lincoln promised freed blacks 40 acres and a mule they're still waiting on.

You see this as a Trump thing and I see it at something that has been fostered by the welfare mentality and telling blacks they are entitled to reparation for their ancestors being slaves. Trump had nothing to do with the discussion before Trump and I was already having it. It could be both.

The issue has been there since the end of the US Civil War, and groomed by revisionists since. If it's a handy topic to regurgitate so the NYT than can get the focus on anything but itself, I have no issue with that point. The NYT is not going to get the spotlight off itself covering something that isn't progressive and above all controversial enough to shift the focus.

SO if you're saying the NYT sucks, I would have agreed with you before this thread :) The issue itself irks the crap out of me. You should know by now what I think about revising history. It's no wonder we can't learn from it. We don't know what it is.

It does not surprise me that public schools would use the trash the NYT provides them. Want to bet the schools are jumping on free books (gifts or grants) with little regard to content? You would know better than I.

No, this comes from the NYT itself, on how to 'deal with Trump' once the Mueller/Russia thing died. This is what the NYT is now going to push! White Supremacy, based on it being the problem since 1619.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/new-goal-for-new-york-times-reframe-american-history-and-target-trump-too

[Kathianne]

That this was leaked proves that someone there realized just how bad this is. Leaked meeting of 1619 project:

https://www.conservativedailynews.com/2019/08/leaked-transcript-of-new-york-time-crisis-meeting-full-text/




Executive Editor Dean Baquet held a crisis town hall Monday after the maelstrom that erupted over a Trump headline. Someone at that meeting recorded, transcribed and then leaked the transcription.


The meeting ranged from how the bad headline got past the editorial process to how they intend to cover Trump going forward.


Baquet admits they purpose-built the newsroom to cover the Russia-collusion conspiracy theory as a singular storyline from a singular, prejudicial viewpoint. He then goes on to explain that since that didn’t work, they’ll reconfigure the newsroom to paint the President of the United States as a racist, without actually calling him that.


Full transcript of the 8/19/19 meeting at the New York Times
Dean Baquet: If we’re really going to be a transparent newsroom that debates these issues among ourselves and not on Twitter, I figured I should talk to the whole newsroom, and hear from the whole newsroom. We had a couple of significant missteps, and I know you’re concerned about them, and I am, too. But there’s something larger at play here. This is a really hard story, newsrooms haven’t confronted one like this since the 1960s. It got trickier after [inaudible] … went from being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character. We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story. I’d love your help with that. As Audra Burch said when I talked to her this weekend, this one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019. It is a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred, but it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years. In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world. We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story.

But I also want to [inaudible] this as a forum to say something about who we are and what we stand for. We are an independent news organization, one of the few remaining. And that means there will be stories and journalism of all kinds that will upset our readers and even some of you. I’m not talking about true errors. In those cases, we should listen, own up to them, admit them, show some humility—but not wallow in them—and move on. What I’m saying is that our readers and some of our staff cheer us when we take on Donald Trump, but they jeer at us when we take on Joe Biden. They sometimes want us to pretend that he was not elected president, but he was elected president. And our job is to figure out why, and how, and to hold the administration to account. If you’re independent, that’s what you do. The same newspaper that this week will publish the 1619 Project, the most ambitious examination of the legacy of slavery ever undertaken in [inaudible] newspaper, to try to understand the forces that led to the election of Donald Trump. And that means trying to understand the segment of America that probably does not read us. The same newspaper that can publish a major story on Fox News, and how some of its commentators purvey anti-immigrant conspiracies, also has to talk to people who think immigration may cost them jobs and who oppose abortion on religious grounds. Being independent also means not editing the New York Times for Twitter, which can be unforgiving and toxic. And actually, as Amanda Cox reminds me, doesn’t really represent the left or the right. [inaudible] who care deeply about the Times and who want us to do better, we should listen to those people. But it is also filled with people who flat out don’t like us or who, as Jack Shafer put it, want us to be something we are not going to be.


By the way, let’s catch our breath before tweeting stupid stuff or stuff that hurts the paper—or treats our own colleagues in a way that we would never treat them in person. It is painful to me personally, and it destabilizes the newsroom when our own staff tweets things they could never write in our own pages or when we attack each other on Twitter. But let me end where I began: This is hard stuff. We’re covering a president who lies and says outlandish things. It should summon all of our resources and call upon all of our efforts to build a newsroom where diversity and open discussion is valued. We will make mistakes, and we will talk about them openly. We’ll do things that cause us to disagree with each other, but hopefully we’ll talk about them openly and wrestle with them. I want your help figuring out how to cover this world. I want the input—I need it. So now I’m going to open the floor to questions.


Staffer: Could you explain your decision not to more regularly use the word racist in reference to the president’s actions?


Baquet: Yeah, I’m actually almost practiced at this one now. Look, my own view is that the best way to capture a remark, like the kinds of remarks the president makes, is to use them, to lay it out in perspective. That is much more powerful than the use of a word.

...

[Gunny]

I saw that and I understand what you are pointing at. I'm pointing at the same thing just with and older, longer brush. There would be no 1619 Project without all the century-+ groundwork. I guess I'm just not as astonished to find the NYT pushing this agenda in an attempt to divert people away from looking too closely at its Trump-Russia coverage.

The only reason I am not (or wasn't) a journalist at the Miami Herald is because once I figured out what journalism was being used for I couldn't get rid of the bad taste in my mouth with it.

Take a set of facts and create a story to lead the reader to the conclusion you (the media) want them to come to. Not, as is taught, present a set of facts that lead up to/support an event or even a logical conclusion or let the reader decide. They teach truth. They practice otherwise.

The NYT should have been gutted from the basement up long ago. Its been a propaganda rag from the start. Along with the SF Chronicle, LA Time, Washington Post et al. Thing is, we grew up believing these people. If Walter said the sky was orange, you didn't bother looking.

So I was going to ask my dad about certain things that happened when I was a kid just to get his perspective. Same with the daughter. Think either of their stories will match mine? That's the game being played here. Let's focus on slaves and what happened to them according to them, while the other 95% of the population is happenstance and window dressing. Only they matter(ed).

Nobody is going to stop them. That's the way the right rolls (over).

[Kathianne]

I saw that and I understand what you are pointing at. I'm pointing at the same thing just with and older, longer brush. There would be no 1619 Project without all the century-+ groundwork. I guess I'm just not as astonished to find the NYT pushing this agenda in an attempt to divert people away from looking too closely at its Trump-Russia coverage.

The only reason I am not (or wasn't) a journalist at the Miami Herald is because once I figured out what journalism was being used for I couldn't get rid of the bad taste in my mouth with it.

Take a set of facts and create a story to lead the reader to the conclusion you (the media) want them to come to. Not, as is taught, present a set of facts that lead up to/support an event or even a logical conclusion or let the reader decide. They teach truth. They practice otherwise.

The NYT should have been gutted from the basement up long ago. Its been a propaganda rag from the start. Along with the SF Chronicle, LA Time, Washington Post et al. Thing is, we grew up believing these people. If Walter said the sky was orange, you didn't bother looking.

So I was going to ask my dad about certain things that happened when I was a kid just to get his perspective. Same with the daughter. Think either of their stories will match mine? That's the game being played here. Let's focus on slaves and what happened to them according to them, while the other 95% of the population is happenstance and window dressing. Only they matter(ed).

