WALTER DURANTY DELETES TWITTER ACCOUNT: Well, the Walter Duranty of 2020 – Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her “1619 Project,” but perhaps touched the third-rail of intersectionality today:
(Which is actually one of the more accurate statements she’s made: How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative.)
Also today, Hannah-Jones tweeted this (see screencaps below Matt Welch’s response):
And as the Post-Millennial noted prior to the deletion of her Twitter account: ‘1619 Project’ writer claims ‘America isn’t burning’ as America burns:
The New York Times’ “1619 Project” writer Nikole Hannah-Jones said that it would be an honor to have the current destruction and mayhem across the US known as the “1619 riots.”
As detailed by the Times‘ project, the year 1619 is important as it is considered to be the start of slavery in North America. And according to some academics, the current acts of burglary, vandalism, arson, and assault are justified because of historical slavery.
Per the New York Post:
“A Northwestern University journalism professor named Steven Thrasher took to Slate to offer this analysis: “The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one. The uprising we’ve seen this week is speaking to the American police state in its own language, up to and including the use of fireworks to mark a battle victory. Property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party. . . .”
Hannah-Jones is among them, it appears, as she replied to an opinion piece written by the New York Post by saying that it would be an “honor” to call what is happening “the 1619 riots.”
She followed this up by saying “Also, America isn’t burning.”
Eventually, by this afternoon, Hannah-Jones nuked her Twitter account:
In response to her retweet of the person saying that fireworks “are a coordinated attack on Black and Brown communities by government forces,” Charles Cooke tweeted, “The last time she spread a conspiracy theory, she won a Pulitzer.”
Or as Neo writes: The greatest Pulitzer since Duranty: the 1619 Project.
UPDATE: Hannah-Jones reactivated her account “about an hour later. Before deleting her account, Hannah-Jones deleted a tweet that distributed a conspiracy theory thread that expressed a belief that the government was setting off fireworks in the middle of the night to sow division in black and brown communities in Brooklyn…This goes without saying, but the New York Times has a difficult situation on its hands figuring out how to address this story, where their social media standards were almost certainly violated by one of their most well known authors.”
Related: 1619 Project author: ‘It would be an honor’ to call these the 1619 riots.