R.I.P. GORDON WOOD:
Gordon Wood – the eminent historian of early America who just died – was a forceful critic of the NYT ‘1619 Project,’ which was a cheap propaganda effort to convince Americans that slavery was what this country is all about. He dismantled the project methodically. Link next post.
— FischerKing (@FischerKing64) June 9, 2026
He debunks the 1619 Project here. The woke was so strong then that he had to go to the World Socialist Website to find someone who’d run it.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SUES NYT FOR ALLEGEDLY DISCRIMINATING AGAINST WHITE, MALE EMPLOYEE:
[EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas,] who has been involved with the EEOC since President Donald Trump’s first term, was promoted to chair of the federal watchdog group in his second administration. Her goal as chair is to dial back corporate DEI policies.
As chair, Lucas’s EEOC has gone after a Coca-Cola distributor for hosting a two-day networking event, specifically for women. The group is also investigation Nike, after allegations the company discriminated against white workers in an attempt to exemplify its DEI efforts.
“No matter the size or power of the employer, the EEOC under my leadership will not pull punches in ensuring evenhanded, colorblind enforcement of Title VII to protect America’s workers, including white males,” Lucas said in a statement.
The Times’ editorial product has for years endorsed a left-wing identitarian approach to race and gender. Use of the words “racist” and “racism” increased by 700 percent in the Times from 2011 to 2019, according to an analysis by Tablet. In 2018, the Times editorial board hired the writer Sarah Jeong despite her lengthy history of denigrating white people on social media. The Times’ focus on race only increased during the moral panic around race and identity that gripped the country in 2020, with the New York Times Magazine publishing the 1619 Project, which sought to reframe America’s founding around the arrival of slaves in the new world.
Earlier: Even New York Magazine Writers Don’t Bother To Read New York Magazine.
One of my friends works in boutique employment law in NYC, white male discrimination cases rule because instead of having to meticulously pick through years of performance reviews and correspondence for a hint of discrimination, you just subpoena emails and Ctrl+F “white men” https://t.co/Z4YFynQMZf
— Foundational White Janissary (@White_Janissary) May 6, 2026
GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Movies as Weapons of Spiritual Warfare. If we lose Hollywood, we will lose so much more than just something to do on Friday nights.
Spend more than a few minutes scanning through the network and cable news channels and you’ll quickly discover a vast array of odious characters like Nikole Hannah-Jones and her dubious anti-American “1619 Project”, over which Hollywood has been drooling since its inception. Or Elie Mystal, a regular commentator on Progressive MSBNC, who says things like “Our country needs to be sanctioned. We are the bad guys on the world stage. We are a menace, not only to free people everywhere, but we are a menace to peaceful people everywhere at this point.” On the American Left, it’s not China, Iran, Qatar, Hamas or even Vladimir Putin who are the true enemies of world peace, you understand, it is the United States of America.
Nor is the political Right blameless here, either. The New Media Right is filled with bad actors from the “Verbal Kint” school of Devil denial… figures like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Darryl Cooper, a self-styled “historian” who wants you to know that Hitler was misunderstood and that the real villain of World War 2 was Winston Churchill.
The Allied victory over the Nazi regime, an abomination on Earth which subjugated much of Western Europe by force and built enormous factories for the express purpose of liquidating millions of human lives as quickly and efficiently as possible, was our proudest civilizational victory and one of the great inspirational stories we tell ourselves as Americans. But Cooper would prefer we feel ashamed. He calls the American effort to free Europe from tyranny and horror a “myth” on his way to arguing that the Allied victory was not only regrettable, but that The United States fought on the wrong side.
If there really were a Devil, this sort of total moral inversion of the truth about good and evil is exactly the strategy he would employ for convincing the world that he did not exist. Because if Americans are willing to believe Hitler was the good guy, The Devil might say, what other moral perversions might they be convinced are true?
Variety has a year-end article whose Google-friendly metatag is “Why the Box Office Struggled in 2025: Analyzing the Hits and Bombs.” But because Variety is the trade rag for a very much left-leaning company town, it dare not analyze the real reason why the industry struggles, both because of the moral relativism that “Washington” describes above (definitely read the whole thing), and of course, Jacob Savage’s recent “The Lost Generation” blockbuster article on how DEI captured the industry, leading to the terrible product that has kept us increasingly away from the multiplex post-Covid.