Nobody is going to stop them. That's the way the right rolls (over).

We're seeing it differently, at least from the history point of view. With the prism of 1619 everything is false through it.

As for using it to 'white supremacy' all, you're correct, they will succeed.

[Gunny]

We're seeing it differently, at least from the history point of view. With the prism of 1619 everything is false through it.

As for using it to 'white supremacy' all, you're correct, they will succeed.I see exactly what they are attempting to do. Quite the ambitious lot. Of course the 1619 narrative is false. Isn't that how the left rolls? Have you ever really talked to blacks about how they view things? That's an honest question. All of this crap we know isn't true about most whites and the factual history is gospel to them. This country wouldn't exist without them. They did all the work. Blah, blah, blah.

They believe that. They believe we, not they, are the racists. That is hardly limited to just blacks who think that way.

While I get it, I see it as an ongoing push by progressives, as they do in everything, until they just wear us out or time helps them out. What better issue to take up than one no one will talk about for fear of being labeled a racist? You can tell whatever fairy tale you want and if it's the only story out there then it must be THE story. With our society and the chucklehead mealy-mouthers on the Right that's a damned good plan.

[Gunny]

What irks me the most about it? They've been flat busted and their plan leaked and they still don't care and will go through with it anyway and more than likely succeed.

[Kathianne]

What irks me the most about it? They've been flat busted and their plan leaked and they still don't care and will go through with it anyway and more than likely succeed.

These 4 are the face of the democrat party. :laugh2:

Whatever they accomplish with the election and this prism doesn't bother me nearly as much as what I fear it will do to teaching kids. History is screwed up enough, this will put a nail in the coffin.

[Kathianne]

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/339717/


AUGUST 22, 2019


“AS USUAL IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM, WHERE THE TIMES LEADS (https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/339689/), ITS ACOLYTES AROUND THE COUNTRY WILL FOLLOW (https://twitter.com/pulitzercenter/status/1164191957498961921):”
https://static.pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/nyt_1619_project_pulitzer_school_guide_8-21-19.jpg





Share
33 (https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/339717/#respond)

Posted by Ed Driscoll at 7:44 am

[Gunny]

These 4 are the face of the democrat party. :laugh2:

Whatever they accomplish with the election and this prism doesn't bother me nearly as much as what I fear it will do to teaching kids. History is screwed up enough, this will put a nail in the coffin.We hold certain facts to be facts based n our education and perception. This is the same thing. Don't like what people believe? Change what they believe is fact. It's just more mind control.

As a "spin off", look at some of the things we believe as a society. At least things I was taught. A lot based on circumstances surrounding the facts. All Russians are commies and want to destroy the US. All Arabs are extremist, militant terrorists and want to kill or convert the entire World. Neither statement is factual. But we as a society believe (or believed) it to be true. And I am not arguing these points themselves. Just that they are widely held beliefs based on "education", be it from the school, media or society. People don't bother to actually research the topics in depth enough to actually have an educated opinion. They just accept it as truth because everyone else does.

The minority is the people who DO educate themselves and they are more likely than not ignored at the least, ridiculed and my favorite "you just don't understand :rolleyes:" because you disagree.

The 1619 Project will be no different. IF the NYT can get it disseminated, discussed by the uneducated who take the cliff notes that suit them and run, and get it to take on a life of its own, it will be just like any other crap belief. Man-made global warming anyone? How about the Keefover (sp) Hearings? Look how many people buy off on that. People who have the power to address the masses are not held accountable for it. Sure, McCarthy ended up losing his career when it was already over in the end. As he should have. How many peoples lives did he destroy in the meantime?

Mass hysteria and/or indoctrination is nothing new. Nor is the abuse of it. Behind every bit of it from day one? An irresponsible, agenda-driven media (in whatever form).

[Kathianne]

We hold certain facts to be facts based n our education and perception. This is the same thing. Don't like what people believe? Change what they believe is fact. It's just more mind control.

As a "spin off", look at some of the things we believe as a society. At least things I was taught. A lot based on circumstances surrounding the facts. All Russians are commies and want to destroy the US. All Arabs are extremist, militant terrorists and want to kill or convert the entire World. Neither statement is factual. But we as a society believe (or believed) it to be true. And I am not arguing these points themselves. Just that they are widely held beliefs based on "education", be it from the school, media or society. People don't bother to actually research the topics in depth enough to actually have an educated opinion. They just accept it as truth because everyone else does.

The minority is the people who DO educate themselves and they are more likely than not ignored at the least, ridiculed and my favorite "you just don't understand :rolleyes:" because you disagree.

The 1619 Project will be no different. IF the NYT can get it disseminated, discussed by the uneducated who take the cliff notes that suit them and run, and get it to take on a life of its own, it will be just like any other crap belief. Man-made global warming anyone? How about the Keefover (sp) Hearings? Look how many people buy off on that. People who have the power to address the masses are not held accountable for it. Sure, McCarthy ended up losing his career when it was already over in the end. As he should have. How many peoples lives did he destroy in the meantime?

Mass hysteria and/or indoctrination is nothing new. Nor is the abuse of it. Behind every bit of it from day one? An irresponsible, agenda-driven media (in whatever form).


Perhaps why something like this gets to me? I am not real good going along with the crowd, especially when the crowd is going in a demonstrable bad direction. I've always been like this. LOL!

[STTAB]

Perhaps why something like this gets to me? I am not real good going along with the crowd, especially when the crowd is going in a demonstrable bad direction. I've always been like this. LOL!


We couldn't tell LOL


On topic. I love how leftists want to pretend both that the US was founded on slavery and that the US invented slavery.

Slavery is a terrible part of our past, but that's exactly what it is, terrible and a PART of our PAST. A great deal of our history in fact is in the removal of slavery. And certainly in the last 180 years or so no country on Earth has done more to free black and brown people around the world than ours.

[Kathianne]

We couldn't tell LOL


On topic. I love how leftists want to pretend both that the US was founded on slavery and that the US invented slavery.

Slavery is a terrible part of our past, but that's exactly what it is, terrible and a PART of our PAST. A great deal of our history in fact is in the removal of slavery. And certainly in the last 180 years or so no country on Earth has done more to free black and brown people around the world than ours.

For someone with the PhD in history, one would think you'd see history through a different prism.

The the other fallacy, either you're failing to read or you're trying to lead others down a false path? As bad as the project is, there premise was never to say US invented slavery.

They're not pretending to believe a word of it, again, contained within the transcript.

[Kathianne]

https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2019/08/26/misleading-attack-capitalism-part-ny-times-1619-project/


...Magness wrote an entire piece on that error last month. He concludes, “The worthy historical task of documenting the horrors of American slavery has been cynically repurposed into an ideological attack on free-market capitalism.”

[Kathianne]

I brought up Howard Zinn for the simple reason that there is no one that I know of, who has been as influential on students educated since 1978. That includes most of the writers, including editors and contributors to the MSM. The same people who are now putting forward the 1619 project, already being used in schools.

Without a true understanding of how the country was founded, what sacrifices were made for freedom, Constitution, fighting to end slavery, and so much more. Without understanding of how they fit into the society, why individualism IS important, though so is the common good, this Constitution will not last.

