Cancel the New York Times - Claremont Review of Books - "The Left’s cultural revolution is in one of its periodic Jacobin phases: statues defaced, beheaded, burned, and torn down; streets and schools and other things renamed; public spaces occupied by gun-wielding thugs. The iconoclasm has spread from attacks on Confederate monuments to statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Catholic saints, and even white abolitionists. New York’s American Museum of Natural History is taking down its famous Teddy Roosevelt statue. New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio—a man (born Warren Wilhelm, Jr.) who knows something about name changes—is reviewing the racist and/or slave connections of street names. He has already mentioned the avenue named for Robert E. Lee, and is looking for others. Columbus Avenue, Columbia University, the Washington Bridge, maybe even Madison Avenue and Washington Square are not long for this world. Meanwhile, Princeton University intends to rename its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs because of Wilson’s notorious racism, and several elementary and high schools named for Jefferson are contemplating a re-branding because of his racism and slave ownership. Activists make similar attacks on Washington. There is talk of renaming James Madison College at Michigan State University. Consistency demands that Yale University, named after the slave trader who endowed the institution, also change its name. Perhaps the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University will be renamed, too, since William Penn also owned slaves, and, although the Brown for whom the school is named was an abolitionist, his family had been involved with the slave trade. If we really wish to remove names associated with slavery, one obvious candidate, and I am hardly the first to mention this, is New York City itself. It was named for James, Duke of York, brother of King Charles II of England. Together, they attacked the Dutch outpost of New Netherland and, after its capture, rechristened it “New York.” Like his brother, James was a would-be tyrant, particularly where the colonies were concerned... James masterminded the newly created “Royal African Company” that set out to take the African slave trade from the Dutch... History is, of course, more complicated than partisans would like it to be. And those complexities have much to teach about today’s “1619 riots,” as Charles R. Kesler called them recently in the New York Post. He notes that the New York Times seized upon 1619 as the year for their rewrite of U.S. history because that’s the year the first slaves arrived in Virginia. Racism is, in the words of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter the Times put in charge of the 1619 Project, “in the very DNA of this country.” But DNA, Kesler notes, is something that cannot be changed. Hence the rhetoric of the 1619 Project is rhetoric of futility. Like bringing democracy to Iraq or a sense of humor to Presbyterians, ending racism in the U.S., from this point of view, is impossible. Yet the 1619 story rests on false history. For starters, it is not, in fact, clear that the slaves the Dutch brought to Virginia in 1619 were, after their sale, treated as slaves. Slavery did not yet exist in colonial law. Some may very well have been treated as slaves as the term came to be defined, but others probably were not. Good scholars, like Princeton’s Nell Irvin Painter, have argued that they were all servants. The Times, reflecting its ever-growing devotion to “narrative” over facts, simply ignores such possibilities. That simplification sets up the Times’s account of the American Revolution. The 1619 Project originally asserted that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” That follows from the “racist DNA” line—the U.S. was created to save slavery from Britain. But it’s fake news. After months of criticism by historians of all political persuasions, a Times update stated: “We recognize that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists.” Since “some” could mean anything from 0.1% to 99.9%, the Times has retreated from a dubious but bold assertion to an unfalsifiable, meaningless one. “We stand behind the basic point,” the Times insisted, either dishonestly or ignorantly. Logically, the Times’s small verbal tweak masks a huge concession, one that shatters a central contention of the 1619 Project. So what actually happened in 1619? We don’t have enough evidence for there to be a definitive answer... Race in our sense of the term did not yet exist. Even in the 18th century, Jill Lepore notes in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), the English regarded Germans, Italians, Swedes, and others as “swarthy.” If that’s the case, then it’s wildly anachronistic to call Western civilization “white.”... The great colonial historian Edmund Morgan noted in his book American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) that “before 1660, it might have been difficult to distinguish race prejudice from class prejudice.” (Morgan used the term “might” advisedly. Historians are still debating the point.) Scholars have weighed in since Morgan, but they have not cast his nuanced point into doubt... Douglass recognized that the U.S. was not a slaveholding republic, and the Constitution, rightly interpreted, is not a pro-slavery document. So much for slavery being in our DNA. As for the Declaration, Lincoln and Douglass, and later Martin Luther King, Jr., held that the Declaration was, as King put it, a “promissory note.” Not surprisingly, Douglass is virtually absent from the 1619 Project. To make its fatalistic point, the Times has to silence his voice. To recover Douglass’s voice, we must recognize that the Declaration put anti-slavery and anti-racism, not slavery and racism, into the republic’s DNA... Why not turn to DeWitt Clinton, the man who truly made New York the “Empire State”? Clinton served as either the city’s mayor or the state’s governor for most of the quarter-century from 1803 to 1828... Thanks to Clinton’s work, slavery was responsible for only 5% (not the 50% some leftists claim) of U.S. economic activity. Clinton’s importance used to be more recognized: in the 19th century, his picture was on our currency (a $1,000 bill). His name is worth honoring again. So let New York State and City be re-christened “Clinton.” Then the New York Times would be known forever by the name it could have adopted during the 2016 presidential campaign: the Clinton Daily."