The unstated argument in the Compact piece is that the quality of the institutions declined in parallel with their adoption of anti-white-male discrimination. Films, novels, newspapers, and academic journals all got markedly worse during the DEI Decade, 2014-2024.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) December 16, 2025
With the exception of Noam Chomsky, perhaps no intellectual has been more influential on today’s American neo-communists and radical progressives than Howard Zinn. The far-left academic, who died in 2010, literally wrote the book on the left’s revisionist history of the United States.
With his A People’s History of the United States, a bestseller thanks to generations of academics forcing their students to buy it, Zinn outlined a comprehensive vision of this history—likely drawn from Stalinist propaganda—that portrays the United States as a conspiratorial fraud got up by white racists and rapacious capitalists.
The conspirators, Zinn claims again and again over hundreds of pages, brutally exploit the American people, who are too duped or stupid to realize the truth of their plight. Thankfully, Zinn is there to enlighten them.
It is impossible to overestimate the power this vision exercises over today’s radical left. They have effectively adopted Zinn’s claims wholesale without the slightest question. Zinn’s influence is palpable in the tearing down of statues, demonization of the US as a racist and genocidal entity, and even “mainstream” efforts like the New York Times’ 1619 Project. If the radical left has a vision of what the US is, it is Zinn’s vision.
Katie Couric is apparently a fan, not surprisingly: Couric and Ken Burns Lament Left’s Declining Influence In History Education.
One of the bigger criticisms of PragerU appears to be a video where a cartoon version of Christopher Columbus says slavery is better than death in a conversation with time-travelling children from the present day. PragerU has defended itself by saying that is simply what the real Columbus would have believed. Indeed, one of the child characters immediately follows up by debating Columbus and telling him that slavery was “evil.”
Nevertheless, Couric rolled on, “And I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on this reversion to a brand of history that is not factually accurate, that presents American history, you know, through rose-colored glasses and gives the impression that Americans never did anything wrong.”
She also stated that, “Howard Zinn kind of tried to turn it on, turn this on its head with, you know, talking about history from the point of view of the oppressed instead of the oppressor, but it seems like we’ve made so many strides in giving a more inclusive and a more accurate view of our history, and now we’re going backwards, and it’s so frustrating to me, and as a historian, I can only imagine how you feel.”
Couric tried caricaturizing conservatives by claiming we don’t believe anything bad ever happened in American history, yet she was promoting someone who thinks nothing good ever happened.
For his part, Burns accepted Couric’s dishonest framing of the conservative perspective, “Yeah, it’s terrible and it happens. It’s the course of human events. You go forward, you go back, and yes, it’s simple. It’s in an autocrat’s interest to want to simplify this story and make it only one thing, but it’s, you can’t do that.”
Dennis Prager, “autocrat.”
Oh, and speaking of Couric: Katie Couric faces mounting criticism for cozying up to Jeffrey Epstein at his private dinner with Prince Andrew AFTER pedophile was convicted.
With the exception of Noam Chomsky, perhaps no intellectual has been more influential on today’s American neo-communists and radical progressives than Howard Zinn. The far-left academic, who died in 2010, literally wrote the book on the left’s revisionist history of the United States.
With his A People’s History of the United States, a bestseller thanks to generations of academics forcing their students to buy it, Zinn outlined a comprehensive vision of this history—likely drawn from Stalinist propaganda—that portrays the United States as a conspiratorial fraud got up by white racists and rapacious capitalists.
The conspirators, Zinn claims again and again over hundreds of pages, brutally exploit the American people, who are too duped or stupid to realize the truth of their plight. Thankfully, Zinn is there to enlighten them.
It is impossible to overestimate the power this vision exercises over today’s radical left. They have effectively adopted Zinn’s claims wholesale without the slightest question. Zinn’s influence is palpable in the tearing down of statues, demonization of the US as a racist and genocidal entity, and even “mainstream” efforts like the New York Times’ 1619 Project. If the radical left has a vision of what the US is, it is Zinn’s vision.
Read the whole thing.
RETHINKING HOW WE MISTHINK THE HOLOCAUST:
Every few months, another academic or journalist decides that the best way to honor Holocaust memory is to accuse Israel of repeating it. The latest comes from The New York Times, where Professor Marianne Hirsch, interviewed by Masha Gessen, claims we need to “rethink how we think about the Holocaust.”