The following results found by the WSJ are not influenced by the new, 'America sucks and always has because the only true leaders were black and slavery! That's going to really help these results. What has been wrought by the revisionism, literally millions of young people from school aged-40 year olds. An example of results:

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2019/08/26/poll-younger-americans-much-less-likely-say-patriotism-religion-children-important/

Poll: Younger Americans Much Less Likely To Say That Patriotism, Religion, And Having Children Are “Very Important”
ALLAHPUNDITPosted at 5:31 pm on August 26, 2019

...

The WSJ didn’t provide partisan splits on each question, but if you suspect that young Democrats are driving this collapse in basic American values, you’re correct: “In fact, the views of Democrats over age 50 were more in line with those of younger Republicans than with younger members of their own party.” Call it the AOC-ization of the Democratic Party. Thanks to the drift among progressives, the overall share of the public that says each of the values listed above is “very important” has declined significantly since 1998. As a society, we’re now nine points less likely to say patriotism is very important, 12 points less likely to say that religion is, and 16 points(!) less likely to say that having children is. The last of those is actually under 50 percent, in fact, with just 43 percent finding it “very important” to have children.


If forced to choose between children and time on one’s smartphone, the choice is clear.


Just one wrinkle. How much can we trust the age groupings in this poll? Putting the Silent Generation and the Boomers together doesn’t fully compute. Older members of the Silent Generation lived through World War II; Boomers were born after the war and have Vietnam as their most vivid military memory. You’re probably going to see some differences on patriotism between those groups. Likewise for the pairing of millennials and Generation Z. The former remember 9/11 and the Iraq war; the latter remember … I don’t know what. The financial crisis, maybe? Certainly the dawning of the Trump era. I’d be curious to know if there are any differences within these broad demographic pairings on basic values questions given their life experiences.

[Abbey Marie]

I just read the article. Baby Boomers = Garbage generation?

It doesn’t appear to state what young people would list as important in their stead. I’d love to know. I’m guessing that in addition to the devaluing of the three things in the survey, they find important:
1. The environment
2. Empowerment of women and minorities

[Kathianne]

I just read the article. Baby Boomers = Garbage generation?

It doesn’t appear to state what young people would list as important in their stead. I’d love to know. I’m guessing that in addition to the devaluing of the three things in the survey, they find important:
1. The environment
2. Empowerment of women and minorities

Exactly Abbey! Take a look at any 'social studies' book written at the end of 70s through today. They are formulated: 'here's traditional' people considered influential and what they are credited with. (on sidebars, the text highlights controversial or questionable actions.) Next sections cover 'big actions' of period, with all the 'peoples' and 'environmental impacts' of those actions. Lastly is a section with 'influential minorities' that either haven't been credited or marginalized at the time. Every chapter is laid out in that matter, growing in stridency as publishing dates become more current.

That was without an 'prism' such as Slavery!

Howard Zinn-read about him-is the major contributor to the re-writing of history since late 60s/70s.

Couple the revision and throw in 'No Child Left Behind' which removed social studies/civic/science from 'national testing.' It's the reason that many schools no longer are teaching any history until 6th grade and that is World History.

Literally there has been nearly 50 years where we have not been educating the future into the story of our country; responsibilities or benefits of the system. They learn 'democracy!' but not about republic or federalism.

A preventable, but purposeful mess.

[High_Plains_Drifter]

All I see is... "hate whitey."

I don't think black Americans will ever be happy until they see white people in chains picking cotton. The hatred of whites by blacks is certainly deep and intense enough.

[Kathianne]

Well I'm not the only one being more 'woke' by the 1619 project and earlier, related trends:

https://www.ocregister.com/2019/08/24/public-schools-should-be-places-of-learning-not-propaganda/



Public schools should be places of learning, not propaganda
By JOEL KOTKIN and DOUG HAVARD | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: August 24, 2019 at 9:22 am | UPDATED: August 24, 2019 at 9:22 am



California likes to think of itself as the brain center of the universe, but increasingly much of that intellectual content comes from somewhere else. Once a leader in educational innovation and performance, California is now toward the bottom of the pack.


Despite these failings, the powerful California Teachers Association, emboldened by the huge Democratic gains in 2018, continues to push an aggressive and fundamentally reactionary approach to education, spending upwards of a million a month to curtail the surge of innovative charter schools in the state. This is particularly critical in lower-income communities, such as the East Bay, central Orange County and Los Angeles, where the state’s public schools have consistently failed and where some charters have made considerable strides through reforms and innovations.


But nothing has been more illustrative of the political agenda of our educational establishment than the recent draft curriculum for an “ethnic studies” course for the state’s schools. Although this curriculum has created a firestorm of opposition and is unlikely to be adopted as is, the fact is the curriculum reflected a far-left agenda that is deeply entrenched in the educational establishment.


Cadres or careers?


The scariest thing about the ethnic studies curriculum may not be its ultimate content but how it reflects an ideology that advocates indoctrination of youngsters who often don’t even have the most basic understanding of sociology or history.


Often incapable of meeting basic grade-level English language and mathematics standards, these students would be forced to learn academic jargon like misogynoir, cisheteropatriarchy and hxrstory.


Indoctrinating the young has long been a favored priority for activists, including on the religious right. After a decade or two of concern with actual performance, ideological information and indoctrination has been increasingly de rigueur in schools through the West. Educators have been moving toward scrapping such things as exit exams and clearly comparable measures of achievement.


Yes, these young people may be getting diplomas, but do they have the skills, academic as well as social, to compete in the real world?


So far, the answer is largely no. California’s 8th graders, on average, have fallen well behind the rest of the country in science, mathematics and reading scores — including even demographically similar states such as Texas and New York. Almost three of five California high schoolers are not prepared for either college or a career; the percentages are far higher for Latinos, African American and the economically disadvantaged. It’s hard to see how they will benefit by being schooled in an anti-capitalist ideology while countries like China and India focus on preparing students for the challenges of the global economy.


Is there an alternative model?


California’s educational shortfalls are clear to most business leaders we interview. Whether on the shop floor, or in a laboratory, California’s inattention to basic skills education has had catastrophic results in many communities. This is particularly true in manufacturing and engineering — historically strengths of the state, notably in the Bay Area and across Southern California.


Fortunately, some California communities, notably Long Beach, are focusing increasingly on skills education. Well-developed linkages between schools such as California State University Long Beach, Long Beach public schools and Long Beach City College with companies such as Virgin Orbit and Toyota, provide a uniquely aligned cradle-to-career learning environment. The Long Beach Education Partnership, a coalition of leaders between the three local educational institutions and industries, was developed in the early 1990s to stimulate economic growth and build regional skills capacity.


Through initiatives such as the Maritime Center of Excellence and the Center for Community and Industry Partnerships at Long Beach City College, the coalition continues to build innovative models for skills-based education aligned to in-demand industry jobs as well as connecting students to those career opportunities. Similarly, initiatives have been launched in both the Central Valley and the Inland Empire to build similar educational partnerships with industry.


Ultimately most firms here don’t need ideological warriors nearly as much as trained technicians of all sorts, well-trained managers and practically minded engineers. You can’t run a high-tech lathe, manage logistics or design programs for space vehicles with ideology.


Education should not be a political issue


Ultimately, the biggest losers from the shift from skills to indoctrination, as well as the assault on charter schools, will be those about whom the progressives most lament about: the poor, minorities and immigrants. In contrast, a failing education system, particularly in poor communities, does not much disturb a well-educated hipster without children or those wealthy enough to live in an elite suburb or pay for private school.