The Inclusive Case for 1776, Not 1619 - The Atlantic - "That revisionist ambition quickly brought out critics—in outlets as normally antagonistic as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the World Socialist Web Site—who challenged the Times’s reframing and the factual claims offered as its basis. Last month, five historians alleged significant factual errors in a letter published in the magazine, alongside a response from Jake Silverstein, its editor in chief, who declined to issue corrections. That prompted another round of critical coverage from the World Socialist Web Site and historian Gordon Wood, a leading scholar of the period, who was irked most by the Times Magazine’s doubling down on the claim that a primary reason American colonists favored independence was to protect slavery. “I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves,” he wrote. “No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776.” That movement conservatives, tenured historians, and the editors of the World Socialist Web Site align so substantially in their critiques has broader significance. The debate over the relative salience of class, race, and hierarchy in the United States has divided the left while yielding odd convergences, and not only between classical liberals on the left and right. Both Trotskyist and movement conservatives can be fiercely protective of the revolution of 1776 and worry that centering race in history and politics divides America in corrosive ways (though they differ wildly on what should or will likely happen if racial fissures recede)... Linker argued that the paper treated history “in a highly sensationalistic, reductionistic, and tendentious way, with the cumulative result resembling agitprop more than responsible journalism or scholarship.” Other early critics worth engaging include Rich Lowry, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Phillip W. Magness at National Review; Andrew Sullivan at New York; Glenn Loury and John McWhorter at Bloggingheads.tv; Lucas Morel at The American Mind; Wilfred M. McClay at Commentary; Timothy Sandefur at Reason; and Magness again at the American Institute for Economic Research. But little constructive debate about the substance of these critiques ensued, in part because center-left publications such as Vox, Slate, and The Nation tended to mock or pathologize those conservative responses to the 1619 Project that they found vapid (Newt Gingrich came up a lot), instead of grappling with the most thoughtful objections. The most sustained, ambitious critiques came later—and from an unexpected source: the World Socialist Web Site, published by the Trotskyists at the International Committee of the Fourth International. Social-media users circulated the site’s interviews with academic historians who believe that the 1619 Project got something important wrong about slavery. Among them were Texas State University’s Victoria Bynum, Adolph Reed Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania, Brown’s Gordon Wood, the City University of New York’s James Oakes, and Princeton’s James McPherson. They raised some of the same counterpoints as the widely ignored center-right critics. Why did a socialist website invest so much time and attention to the 1619 Project? In the view of the site’s editors, The New York Times is engaged in a reactionary, politically motivated “falsification of history” that wrongly centers racial rather than class conflict. “The establishment of a racialist narrative is extremely dangerous,” the Marxist theoretician David North, chairman of the site’s international editorial board, told me in a phone interview. “I cannot think of any action, intellectually or politically, more harmful to the struggle to unite the working class than an argument which asserts the primacy of race as the motivating factor in history.” His efforts to rebut the project flow from his related belief that “the uncompromising defense of the progressive heritage of the two American revolutions”––the Revolutionary and Civil Wars––“is necessary for resisting intellectual retrogression and political reaction, educating the working class, and building a powerful American and international socialist movement.”