What followed was a stupefying race-based fantasy about the origins of the United States. The lead essay, by the black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the “architect” of The 1619 Project, set the tone. “[O]ne of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain,” she wrote, “was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” So, everything you learned about the American Revolution is wrong, or at least wrongheaded. Forget about the Stamp Act, the Boston Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts, “No taxation without representation,” etc. All that, utterly unmentioned by Ms. Hannah-Jones, was mere window dressing. The American colonists might talk about liberty. What they really cared about, according to this malignant fairy tale, was preserving and extending the institution of slavery. “[S]ome might argue,” as Hannah-Jones coyly puts it, “that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.” Gosh. Of course, “some might argue” any number of incredible things: that the earth is flat, that the moon is made of green cheese, that The New York Times is still a responsible source of news and even-handed commentary. The fact that “some might argue” X does not mean that X is credible.
So it is with the preposterous idea that America was founded as a “slavocracy.” Hannah-Jones asserts that “anti-black racism runs in the very dna of this country.” The claim is obviously metaphorical; countries do not possess dna. But if one were to take the metaphor seriously, as tantamount to asserting that anti-black racism is an essential and therefore unalterable characteristic of America, then the whole 1619 Project would be pointless from the get-go. It would be like complaining about the roundness of a circle or the wetness of water.
Presumably, however, neither Hannah-Jones nor the Times intends for us to take the metaphor quite so seriously. For Hannah-Jones, what is wanted is an expression that simultaneously justifies the endless whining of black radicals about how victimized they are because of things that happened a few centuries ago while also stressing the perpetually renewable guilt (like the liver of Prometheus) of whites, all whites, those living today even more than those actually involved in the African slave trade in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. For the Times, it fits in with what Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff called its “irresistible urge to delegitimize America.” That is the ultimate aim of The 1619 Project: to deliver another blow in the campaign to besmirch and diminish the political and moral achievement that is the United States of America. It is as despicable as it is mendacious.
You might say, Who cares about insane rantings in The New York Times? It is increasingly a niche publication for the credentialed, politically correct nomenklatura, totally out of touch with the main current of America and held afloat only by its unremitting attacks on anything to do with Donald Trump.
This is true. Nevertheless, the paper is not entirely without influence, even today. Indeed, various public school districts, including some in Chicago, have announced that they will supplement their curricula by distributing copies of The 1619 Project to students, thereby promulgating the racialist worldview expounded by that “major” “reframing” of our history. And though the copies will be paid for by the Times and donors, taxpayers will still be indirectly funding a version of history that is politically tendentious and wildly at odds with the facts. The Pulitzer Center (not affiliated with the famed prizes) has announced that it “is proud to be the education partner for The 1619 Project.” As we write, the Center’s website is full of little valentines to Hannah-Jones and her racialist, ahistorical fantasy about the founding of the United States.
We said that The 1619 Project was stupefying. What we meant was that the claims it makes are so outlandish, at once so ostentatiously at odds with historical reality while also being carefully framed in a corset of politically correct verbiage, that any critical response is at first stunned. Someone tells you that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a carefully staged hoax perpetrated by nasa or the Trilateral Commission or whatever. Your first response is a spluttering incredulity.
It is the same with the contention that 1619, the year that the first African slaves were brought to America, marked “the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built.” But there were already slaves and various other forms of indentured labor in the Americas as there were all over the world. To say that there were slaves in America is not to say that “the country was built” on slavery. Moreover, the African slaves were not “kidnapped” by American or British slavers, as Hannah-Jones asserts, but were sold by other black Africans who were happy to profit by selling people they had enslaved to the colonists.
Fortunately, a rational, historically informed response to The 1619 Project has been building. The National Association of Scholars has inaugurated the “1620 Project,” not just to commemorate the signing of the Mayflower Compact—a much more significant event in the history of the United States—but also to provide an occasion for thoughtful responses to some of the more outlandish claims made by Hannah-Jones and the other writers involved in the Times’s latest campaign of disinformation. (Among our favorites, the contention that double-entry bookkeeping was an innovation “whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.”)
The distinguished historian Allen C. Guelzo, writing in City Journal, notes that 'The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.' The great irony, Guelzo writes, is that 'The 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America,' The New York Times, 'because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.'”
(A prime number is distinct, whose only function is 1 and itself, that is it is not the product of any two numbers other than one and itself. It is a happy curiosity. In this instance, it is meant to be isolated, autogenerated, and alone. But it may not be a terrific metaphor for a calculated, propagandist lie intended to influence public opinion and education. That kind of act is neither quirky nor interesting. Beneath such mendacity is a malignant evil and its target is the very foundation of the nation, a foundation that allows the NYT to exist. Any notion intended to hobble the value and free nature of man should never be passively tolerated.)
