1619

In what has to be one of this year's least surprising of journalistic awards, a group of "judges" recently decided that the New York Times "1619 Project" and one of its authors, Nikole Hannah-Jones, were deserving of a Pulitzer Prize in "commentary." Issues and Insights comments:

The 1619 Project is aptly titled. It’s not journalism so much as a twisted piece of progressive propaganda that even now is being imposed on thousands of grade-school students as part of our “education” curriculum. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragically true...

 A group of major U.S. historians, including Texas State University professor emerita Victoria Bynum, Princeton’s James McPherson, Brown University historian Gordon Wood, CUNY’s James Oakes, and Sean Wilentz of Princeton, wrote a letter calling out the Times for its extremist rewrite of American history.

Meanwhile, the 1619 Project also spurred a group of African-American intellectuals, journalists and activists to create their own alternate 1776 initiative in response. They worry that America’s true legacy as a place of hope and freedom – despite its many well-documented shortcomings – is being erased by the Times’ false, extremist tale. We highly recommend you visit the 1776 site.

It turns out, rather than a bold and insightful reworking of U.S. history, the 1619 Project was little more than an effort to rewrite history to fit the pernicious and mistaken progressive belief that America is steeped in racism, hatred and capitalist oppression, and has been since before its actual founding.

To the progressive left, which now dominates both the major U.S. media and the Democratic Party, America isn’t the land of the free, but the home of racial, economic and class victimhood. America, the beacon of freedom that attracted tens of millions of impoverished immigrants from around the world, doesn’t really exist except as a xenophobic, racist and hyper-capitalist playground for white Americans – and is hell for everyone else.

As such, the 1619 Project isn’t really an education project at all. Indeed, it has one main goal: to further split Americans along race, class, gender and other lines, part of the left media’s divide-and-conquer strategy. Make Americans believe they’re all victims, and no one will agree on anything. “You owe me” becomes the universal mantra.

Whether it's the current COVID-19 crisis or the early history of our country, the left-leaning media is desperate to control the narrative, shaping it to fit the warped and dishonest message designed to increase their own power by dividing the nation and/or making segments of the populace dependent on the government. The 1619 project is a classic example that uses half truths, anti-historical claims, and outright falsehoods to claim that our nation is the racist hell. Pathetic.