Given its global allure and gobs of cash, Google may not need better local high schools and community colleges since they can draw their employees from everywhere. But most Californians and local businesses depend on basic public education.


Public schools need to focus not on ideology but on intelligent pragmatism. They should focus on both on improving reading and math scores and becoming reliable suppliers of talent to our local companies.


It may seem as simply as two plus two, but, sadly, for too much of our educational establishment this simple logic does not compute. This growing dysfunction will only change when Californians, particularly parents and companies, insist our schools perform as they were meant to do — training the future workforce and nurturing the next generation of the middle class.


Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Doug Havard is a public-school educator and Ph.D. student at Chapman University’s Attallah College of Educational Studies.

[STTAB]

For someone with the PhD in history, one would think you'd see history through a different prism.

The the other fallacy, either you're failing to read or you're trying to lead others down a false path? As bad as the project is, there premise was never to say US invented slavery.

They're not pretending to believe a word of it, again, contained within the transcript.


Yes, I'm well aware that leftists never actually believe ANYTHING they say . That's why I said they love to pretend.

Man Made Climate Change is another clear example of this, their behavior betrays their true beliefs.

We could add abortion and their absurd screams that fetuses are not human life, but we know they don't actually believe this either, because to a person if a woman they knew was 2 months pregnant and someone else killed that fetus they would want them charged with MURDER, which is the unlawful taking of a HUMAN life.

For that matter, does anyone believe that Adam Schiff EVER believed that Trump actually colluded with Russia? Fuck no he never believed that. And neither did any of the other Democrats in Congress.

What about Kavanaugh being a serial rapist in his youth, do you think Diane Feinstein believed that? Hell no she didn't.

And that all goes back to my original post in this thread. It's unbelievable that leftists continually say things that we all know aren't true, and half the country believes them every time regardless of evidence. Democrats truly are the party of stupid, by stupid people for stupid people.

[icansayit]

"Insanity"........ Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different results.

These words are usually credited to Albert Einstein. But, there is no substantive evidence he either wrote, or spoke that statement.

Democrats in Congress are insisting nothing but lies about the President, and continue to Lie just to convince the Most Uninformed, Under-educated Americans...who always vote Democrat "THEY NEVER WOULD LIE TO THEIR EXTORTED, BLACKMAILED VOTERS.

http://liquid.uk.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/einstein.jpg

[Kathianne]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/andrew-sullivan-ny-times-abandons-liberalism-for-activism.html?utm_source=tw

[SassyLady]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/andrew-sullivan-ny-times-abandons-liberalism-for-activism.html?utm_source=tw

Best line from article.


To present a truth as the truth is, in fact, a deception.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

This is another part of the enemies of Trump and their campaign to try to get a progressive/socialist demo-rat into that position.
These people are nothing short of true bloodied traitors--a damn tragic and sad fact, IMHO.
And they will succeed unless enough people take notice, take meaningful action to highlight their damn lies, their treason and their true
political allegiances to Socialism, Marxism, Communism and its renaming to be called - Liberalism-Progressive enlightenment and fly under the Dem party banner why lying to gain office to destroy our nation!
NYT is a propaganda rag that should be brought up on charges IMHO.
It is no longer a newspaper that has any legitimate standing.
To let that rag do this is far, far, far worse than just a damn crying shame.
It is turning a blind eye to outright lying, corruption, evil, unamerican and definitely treasonous actions/behavior.
Many of us predicted that they would pull out all stops to try to make sure Trump does not get a second term. -Tyr

[Kathianne]

This is another part of the enemies of Trump and their campaign to try to get a progressive/socialist demo-rat into that position.
These people are nothing short of true bloodied traitors--a damn tragic and sad fact, IMHO.
And they will succeed unless enough people take notice, take meaningful action to highlight their damn lies, their treason and their true
political allegiances to Socialism, Marxism, Communism and its renaming to be called - Liberalism-Progressive enlightenment and fly under the Dem party banner why lying to gain office to destroy our nation!
NYT is a propaganda rag that should be brought up on charges IMHO.
It is no longer a newspaper that has any legitimate standing.
To let that rag do this is far, far, far worse than just a damn crying shame.
It is turning a blind eye to outright lying, corruption, evil, unamerican and definitely treasonous actions/behavior.
Many of us predicted that they would pull out all stops to try to make sure Trump does not get a second term. -Tyr

I don't think Trump is the end game, perhaps a catalyst.

The end game is Marxism.

[Russ]

The New York Times has an important part to play in this world, but only if you have a pet parakeet or you are trying to housebreak your new St. Bernard. :salute:

[LongTermGuy]

The New York Times has an important part to play in this world, but only if you have a pet parakeet or you are trying to housebreak your new St. Bernard. :salute:


:laugh:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaovzmXcN6k

[Kathianne]

https://fee.org/articles/what-the-1619-project-gets-wrong-about-slavery-and-economics/

[Kathianne]

https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2019/11/1619-mao-9-11-history-according-to.html?m=1

[High_Plains_Drifter]

That crap reads almost like treason.

No wonder Rush is always saying the democrats hate America and it's founding, and that all Americans need to apologize for who and what we are. We don't deserve this nation.

[Kathianne]

That crap reads almost like treason.

No wonder Rush is always saying the democrats hate America and it's founding, and that all Americans need to apologize for who and what we are. We don't deserve this nation.
I think the term is “alternative history “ which means faked.

As I wrote earlier it became the norm with Zinn and many now think it’s gospel.

[Kathianne]

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/understanding-the-roots-of-the-war-on-history/

[Kathianne]

Well waddya know! Historians are speaking out regarding the project:

https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2019/11/30/prominent-historians-criticize-ny-times-1619-project/

This is a good compilation of links to some various folks and resources.

[Kathianne]

And another: https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/01/02/oxford-historian-1619-project-preposterous-one-dimensional-reading-american-history/

[Kathianne]

Response to Atlantic criticism:
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/01/07/1619-project-editor-responds-criticism-atlantic/

[Kathianne]

Why lies matter:

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/19/high-school-history-teacher-throws-out-textbooks-for-radical-marxist-history-book/?fbclid=IwAR1e0dGGkWZ-SchK3Lyrw7pzsMgv-txujS6RbkuaUfePY2D66jqGaiYOtVQ#.Xu0Fyl1a3A0.facebo ok

[Black Diamond]

This 1619 project is not good at all. They need to keep it out of schools.

[Black Diamond]

Interestingly I am reading 1984 and I up to the part where Orwell is talking about "changing history" .

[Kathianne]

Good story. True: Mike Mansfield was strong Democrat, in fact Senate Majority leader for years. That's how both sides used to see the country-as something to honor:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/387994/


JULY 18, 2020
FOGGY BOTTOM FLUNKS THE SCHULZ TEST:
Shot: Pompeo’s Attack on ‘1619 Project’ Draws Fire From His Own Diplomats (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/17/pomepo-human-rights-commission-trump-racial-injustice-alienates-diplomats-attack-1619-project/).

The New York Times ’ “1619 Project (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html),” which examines the role of slavery in U.S. history, was not the central focus of his speech, nor of the new draft report that his controversial Commission on Unalienable Rights produced.


