Episode 288 – The 1619 Project

One thing I hate about our society, specifically on the Left, is how we are changing everything.

We have changed language. We have normalized in correct language like using “at” at the end of the sentence. We have changed definitions like how we did with the term “gender.” We have even changed the way we use pronouns referring to an individual as “they.”

We are trying to change science because of political correctness. A man wanting to be a woman means that he is a woman, no matter what his DNA says. Gender dysphoria is no longer a mental disorder. We are assigned gender, not born with it. And the world is going to end in 10 years because of weather.

But the worse thing we are doing is changing the history of the United States without adding context to the history of the world. The revision of our history is enunciating our dark moments without acknowledging our successes. The goal of this is to emphasize the failure of the United States and all its systems.

Enter the 1619 Project.

 

What is the 1619 Project?

There is a huge push to revise history within the United States. This revisionist push is not something that just happened in the last ten years. It has been around for almost a century. People like Howard Zinn have written histories that make the United States look like an imperialistic tyranny instead of a country that celebrates freedoms that have been given to us by God, not government.

In Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, a book that was touted by Matt Damon who played a genius in Good Will Hunting, blamed all evils in history on the United States. Slavery, the Native American crisis, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the wars in the Middle East, even terrorism was all because of the imperialism of the United States. Many of Zinn’s findings were actually debunked by real historians. In fact, there is an entire book written that destroys all of Zinn’s arguments. But this doesn’t matter to the Leftists. The book is being touted as a legitimate history of the United States and has found its way into out high schools and colleges as mandatory reading.

In 2019, another document that tries to revise American history was released: The 1619 Project. According to Wikipedia.com:

The 1619 Project is a long-form journalism project developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the United States‘ national narrative”.[1] The project was first published in August 2019 for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the Virginia colony.[2] The project later included a broadsheet article, live events, and a podcast.

 

It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact date has been lost to history (it has come to be observed on Aug. 20), that was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.

Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.

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.  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. Perhaps you need some persuading. The issue contains essays on different aspects of contemporary American life, from mass incarceration to rush-hour traffic, that have their roots in slavery and its aftermath.

Each essay takes up a modern phenomenon, familiar to all, and reveals its history. The first, by the staff writer Nikole Hannah- Jones (from whose mind this project sprang), provides the intellectual framework for the project and can be read as an introduction. Alongside the essays, you will find 17 literary works that bring to life key moments in African-American history. These works are all original compositions by contemporary black writers who were asked to choose events on a timeline of the past 400 years. The poetry and fiction they created is arranged chronologically throughout the issue, and each work is introduced by the history to which the author is responding. A word of warning: There is gruesome material in these pages, material that readers will find disturbing. That is, unfortunately, as it must be. American history cannot be told truthfully without a clear vision of how inhuman and immoral the treatment of black Americans has been. By acknowledging this shameful history, by trying hard to understand its powerful influence on the present, perhaps we can prepare ourselves for a more just future. That is the hope of this project.

The Goals of the Project

 

This is a complete rewrite of American history. Its goal is to:

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  • Become the new education tool of American history.
  • Change the way our children think about America. They will be our leaders one day. The goal is to change the culture so the future generations will change it politically. Politics is always down stream of culture.
  • Blame America for slavery. Slavery has been around forever and still exists.
  • Make it only that blacks made America what it is today and ignore what we did as a nation.
  • America is evil and must be changed. That includes eliminating our philosophy, accomplishments and successes.
  • Ignore our real history and the struggles we went through to become the successful country we are.
  • Makes racism systemic. It’s not.
  • It ignores the struggles this country went through, black and white, to get where we are today.
  • It ignores how far we’ve come.
  • Demonize an entire race; the white race. This is a document on black supremacy. This is dangerous. When you demonize a skin color, you end up with slavery, gulags and holocausts. Isn’t this what they are fighting against?
  • Ignore that whites are diverse. We are English, Irish, Scottish, Italian, Russian, German and many others.
  • Ignore the sins of other civilizations including African and Muslim civilizations.

 

This is some really dangerous stuff. This is changing U.S. history in order to demonize a country, its citizens and the system:

  • Justifies cancel culture. This will kill the economy, kill innovation and kill national pride.
  • Promotes a complete change to the system of the most successful country in world history.
  • Justifies the persecution of those who don’t agree.
  • Creates race superiority.
  • Justifies policies that will hurt the economy of this country, further pushing the need for socialism. Socialism leads to tyranny.

 

Oops! It Ain’t that Accurate

 

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According to the Wall Street Journal article by Elliot Kaufman:

‘So wrong in so many ways” is how Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American Revolution, characterized the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” James McPherson, dean of Civil War historians and another Pulitzer winner, said the Times presented an “unbalanced, one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” Even more surprising than the criticism from these generally liberal historians was where the interviews appeared: on the World Socialist Web Site, run by the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party.