... “There is an implication running through much of the 1619 Project that slavery is a subject that somehow is rarely if ever spoken of in American history,” McClay writes at Commentary. He adds, “The shelves of American libraries groan with books on the subject by many of the greatest American historians, from Oscar Handlin and John Hope Franklin to Winthrop Jordan, Edmund Morgan, Eugene Genovese, Lawrence Levine, David Brion Davis, Stanley Engerman, Gavin Wright, and so on.”... In my colleague Adam Serwer’s recent article about five scholars who criticized the 1619 Project in a letter, he noted “a recurrent theme” among historians he spoke with who saw the letter but declined to sign it. “While they may have agreed with some of the factual objections in the letter or had other reservations of their own,” he wrote, “several told me they thought the letter was an unnecessary escalation.” Similarly, North told me the World Socialist Web Site’s editors contacted several historians who have factual critiques but fear the backlash from voicing them publicly. Insofar as such historians are refraining from public comment at all, they do a disservice to public discourse... she told Serwer that the 1619 Project was not history “as I would write it,” but added, “I felt that if I signed on to that [letter], I would be signing on to the white guy’s attack of something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way.” I’d fault Painter only for implying that the race of a historian is among the factors that should influence whether colleagues sign on to his or her critiques... Against charges of arbitrariness or problematic implications, the Times offers no adequate or even straightforward defense of the premise that the arrival of slaves in Jamestown was our true founding, leaning on vague, slippery formulations like “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.” Isn’t it equally true that no aspect of subsequent history “has been untouched” by the birth of Christ [etc]? To substitute 1619 as America’s true founding not only centers one original sin, chattel slavery, over an earlier sin that was also abhorrent and consequential: the genocide and subjugation of indigenous North Americans... What relationship, I wonder, does an indigenous Hawaiian have to 1619? How about Andrew Yang?... the 1619 Project itself at times treats African slaves of bygone centuries and African Americans born after Jim Crow ended as one coherent group and bygone slaveholders and today’s white Americans as another, echoing a contestable, reductive, widespread, yet perhaps inevitable conceit."
For all that they claim that they want to "teach history" (what they claim CRT is), liberals seem to be pushing a lot of the made-up sort
Lots of historians think the 1619 project is bunk, but they're scared that the lynch mob will turn on them if they speak the truth
The 1619 Cover-Up - "This was the first civil suit in the Thirteen Colonies to declare a person of African descent a slave for life. It also established the right of free blacks to own slaves... the 1619 Project might not be guilty of a cover-up, but it definitely washed its hands clean of a free black man’s contribution to slavery. The 1619 Project’s editor probably believed it was unconscionable to taint their narrative with such an anomaly, but that doesn’t help American students know the full story of slavery."
Steve Guest on Twitter - "Nikole Hannah-Jones: Parents shouldn't be in charge of their kids' schooling: "I don't really understand this idea that parents should decide what's being taught. I'm not a professional educator. I don't have a degree in social studies." Yet she wants the 1619 Project in schools."