But his comments have sparked fresh debate and criticism among diplomats who continue to raise alarm bells over long-standing issues of systemic racism and diversity challenges in the State Department (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/11/u-s-black-diplomats-state-department-george-floyd-protests-trump-pompeo-state-department-diversity-racial-injustice-police-violence-soft-power/). Five officials who spoke to Foreign Policy on condition of anonymity described a reaction of shock and fury.


“Pompeo made it very clear where he stands and reaffirmed the purpose of the commission by denigrating the movement for equal justice and the call for racial reckoning and healing in America,” said one State Department official. “Everyone that I have spoken with is horrified and disgusted by the commission, his press conference, and [the] attack on 1619,” said the official.
—Foreign Policy, yesterday.

Chaser:

When I was in the first period when I was secretary of state, there was in my office a big globe. And when ambassadors, who were newly going to their posts or in their posts and coming back to visit me, would get ready to leave, I would say to them, “Ambassador, you have one more test before you can go to your post. You have to go over to the globe and prove to me that you can identify your country.” So unerringly, they would go over and they’d spin the globe around and they’d put their finger on the country they were going to, pass the test.


So Mike Mansfield, great elder statesman in America, former Senate majority leader and who had been ambassador to Japan for a while before I was there, and he was a close friend of mine from back when I was in the Nixon administration — so he was visiting and he got ready to leave. I said, “Mike, I got to give you the same test I give everybody else. Before you can go back to Japan, you got to show me that you can go over to the globe and put your finger on your country.” So he went over and he spun this globe around and he put his hand on the United States, said, “That’s my country.” So I’ve told that, subsequently, to all the ambassadors going out, “Never forget, you’re over there in that country, but your country is the United States. You’re there to represent us. Take care of our interests and never forget it, and you’re representing the best country in the world.”
—Former Secretary of State George Shultz on C-Span (http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4450623/globe), April 29, 1993.





Share
20 (https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/387994/#respond)

Posted by Ed Driscoll at 4:44 pm

[Kathianne]

More pushback against the coming curriculum:

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/cabot-phillips-cancel-culture-distorts-history-to-portray-us-as-evil-nation-that-must-be-transformed

https://wcfcourier.com/opinion/editorial/editorial-1619-project-sparking-overdue-conversations/article_6cfc1a30-e403-5e86-b943-bc68a0468b08.html

[Gunny]

The Cabot Phillips article pretty-much covers it. Like everything else nowadays, I don't see anyone doing anything to stop it. Just imagine, "American History, as brought to you by the NYT's fiction department":rolleyes:

[Gunny]

IMO, this is just another, NE, industrial cities-think, ESPECIALLY NYC that thinks and has always thought it drives the train for the US, getting a toe in the door and spreading its poison like a virus. Being from the South and SW, NYC, Chicago, Philly, DC are foreign countries always shoving their crap on everyone else. It's always been that way and this is just more of the same.

NO thought is ever give to the fact that those places are NOT the center of the damned World. Our culture down here is mostly Hispanic, Native American and white/Euro. Black culture and its "impact" down here ain't shit. Nobody cares what they think in the NE; which, I consider part of the problem since with it comes nobody's paying attention to what the rats are doing in the NE.

I haven't heard a world of this from my daughter, who is a public school teacher. I am quite sure I would have if this garbage was being pushed. We just have to deal with stuff down here like "Davy Crockett survived the battle of the Alamo and died on his knees begging for his life:rolleyes:" from the revisionist Hispanics.

So all of that to ponder the question: Wonder how this 1619 Project BS is going to go over with the Hispanics? I'm thinking not real well, and they're going to outnumber the blacks soon enough.

[icansayit]

They don't want to teach the truth, just their opinion of what Slavery means to them in order to Demand that ALL AMERICANS are responsible for Slavery that began long before the USA became a nation.

If the 1619 project is serious. Let them go to the ACLU and collect their Reparations from The Founding Fathers, and Everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence. They weren't all rich White Men who are now called WHITE SUPREMISTS.

As for me. The 1619 Project can just KISS MY YOU KNOW WHAT with a BIG PUCKER!

[Kathianne]

IMO, this is just another, NE, industrial cities-think, ESPECIALLY NYC that thinks and has always thought it drives the train for the US, getting a toe in the door and spreading its poison like a virus. Being from the South and SW, NYC, Chicago, Philly, DC are foreign countries always shoving their crap on everyone else. It's always been that way and this is just more of the same.

NO thought is ever give to the fact that those places are NOT the center of the damned World. Our culture down here is mostly Hispanic, Native American and white/Euro. Black culture and its "impact" down here ain't shit. Nobody cares what they think in the NE; which, I consider part of the problem since with it comes nobody's paying attention to what the rats are doing in the NE.

I haven't heard a world of this from my daughter, who is a public school teacher. I am quite sure I would have if this garbage was being pushed. We just have to deal with stuff down here like "Davy Crockett survived the battle of the Alamo and died on his knees begging for his life:rolleyes:" from the revisionist Hispanics.

So all of that to ponder the question: Wonder how this 1619 Project BS is going to go over with the Hispanics? I'm thinking not real well, and they're going to outnumber the blacks soon enough.
It’s already big in public schools for middle:high schools for this year.

[Gunny]

It’s already big in public schools for middle:high schools for this year.Where? My understanding is curriculum is a State decision. Ashley teaches 1st grade. They're idea of history I'm sure is what happened 3 minutes ago :)

If that is the case, I'm surprised no one has brought a lawsuit against it. It's just lies. But then, I wouldn't have thought a LOT of things going on right now would be.

[Kathianne]

Where? My understanding is curriculum is a State decision. Ashley teaches 1st grade. They're idea of history I'm sure is what happened 3 minutes ago :)

If that is the case, I'm surprised no one has brought a lawsuit against it. It's just lies. But then, I wouldn't have thought a LOT of things going on right now would be.
Standards are the state decision, how they are administered is up to the teacher/principal. There's lots of teacher in TX planning on incorporating the project into their lesson plans.

I belong to probably 6 private social studies teaching groups online, private in the sense you have to be admitted, not open to general public-thus if you peruse my FB or Twitter, these posts do not show. (Hidden forum if you will.) Obviously the younger, newer teachers are the most prolific in posting and most excited about anything 'new,' well just because. (I mean it would be nice if they learned a bit before, but heh.)

As I said, while it's mostly the younger/newer teachers that are all excited, there are several administrators and department chairs that have said this is 'important' to get started on, even with pandemic. :rolleyes: Of course it will easily work with the 'first amendment' lessons we've all learned this year. Again, :rolleyes:

[KarlMarx]

I've been so pissed since I read about this in NYT, that I was hoping someone else would start the discussion, alas.

So, the NYT has decided we should all look at American history through the slave perspective. It is only they, that have done anything towards making America a semi-decent place to be. Any accomplishments have been on their backs or by them. Seriously. They have even come up with lesson plans made in conjunction with the Smithsonian, thus using all of our money to change history.

Oh the Founding Fathers? )They don't capitalize that title, they were just lucky heirs to what had already been done with the slaves. The entire Revolution was a response to England wanting to end slavery. There is no mention of the thousands of years that slavery existed prior to 1619, it was all those English colonists doing.