A September essay for the World Socialist Web Site called the project a “racialist falsification” of history. That didn’t get much attention, but in November the interviews with the historians went viral. “I wish my books would have this kind of reaction,” Mr. Wood says in an email. “It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support.” He adds that fellow historians have privately expressed their agreement. Mr. McPherson coolly describes the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”

The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it “decenters whiteness” and disdains its critics as “old, white male historians.” She tweeted of Mr. McPherson: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” Her own qualifications are an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master’s in journalism. She says the project goes beyond Mr. McPherson’s expertise, the Civil War. “For the most part,” she writes in its lead essay, “black Americans fought back alone” against racism. No wonder she’d rather not talk about the Civil War.

When called out by the socialist organization, Nicole Hannah-Jones doubled-down using race as her justification:

To the Trotskyists, Ms. Hannah-Jones writes: “You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are.” She calls them “white men claiming to be socialists.” Perhaps they’re guilty of being white men, but they’re definitely socialists. Their faction, called the Workers League until 1995, was “one of the most strident and rigid Marxist groups in America” during the Cold War, says Harvey Klehr, a leading historian of American communism.

“Ours is not a patriotic, flag-waving kind of perspective,” says Thomas Mackaman, the World Socialist Web Site’s interviewer and a history professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He simply recognizes that the arrival of 20 slaves in 1619 wasn’t a “world-altering event.” Slavery had existed across the world for millennia, and there were already slaves elsewhere in what would become the U.S. before 1619.

But “even if you want to make slavery the central story of American history,” he says, the Times gets it backward. The American Revolution didn’t found a “slavocracy,” as Ms. Hannah-Jones puts it. Instead, in Mr. Mackaman’s telling, it “brought slavery in for questioning in a way that had never been done before” by “raising universal human equality as a fundamental principle.” Nor was protecting slavery “one of the primary reasons” the colonists declared independence, as Ms. Hannah-Jones claims. It’s no coincidence the abolitionists rapidly won votes to end slavery in five of the original 13 states, along with Vermont and the new states of the Midwest.

Ms. Hannah-Jones insists “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” Mr. Mackaman calls that claim “anti-historical.” Proving it requires her to belittle the most progressive declaration of modern history: “that all men are created equal.” Ms. Hannah-Jones calls this a “lie” and claims its drafters didn’t even believe it. The abolitionists disagreed. So did Martin Luther King Jr: He saw it as a “promissory note.”

Other things that the 1619 Project gets wrong:

  • Sociologist Matthew Desmond marshals substantially discredited research to tar the whole of American capitalism as a legacy of slavery.
  • Legal activist Bryan Stevenson presents the war on drugs and broken-windows policing as successors to lynching, the Black Codes and other white “strategies of racial control.”
  • Joseph Kishore, the Socialist Equality Party’s national secretary, says the “1619 Project” is aimed at legitimizing the politics of the Democratic Party and at “dividing workers” by race.

 

Other issues about the 1619 Project come from The Atlantic, far from a right-wing publication. They did try to ease the conflict but pointed out that the conflict was started by real historians who had issue with the layman’s history created by the doocument:

Several weeks ago, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who had criticized the 1619 Project’s “cynicism”in a lecture in November, began quietly circulating a letter objecting to the project, and some of Hannah-Jones’s work in particular. The letter acquired four signatories—James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, all leading scholars in their field. They sent their letter to three top Times editors and the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, on December 4. A version of that letter was published on Friday, along with a detailed rebuttal from Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times Magazine.

  • The letter sent to the Timessays, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.

The letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain march toward a more perfect union. The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation, in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize. Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white anti-racism. It is a harsh verdict, and one of the reasons the 1619 Project has provoked pointed criticism alongside praise.

Americans need to believe that, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of history bends toward justice. And they are rarely kind to those who question whether it does.

 

What Does This Document Ignore?

This document ignores a lot of things.