When teaching about race, faculty members should avoid imposing a singular interpretation or ideology (opinion) - "surely our past encounters with race are subject to multiple interpretations, too. We saw that in the controversy over The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” which highlighted how slavery and racism have affected everything from housing and labor to health and education. It also triggered stark objections from several leading historians, who said the project distorted or downplayed the role of Americans -- of every race -- in resisting racism and creating a more perfect (albeit still imperfect) union. Like McWhorter and Williams, these scholars did not shrink from identifying slavery, segregation and racism as key factors in shaping America. But they rejected the idea that racism “runs in the very DNA of this country” -- as the project’s lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, wrote -- and the implication that it limited what Americans could imagine or accomplish. “The function of these tropes is to deny change over time,” historian James Oakes told an interviewer, criticizing “The 1619 Project.” “The worst thing about it is that it leads to political paralysis … If it’s the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?” Oakes’s interview ran on a socialist website, which should tell you something. “The 1619 Project” became a punching bag for red-meat conservatives like Newt Gingrich, who flatly called it a “lie” perpetuated by hidebound leftist elites. But it also drew fire from staunchly liberal scholars like Oakes, who applauded the Times for exploring racial histories but disputed its interpretation of them. Again, Oakes might be wrong, or right, or any number of shades in between. But surely any teacher using “The 1619 Project” in class -- as many have already begun to do -- owes it to students to present contrasting perspectives on it. Don’t hold your breath for that. Despite all of the rhetoric about “hard work” and “courageous conversations,” we seem to be gearing up for a spate of single-minded indoctrination around race. I find Kendi’s own recommended reading list -- which the Times published earlier this spring -- a case in point, as it pretty much studiously avoids any author whose assumptions break fundamentally from his. Introducing the list, Kendi wrote that “we need to read books that are difficult or unorthodox, that don’t go down easily.” But a truly difficult approach would require us to grapple with different ideas about race, instead of inscribing a new orthodoxy about it. It would also pay homage to the great James Baldwin, who knew just how hard all of this would be. Pleading for an education that taught students to “examine everything” -- and to come to their own conclusions -- Baldwin admitted that “no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around.” Yet it remains our basic duty, as teachers, to cultivate precisely the type of person that Baldwin had in mind. Presenting a single story about race -- and pretending it's a holy writ -- won’t make students more aware or informed; it will instead make them into cynics who mouth the right incantations when we say the word. Our job is to teach them to ask questions of the universe, not to answer the questions ourselves."
New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones says 'all journalism is activism' - "New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones declared that "all journalism is activism" as the Gray Lady faces constant criticism that it favors liberals... Former Times columnist Bari Weiss ripped the paper’s staffers last month as "activist journalists who treat the paper like a high school cafeteria." Weiss said the once-proud paper foments "rage, polarization, distrust" which betrayed her values. She famously quit the Times in 2020 with a scathing resignation letter in which she detailed bullying in an "illiberal environment." It seems Hannah-Jones agrees with her theory that the paper’s reporters don’t have a neutral position. However, critics don’t think Hannah-Jones is accurate when claiming activist reporters try to be truthful. "The New York Times journalist might have a point if she actually strived to be "fair and accurate." She doesn’t," NewsBusters associate editor Scott Whitlock wrote. "The problem with The 1619 Project is a problem with facts. Distinguished historians, including Pulitzer Prize-winners, hammered the errors.""
Only far right conspiracy theorist fascists don't trust the media
Andrew Sullivan: NY Times Abandons Liberalism for Activism - "“Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”... How can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one point in history and true in another? You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different than saying that the ideals themselves were false. (They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition. But that would be conventional wisdom — or simply the central theme of President Barack Obama’s vision of the arc of justice in the unfolding of the United States... Even though those ideals eventually led to the emancipation of slaves and the slow, uneven and incomplete attempt to realize racial equality over the succeeding centuries, they were still “false when they were written.” America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy, which was masked by highfalutin’ rhetoric about universal freedom. That’s the subtext of the entire project, and often, also, the actual text. Hence the replacing of 1776 (or even 1620 when the pilgrims first showed up) with 1619 as the “true” founding. “True” is a strong word... the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines! Am I exaggerating? The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed … it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” Finally! All previous accounts of American history have essentially been white lies, the NYT tells us, literally and figuratively. All that rhetoric about liberty, progress, prosperity, toleration was a distraction in order to perpetrate those lies, and make white people feel better about themselves... It seems to me that the New York Times’ editors and reporters want to say this, but not quite so explicitly. So the issue is riddled with weirdnesses like the opening sentence. 