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60532.html#comment-1021541





https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/new-goal-for-new-york-times-reframe-american-history-and-target-trump-too



[/FONT][/COLOR]
[/FONT][/COLOR]

The NYT aka, There is no Ukrainian Fame Times, aka There is no Holocaust Times? When it comes to revising history, the NYT are Zen masters

My feeling is that all education in this country should include a study of the Greek and Roman classics, and a required curriculum in the United States in the US Constitution

All of this should be done at the expense of gender studies, and multiculturalism studies

[Kathianne]

Standards are the state decision, how they are administered is up to the teacher/principal. There's lots of teacher in TX planning on incorporating the project into their lesson plans.

I belong to probably 6 private social studies teaching groups online, private in the sense you have to be admitted, not open to general public-thus if you peruse my FB or Twitter, these posts do not show. (Hidden forum if you will.) Obviously the younger, newer teachers are the most prolific in posting and most excited about anything 'new,' well just because. (I mean it would be nice if they learned a bit before, but heh.)

As I said, while it's mostly the younger/newer teachers that are all excited, there are several administrators and department chairs that have said this is 'important' to get started on, even with pandemic. :rolleyes: Of course it will easily work with the 'first amendment' lessons we've all learned this year. Again, :rolleyes:

While it's not only these schools, they are cited about the incorporation. Note the date, which is just at the beginning of the pandemic coverage, likely slowing down implementation district wide. Individual teachers however are planning on using pretty widely, if my contacts are typical:

https://reason.com/2020/01/28/1619-project-new-york-times-public-schools/


Public Schools Are Teaching The 1619 Project in Class, Despite Concerns From Historians
"Mandating the use of The 1619 Project in K-12 curricula is at best premature until these issues are resolved."
ROBBY SOAVE | 1.28.2020 9:57 AM

The 1619 Project—The New York Times Magazine's much vaunted series of essays about the introduction of African slavery to the Americas—will now be taught in K-12 schools around the country.


School districts in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, New York, have decided to update their history curricula to include the material, which posits that the institution of slavery was so embedded in the country's DNA that the country's true founding could be said to have occurred in 1619, rather than in 1776.


"One of the things that we are looking at in implementing The 1619 Project is to let everyone know that the issues around the legacy of enslavement that exist today, it's an American issue, it's not a Black issue," Dr. Fatima Morrell, associate superintendent for culturally and linguistically responsive initiatives for Buffalo Public Schools, told Buffalo's NPR station.


Buffalo teachers and administrators have already begun studying the 1619 material so they can implement it into their curricula. The NPR story correctly notes that the essays examine "lesser-known consequences of slavery," like "how plantation economics led to modern corporate, capitalist culture."

...

[icansayit]

Where? My understanding is curriculum is a State decision. Ashley teaches 1st grade. They're idea of history I'm sure is what happened 3 minutes ago :)

If that is the case, I'm surprised no one has brought a lawsuit against it. It's just lies. But then, I wouldn't have thought a LOT of things going on right now would be.


A personal check on my own has found that most all of the States who plan to use this 1619 crap are.......DEMOCRAT controlled. Therefore...the teacher unions have a massive hand in it where the LIBERAL, LEFT WING, HATE AMERICA teachers have the opportunity to teach IGNORANCE to our children without being observed by parents. And the kids are sworn to NEVER disclose what the teachers talk about or...their GRADES are useless.

Not my opinion. Just a FACT most do not want to touch. If that offends anyone...GOOD.

[Kathianne]

@Gunny (http://www.debatepolicy.com/member.php?u=30)

How weird, just came across this tonight: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html?fbclid=IwAR3PB1xQqQ0NSEO0hL3dV3TM03 zZkEnRXp9AEvq3g3zufNCnkhqNrrrYo6U

It's comparing the exact same textbooks, which differ because of the state they are bought by. The chose TX and CA to contrast and compare. Two textbooks, one by McGraw-Hill, the other Pearson, (used to be Prentice-Hall), they are actually two of three major text suppliers for most public schools across the country. Both use Zinn acolytes as consultants, of course.

You can actually see how the state standards are incorporated into the state's edition of the text. THEN, you can read how teachers use their own 'resources' to 'enrich' and enlighten their students-you'll see they seem to cite TX teachers more than CA, because the state standards are exactly inline with many teachers perspectives.

[Kathianne]

Memory hole indeed:

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/09/21/memory-hole-ii-nyt-boogaloo-nations-founding-claim-disappears/

I'm copying, for fear that this will be removed at some point:


Memory Hole II, NYT Boogaloo: “Our True Founding” Claim Disappears From 1619 Project

ED MORRISSEYPosted at 4:01 pm on September 21, 2020

It’s one thing to see intellectual dishonesty from radical activist groups like Black Lives Matter (https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/09/21/memory-hole-black-lives-matter-deletes-believe-page/). Their primary purpose, both ostensibly and actually, is to campaign for their agenda, not to act as keepers of a public record. If they decide that their publicly declared agenda hampers that purpose, then discarding it may not be a terribly honest approach, but it’s not exactly surprising either.

When a media outlet that styles itself as America’s Paper of Record starts altering that record to cover its tracks, that’s an entirely different matter. After a year of hailing Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “1619 Project” as a necessary step to understanding slavery as “our true founding,” both the New York Times and Hannah-Jones tried to send that claim down the memory hole — despite the fact that both promoted it as the basic message of their historical revisionism, and criticism of the “1619 Project” focused on that claim from the start. The entire point of Hannah-Jones’ essays were to recast the American Revolution as an attempt to cling to slavery rather than launch an experiment in self-governing democracy.


The term “memory hole” comes from George Orwell’s 1984
, and it fits, writes Phillip Magness at Quillette (https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memory-hole/)
:


The history of the American Revolution isn’t the only thing the New York Times is revising through its 1619 Project. The “paper of record” has also taken to quietly altering the published text of the project itself after one of its claims came under intense criticism.
When the 1619 Project went to print in August 2019 as a special edition of the New York Times Magazine, the newspaper put up an interactive version (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html) on its website. The original opening text stated:

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added] …

For several months after the 1619 Project first launched, its creator and organizer Nikole Hannah-Jones doubled down on the claim. “I argue that 1619 is our true founding,” she tweeted (https://twitter.com/conor64/status/1307056277848297473) the week after the project launched. “Also, look at the banner pic in my profile”—a reference to the graphic of the date 1776 crossed out with a line. It’s a claim she repeated (https://twitter.com/conor64/status/1307056509025738753) many times over (https://twitter.com/conor64/status/1307058774595776512).



Until now, anyway:


Rather than address this controversy directly, the Times—it now appears—decided to send it down the memory hole—the euphemized term for selectively editing inconvenient passages out of old newspaper reports in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Without announcement or correction, the newspaper quietly edited out the offending passage such that it now reads:

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

Discovery of this edit came about earlier this week when Nikole Hannah-Jones went on CNN (https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1307029623943831552) to deny that she had ever sought to displace 1776 with a new founding date of 1619. She repeated the point in a now-deleted tweet (https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1306941913556283401): “The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 was our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.” It was not the first time that Hannah-Jones had tried to alter her self-depiction of the project’s aims on account of the controversial line. She attempted a similar revision a few months ago during an online spat (https://twitter.com/conor64/status/1307054617713311745) with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.