  • From a history standpoint, the Africans brought over in 1619 weren’t slaves, they were indentured servants. That sucked too. But, after a time, they were freed and given land. Some of those same blacks brought over in 1619, owned land as freeman and owned slaves. Chattel slavery did not really start until later in the century.
  • It ignores that the English Puritans and Spanish colonists did not support any type of slavery. Christopher Columbus got into trouble with Queen Isabella for sending 500 Haitian slaves back to Spain. He was arrested and the slaves were immediately freed and sent home.
  • The Founding Fathers did debate ending slavery with the new Constitution. George Washington actually freed his slaves. Slavery is mentioned in the Federalist Papers. But, because the south depended on slavery and the Union needed to remain unified, the Founding Fathers decided to deal with slavery later.
  • The abolition movement in the United States started right after the Revolutionary War and picked up steam in the early 1800s, well before the Civil War.
  • It ignores the individual and puts individuals into groups based on race. This is evil. This racist. This was done during slavery and Jim Crow. It was also done in Nazi Germany, done in Cuba by the Leftist-revered Che Guevara and is currently being done in China with the Uyghers.
  • Likewise, it groups whites as a single race and all with the same privilege. This is racist. It doesn’t acknowledge that whites also were in their own little castes within the United States. Germans, Irish and Italians are all white ethnicities but were seen as lower class compared to the northern European races. They were treated pretty badly. Jews, also white, were treated with disdain. But none of that matters, they’re all white.
  • It ignores individual’s capacity. If a black man can only get a job as a ditch digger, it is because of racial inequity. If a white man is a ditch digger, it is ignored. There is never an acknowledgement that each have their own abilities.
  • If there is systemic racism in the United States, where is it? What evidence is there? We were systemically racist before the Civil Rights Act but where is it now?
  • It ignores that times have changed and that history is flat within the United States. According to the 1619 Project, blacks have it just as bad today than they did during slavery and Jim Crow which is just ridiculous.
  • It states that all technology and feats achieved by the United States have been abled by slavery, giving blacks credit in areas that just are not true. The light bulb, electricity, space flight, the Internet, computing, cars, television, astrophysics, the plane and jets and other forms of technology are all because of slavery. None of this stuff has anything to do with slavery.
  • The document has no problem stating what America has done wrong but ignores what America has done right throughout history to fix their sins. The Civil War, Women’s Suffrage, reparations for the Japanese interned during World War II and the Civil Rights Act. These never happened and, if acknowledged as significant times in American history, would make America a country that acknowledges its sins.
  • It also brings up the rich black culture and how it affected American culture. Now this is true. Blacks have a great culture that I embrace including dance, blues and jazz music and literature. But American culture seems to be forgotten. Whites had some culture also. Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, John Wayne and Elvis might have a say about that.
  • It ignores the success that blacks have had in this country. Ophra Winfrey is worth billions of dollars. Would she have done that in another country? LeBron James, who is no genius and continually bitches about equity, is worth a billion dollars. Everyone who added to the 1619 Project has a degree is black and from Harvard or Princeton. Does it sound like these people are being oppressed? Stop it.
  • Didn’t mankind have slavery throughout its history? Weren’t the pyramids of Egypt built from slave labor? Weren’t the pyramids of Mexico and South America built on slave labor? Doesn’t China still have slave labor? Not sure? Where the hell do you think your f-ing iPhone came from?
  • Finally, why is there an equity problem in the black community? Why are blacks not earning as much as whites (or Asians)? Why are blacks jailed in disproportionate numbers than any other races including Hispanics? Because of systemic white racism? Then why aren’t there more Asians and Hispanics in jails? Why are white men still the majority in jails and prisons? And what are the examples of unjust imprisonment? None of this is answered. It’s just stated and that’s it.

 

What is the Goal of this Document?

Not sure who said it but some said, outside of 2+2=4, that math can be manipulated to show whatever you want to show. Physics, with the math in the right places, can prove that an elephant can hang off a cliff with its tail tied around a daisy. Well, so it is with history.

This is pure revisionist history. The document admits it. It is revising history to teach the truth. Problem with revisionist history is it adds what “historians” want you to know and leaves out what they want you to forget. The problems with the 1619 Project: It adds stuff that, flat out, isn’t true and leaves out most of true American history. I think it is a good idea to go through all of the history of the New World and the United States. I think U.S. history starts well before the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus.

This document is to change our culture. It is to teach our children the fallacy that the United States is evil, always has been and always will be. The United States is systemically racist. The Left wants that philosophy bled into the institutions: the news media, entertainment and, especially, the education system. Once in the culture, it is a short trip to politics.

Once in politics the system can be changed.

 

What Do We Do?

The Left wants to “counter” systemic racism by, you got it, implementing systemic racism. But the racism will go in a different direction. Let’s listen to Joe Biden, who, in this statement, is promoting systemic racism:

That is promoting systemic racism. Help everyone except white people. Maybe the government will help white women.

When the government will benefit one race over another, that is systemic racism.

When the government supports the change of history to demonize a race, that is systemic racism.

When the government condemns and prosecutes white rioters at the capital building but ignores the $3 billion in damage by BLM and Antifa because of “racial justice,” that is systemic racism.

So what do we do who are concerned with this very disturbing turn of events:

  • Read the Bible and go to church. Many of our philosophies are based on the Judeo-Christian philosophy. Our rights came from God, not government. You might as well know what God said. Include your children. They will need a moral base because they are not going to get it from public school.
  • Read the Declaration of Independence. This document defines who we are as a nation. It is never changing. We are to be in 2021 that we were defined to be in 1776. Make sure your children know about it. Teach them. They won’t get it in public school.
  • Read the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and all the Amendments. This document is the law of the land and gives us the exact process to lead us to be what is defined in the Declaration of Independence. Know that was not defined in the Constitution is a state’s right. Abortion: Not a Constitutional right. Make sure your children know about it. Teach them. They won’t get it in public school.
  • Devour history books. Read history from all sides. I have read Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States. It was crappy and filled with lies, but that’s what your children are learning in school. I like Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History of the United States because it is a far more detailed history of America, both positive and negative, and will counter the Leftist narrative on history. Talk to your children about American history. Learn what they are learning and teach them how to be critical of what they learn. They won’t get any counter arguments in public school.
  • Home schooling is not a thing for everyone. It’s just not possible. But talk to your children. Teach them. Teach them morality, religion, history, math and English. They ain’t learning it is public school. Make them read Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and JD Salinger. Their books are banned in public school.

We need to take over the culture. The only way we do it is teach our children.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-gets-schooled-11576540494
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project