1619 is the “true” founding at one point, and then only “as important as” 1776 at another. The original ideals were false, and then the country was founded on “both an ideal and a lie.” It’s as if liberal editors reined in radical writers but couldn’t do so coherently, and lost the plot at times. Which is a good way of understanding the NYT as a whole right now, and the internal conversation that took place in the office soon after... a reporter asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, why the Times doesn’t integrate the message of the 1619 Project into every single subject the paper covers... “I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.” It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way? Baquet had no answer to this contradiction, except to say that the 1619 Project was a good start... the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists. The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism... I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it. Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism. Don’t get me wrong. I think that view deserves to be heard... But I sure don’t think it deserves to be incarnated as the only way to understand our collective history, let alone be presented as the authoritative truth, in a newspaper people rely on for some gesture toward objectivity. This is therefore, in its over-reach, ideology masquerading as neutral scholarship. Take a simple claim: no aspect of our society is unaffected by the legacy of slavery. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. But, when you consider this statement a little more, you realize this is either banal or meaningless. The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us. You could say the same thing about the English common law, for example, or the use of the English language: no aspect of American life is untouched by it. You could say that about the Enlightenment. Or the climate. You could say that America’s unique existence as a frontier country bordered by lawlessness is felt even today in every mass shooting. You could cite the death of countless millions of Native Americans — by violence and disease — as something that defines all of us in America today. And in a way it does. But that would be to engage in a liberal inquiry into our past, teasing out the nuances, and the balance of various forces throughout history, weighing each against each other along with the thoughts and actions of remarkable individuals... But the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one... I don’t believe most African-Americans believe this, outside the elites. They’re much less doctrinaire than elite white leftists on a whole range of subjects. I don’t buy it either — alongside, I suspect, most immigrants, including most immigrants of color. Who would ever want to immigrate to such a vile and oppressive place? But it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end. To present a truth as the truth is, in fact, a deception. And it is hard to trust a paper engaged in trying to deceive its readers in order for its radical reporters and weak editors to transform the world."
New York Times 1619 Project: No One Year Unlocks Meaning of America - "Whether the subject is slavery or liberty, American history is a story of contested principles. A single birth year cannot unlock the very meaning of the nation, not least because how historians and others explain the past hinges on how they understand the present. An overemphasis on 1619, 1620, or any other year, makes our history far too simple."
Down the 1619 Project’s 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.. The passage, and in particular its description of the year 1619 as “our true founding,” quickly became a flashpoint for controversy around the project... 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 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 many times over. But something changed as the historical controversies around the 1619 Project intensified in late 2019 and early 2020. A group of five distinguished historians took issue with Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, focusing on its historically unsupported claim that protecting slavery was a primary motive of the American revolutionaries when they broke away from Britain in 1776. Other details of the project soon came under scrutiny, revealing both errors of fact and dubious interpretations of evidence in other essays, such as Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project piece attempting to connect American capitalism with slavery. Finally back in March, a historian who the Times recruited to fact-check Hannah-Jones’s essay revealed that she had warned the paper against publishing its claims about the motives of the American Revolution on account of their weak evidence. The 1619 Project’s editors ignored the advice. Throughout the controversy, the line about the year 1619 being “our true founding” continued to haunt the Times. This criticism did not aim to denigrate the project’s titular date or the associated events in the history of slavery. Rather, the passage came to symbolize the Times’s blurring of historical analysis with editorial hyperbole. The announced intention of reframing the country’s origin date struck many readers across the political spectrum as an implicit repudiation of the American revolution and its underlying principles. 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... Discovery of this edit came about earlier this week when Nikole Hannah-Jones went on CNN 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: “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 with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. But this time the brazen rewriting of her own arguments proved too much. Hannah-Jones’s readers scoured her own Twitter feed and public statements over the previous year, unearthing multiple instances where she had in fact announced an intention to displace 1776 with 1619... Whatever the exact occasion for the changes, the Times did not disclose its edits or how they obscured one of the most controversial claims in the entire 1619 Project. They simply made the problematic passages disappear, hoping that nobody would notice."