Last night, Magness supported his argument with a lengthy Twitter thread (via Twitchy (https://twitchy.com/sam-3930/2020/09/21/epic-thread-takes-nikole-hannah-jones-apart-for-claiming-she-never-meant-1619-was-our-true-founding-and-deleting-tweets/)):


Magness reproduces said banner pic in his Quillette essay:
https://hotair.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/NHJ-banner-pic.jpeg
That’s game, set, and match to Magness, but he has more on this deception from Hannah-Jones. Be sure to read it all.

The issue here, though, isn’t Hannah-Jones. She’s hardly the first activist to give a slanted analysis of history in which good points get drowned in a sea of bias and hyperbole, and she won’t be the last. Hannah-Jones also isn’t the first to react dishonestly to that criticism and flat-out lie to avoid it, either, although we’d hope she’ll be the last. In the Internet age, there are just too many receipts created for that strategy to succeed — as Hannah-Jones is currently discovering.

The big issue here is the New York Times, which is supposed to be a gatekeeper against this kind of dishonesty. Instead, they apparently decided to become an active participant in it. Rather than being the Paper of Record, they altered the record and tried to pretend that nothing at all changed. The fundamental errors in the “1619 Project” got repeatedly pointed out by critics (https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/01/02/oxford-historian-1619-project-preposterous-one-dimensional-reading-american-history/) across the political spectrum (https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/01/06/times-1619-project-limits-story-america-expands/), with the most substantial and withering (https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2019/12/03/sure-read-world-socialists-says-rnc/) coming from the World Socialist Web Site (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/28/wood-n28.html), of all places.

When confronted by refutations from actual historians, the New York Times refused to issue corrections (https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2019/12/23/ny-times-tells-historians-wont-issue-corrections-1619-project/), which was bad enough. Now we find out that the Paper of Record clandestinely edited the record to give its activist cover. That speaks volumes about the credibility of the “1619 Project” and the NYT’s ambitions to repackage it as academic curriculum, but also to the overall credibility of the entire NYT enterprise. The Oceania of Orwell’s imagination could hardly have had a more compliant newspaper than the Winston Smith-edited New York Times.

[jimnyc]

Memory hole indeed:

I'm copying, for fear that this will be removed at some point:

Unbelievable. And yet fully believable at the same time. Today's media.

[Kathianne]

Some haven't forgotten:

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/pulitzer-board-must-revoke-nikole-hannah-jones-prize


Pulitzer Board Must Revoke Nikole Hannah-Jones' Prize
Peter Wood


Article
October 06, 2020
American History Open Letter 1620 Project


The National Association of Scholars has agreed to host this public letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board. The letter calls on the Board to rescind the prize it awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones earlier this year. I am one of the 21 signatories. A hard copy has been mailed to the Pulitzer Committee as well as a digital copy.


—Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars


We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.” That essay was entitled, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” But it turns out the article itself was false when written, making a large claim that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution, a claim for which there is simply no evidence.


We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.”


When the Board announced the prize on May 4, 2020, it praised Hannah-Jones for “a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.” Note well the last five words. Clearly the award was meant not merely to honor this one isolated essay, but the Project as a whole, with its framing contention that the year 1619, the date when some twenty Africans arrived at Jamestown, ought to be regarded as the nation’s “true founding,” supplanting the long-honored date of July 4, 1776, which marked the emergence of the United States as an independent nation.


Beginning almost immediately after its publication, though, the essay and the Project ran into controversy. It has been subjected to searching criticism by many of the foremost historians of our time and by the Times’ own fact checker. The scrutiny has left the essay discredited, so much so that the Times has felt the need to go back and change a crucial passage in it, softening but not eliminating its unsupported assertion about slavery and the Revolution.


The Project as a whole was marred by similar faults. Prominent historians, most of them deeply sympathetic to the Project’s goal of bringing the African American experience more fully into our understanding of the American past, nevertheless felt obliged to point out, in public statements beginning in September 2019, the Project’s serious factual errors, specious generalizations, and forced interpretations. Hannah-Jones did not refute these criticisms or answer them in a respectful or meaningful way. Instead, she dismissed them. In December 2019 five prominent historians wrote a joint letter to The New York Times expressing their “strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project.”1 The New York Times Magazine’s editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein brushed aside the letter with the explanation that “historical understanding is not fixed; it is constantly being adjusted by new scholarship and new voices.”2 True enough; but he refrained from also mentioning that the advance of historical understanding always involves the testing of new interpretations through a process of open criticism and the free exchange of ideas in honest debate, the very things that Hannah-Jones has consistently disdained. Despite this stonewalling, the criticisms of The 1619 Project continued, notably in another joint letter signed by twelve other historians on December 30. Mr. Silverstein again responded, saying that the Times’s “research desk” had examined their criticisms and “concluded no corrections are warranted.”3


The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit.


But that was not the end of it. On March 6, 2020, historian Leslie M. Harris, one of the Times’s own fact-checkers, revealed that she had warned the newspaper that an assertion that “the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America” was plainly false. Harris identified numerous other mistakes that she had pointed out to the Times in advance of the publication of The 1619 Project, none of which was corrected. The Times did, however, respond to Harris’s March 6 revelation by adding the above-mentioned correction on March 11. Where Hannah-Jones had originally written, “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” the new text says “some of the colonists.” Even this softened assertion has little or no documentary basis, according to the most distinguished specialists in the period.


Hannah-Jones’s refusal to correct her errors or engage her critics, we have recently learned, was accompanied by surreptitious efforts by The New York Times to alter the record of what it had published in the original magazine of August 18, 2019. Providing no public explanation or acknowledgment of its actions, the Times amended the digital version of the Project text. Not until September 19, 2020, when historian Phillip Magness compared the original and digital versions of the essay in the journal Quillette, did the alterations come to light.4 These were not changes to Hannah-Jones’s essay itself, but to the crucially important introductory materials whose claims—for example, the “reframing” of American history with the year 1619 as the nation’s “true founding”—form the underlying rationale of the entire Project.


Correcting factual errors in their published works, of course, is an important responsibility of both the journalistic and scholarly press. But such corrections are typically and rightly made openly and explicitly. The author and the publisher acknowledge an error and correct it. That is not what happened in this case. Rather, the false claims were erased or altered with no explanation, and Hannah-Jones then proceeded to claim that she had never said or written what in fact she has said and written repeatedly, assertions that the Project materials also made. Fortunately, we have a documentary record to the contrary, in the form of the original publication, in addition to extensive video footage of Hannah-Jones (and Silverstein) making precisely the claims that she now denies having made.5


The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit. A “sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay,” as the Pulitzer Prize Board called it, does not have the license to sweep its own errors into obscurity or the remit to publish “deeply reported” falsehoods.


The Pulitzer Prize Board erred in awarding a prize to Hannah-Jones’s profoundly flawed essay, and through it to a Project that, despite its worthy intentions, is disfigured by unfounded conjectures and patently false assertions.


The Pulitzer Prize Board erred in awarding a prize to Hannah-Jones’s profoundly flawed essay, and through it to a Project that, despite its worthy intentions, is disfigured by unfounded conjectures and patently false assertions. To err is human. But now that it has come to light that these materials have been “corrected” without public disclosure and Hannah-Jones has falsely put forward claims that she never said or wrote what she plainly did, the offense is far more serious. It is time for the Pulitzer Prize Board to acknowledge its error rather than compound it. Given the glaring historical fallacy at the heart of its account, and the subsequent breaches of core journalistic ethics by both Hannah-Jones and the Times, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written” does not deserve the honor conferred upon it. Nor does The 1619 Project of which it is a central part, and which the Board seeks to honor by honoring Hannah-Jones’s essay. The Board should acknowledge that its award was an error. It can and should correct that error by withdrawing the prize.


Signatories
William B. Allen, Professor of Political Philosophy, James Madison College, Michigan State University.


Larry P. Arnn, President, Hillsdale College.


James Ceaser, Professor of Politics, The University of Virginia.


John Ellis, Professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.


Burton Folsom, Distinguished Fellow, Hillsdale College.


Mark David Hall, The Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics, George Fox University.


Victor Davis Hanson, The Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.


Charles Kesler, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University.


Roger Kimball, Editor and Publisher, The New Criterion; Publisher, Encounter Books.


Stanley Kurtz, Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center.


Glenn Loury, The Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, Brown University.


Phillip W. Magness, Senior Research Fellow, American Institute for Economic Research.


Myron Magnet, Editor-at-Large, City Journal, The Manhattan Institute.


Wilfred M. McClay, The G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, University of Oklahoma.


Lucas Morel, The John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics, Washington and Lee University.


Paul Moreno, The William and Berniece Grewcock Chair in Constitutional History, Hillsdale College.


Robert Paquette, Founder, Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.


Paul Rahe, Professor of History, and Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage, Hillsdale College.


Colleen Sheehan, Professor of Political Science, Villanova University.


Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars.


Jean Yarbrough, Professor of Government and Gary M. Pendy, Sr. Professor of Social Sciences, Bowdoin College.


Additional Signatories
Jonathan J. Bean, Professor of History, Southern Illinois University; Research Fellow, Independent Institute.


Angelo M. Codevilla, Emeritus Professor of International Relations, Boston University; Senior Fellow, Independent Institute.


Williamson M. Evers, Senior Fellow and Director, Center on Educational Excellence, Independent Institute.


William F. Shughart II, J. Fish Smith Professor in Public Choice, Utah State University; Research Director, Independent Institute.


David Theroux, Founder and President, Independent Institute.


Richard K. Vedder, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Economics, Ohio University; Senior Fellow, Independent Institute; Member, Board of Directors, National Assocation of Scholars.


Graham H. Walker, Executive Director, Independent Institute.



1 Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon Wood, The New York Times Magazine, December 29, 2019.


2 Jake Silverstein, “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine, December 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html.


3 William B. Allen; Michael A. Burlingame; Joseph R. Fornieri; Allen C. Guelzo; Peter Kolchin; Glenn W. LaFantasie; Lucas E. Morel; George C. Rable; Diana J. Schaub; Colleen A. Sheehan; Steven B. Smith; and Michael P. Zuckert, “Twelve Scholars Critique The 1619 Project and The New York Times Magazine Editor Responds,” History News Network, January 26, 2020.


4 Phillip W. Magness, “Down The 1619 Project’s Memory Hole,” Quillette, September 19, 2020, https://quillette.com/2020/09/19/down-the-1619-projects-memory-hole/.


5 See the comments of Conor Friedersdorf and numerous video links here: https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2020/09/25/1619-projects-nikole-hannah-jones-tries-punishing-atlantic-journo-who-called-out-her-gaslighting-and-steps-into-a-minefield/

[Kathianne]

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/10/13/nyt-managing-editor-firmly-reject-criticism-1619-project-fell-fully-within-standards-news-organization/


NYT Managing Editor: “Firmly Reject” Criticism Of 1619 Project, “Fell Fully Within Our Standards As A News Organization”
ED MORRISSEYPosted at 12:01 pm on October 13, 2020




In other words, everything conservatives have said about editorial standards at the New York Times turns out to be true. After columnist Bret Stephens finally opened up some in-house criticism of the “1619 Project,” pressure built on the organization to respond to the accusations of editorial and intellectual dishonesty and inaccuracies in both the project itself and how the NYT comported itself afterward. Managing editor Dean Baquet finally responded just a few minutes ago by proclaiming that all of the issues Stephens identified — criticisms which have also percolated for months across the political spectrum — “fell fully within our standards as a news organization.”


Well, at least Baquet’s honest about intellectual dishonesty at the Gray Lady:


This column, however, raised questions about the journalistic ethics and standards of 1619 and the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones, who inspired and drove the project. That criticism I firmly reject. The project fell fully within our standards as a news organization. In fact, 1619 — and especially the work of Nikole — fill me with pride. Our readers, and I believe our country, have benefited immensely from the principled, rigorous and groundbreaking journalism of Nikole and the full team of writers and editors who brought us this transformative work.


Which part of these fills Baquet with pride?


The NYT memory-holing the claim that 1619 was the country’s “true founding” without acknowledging their post-facto edits, let alone explaining them:
Hannah-Jones dishonestly denying she or the paper made that claim
Ignoring input from actual experts in the field about the arguments and conclusions made in the 1619 Project prior to publication
Ignoring repeated criticisms by experts in the field after publication
Refusing to issue corrections to factual errors and misrepresentations
Baquet never addresses these issues. In fact, his statement is remarkable for its utter lack of response to either Stephens or to the myriad other critics of the 1619 Project and the Times, both substantively and ethically, for their handling of the controversy. In his silence, Baquet tacitly approves of all these tactics, and not just approves but positively embraces them.


If the media industry wonders why the American public ranks them below Congress in terms of trustworthiness, they should recall this stance from the “Paper of Record” — the one that stealth-edited the record and then proclaimed that it was proud of itself. Without ever answering any criticism or providing even a rudimentary form of accountability, no less. The message here is clear: We can lie to you with impunity, and we don’t even care if you catch us.


Message received, Mr. Baquet. Loud and clear.

[Kathianne]

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/407390/

[jimnyc]

I don't know how you do it, Kath, as I could never be a teacher. Don't have the patience! Whether that be for the kids, or for administration and/or other teachers, and especially if it's about "new" history being introduced or history being altered somehow. Or allowing for students demands for ridiculous things. Or allowing politics to enter the classroom and then alter history and/or how work is graded, or corrected. I honestly have zero idea of how much any of that truly happens out there, but I do see it happening. And the main reason I hate it, is that it makes me wonder what our country will look like in 100-200 years in the classroom, and how much history will have changed in their text books, and how much of politics will have changed education and how things are taught.

[Gunny]

I don't know how you do it, Kath, as I could never be a teacher. Don't have the patience! Whether that be for the kids, or for administration and/or other teachers, and especially if it's about "new" history being introduced or history being altered somehow. Or allowing for students demands for ridiculous things. Or allowing politics to enter the classroom and then alter history and/or how work is graded, or corrected. I honestly have zero idea of how much any of that truly happens out there, but I do see it happening. And the main reason I hate it, is that it makes me wonder what our country will look like in 100-200 years in the classroom, and how much history will have changed in their text books, and how much of politics will have changed education and how things are taught.I told my daughter recently if I had her job I'd quit and join the Marine Corps. Less bullshit and bureaucracy.

I survived that. I'd have already gone off on multiple idiots just this school year if I was a teacher.

[Kathianne]

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/16/the-1619-project-down-but-far-from-out/

[Kathianne]

Laying the foundation:

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/10/liberals-confirm-they-hate-the-constitution.php