It’s a long conversation—ostensibly about pedagogy and post-memory—but it eventually lands in the same familiar place: Holocaust memory, they say, has been “misused” to justify Israeli actions in Gaza, while Israel itself now stands accused of committing “genocide.” Gaza, in their telling, is the new Warsaw Ghetto.
That’s not scholarship. That’s moral inversion with tenure.
Hirsch and Gessen actively refuse to draw the simplest, most obvious analogy—the one between Hamas and the Nazis.
* * * * * * * *
But this isn’t morality. It’s literature pretending to be ethics. It’s a way for comfortable liberal Western observers to purge inherited guilt: If Jews are now the Nazis, then we can be the righteous ones this time.
That’s why the Nazi analogy persists. It satisfies a psychological craving for symmetry, not a search for truth.
What makes Hirsch’s version especially dangerous is that it comes from within. She is Jewish, the daughter of survivors, and so the accusation carries an air of moral authenticity.
It sounds like humility, but it’s really a form of moral self-cannibalism: turning the Holocaust—the ultimate warning to protect Jewish life—into a tool for condemning Jewish self-defense.
This is the newspaper that tried to rehabilitate the reputation of the Soviet Union in 2017, and created the “1619 Project” two years later to encourage academicians to (further) believe that America was born of Original Sin. So it’s not at all surprising to see the Gray Lady jump on the trend of, as Daniel Ben-Ami wrote at Spiked in March of “turning the Holocaust against Israel.”
Exit question: When will Hirsch and Gessen appear on Tucker’s podcast?
OLD AND BUSTED: The 1619 Project.
The New Hotness at the New York Times? The 1933 Project!
Of all the deranged things the @nytimes has published, this has to be one of the worst.
If you want to understand the psychology of a suicidal Jew, read it.
Every word could have been written by a Nazi. If you didn't know the author, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a… pic.twitter.com/7cuq4Pe9ZH
— Yehuda Teitelbaum (@chalavyishmael) October 31, 2025
GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: “Michelle Goldberg told a Harvard audience that the New York Times ‘lacks pro-Trump columnists because it has had a hard time finding people who are ‘pro-Trump, honest, and not racist.’’”
Yes, I can see how that would be difficult, particularly when you work for a newspaper whose then-publisher “told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers means ‘we’re doing something right,’” in November of 1991, whose newsroom’s atmosphere was summarized as “moderate white men should die,” and starting in 2019, went all-out to promote “the 1619 Project:”
As part of his review of the 1619 controversy as it stood through the summer of 2020, [Peter] Wood gives us a portrait of 1619’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones. A woman who styles herself “the Beyoncé of journalism” acts the part of a diva, and more. Treated by the Times, according to Wood, as “exempt from ordinary forms of accountability,” Hannah-Jones didn’t deign to reply to even the most respectful and serious scholarly criticism of her project. She booked herself instead into speaking venues where she was greeted as hero, prophet, or genius. And of course, Hannah-Jones was showered with accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize. Rudely putting down critics, falsely denying that she’d said things she had demonstrably said, deleting tweets that showed her in a bad light, the behavior that eventually destroyed Hannah-Jones’s credibility was in evidence well before the final collapse. And it was all encouraged by the Times, which treated Hannah-Jones with kid gloves and ignored her critics until its hand was forced. Even when Times magazine editor Jake Silverstein finally answered a critical letter from twelve historians (not the first such letter), that letter’s text was never printed in the magazine.
Something larger is at stake here. To all appearances, Hannah-Jones is a grown-up “cry-bully.” She embodies the movement of campus snowflake culture into the “real world” (if the Times newsroom can be called that). In the old days, Hannah-Jones might have been dubbed a “spoiled child.” Pampered, self-important, lashing out in fury when challenged, she would appear to be a product of the modern double-standard.
Meanwhile, Joy Behar of The View says, “I think we should have more Republicans on the show, but they don’t want to come on. They’re scared of us.”
In response, this person says he’s willing to try to overcome his fears and take up the challenge:
I don’t know that much about Mr. Walsh’s oeuvre, but he seems like an earnest young chap and declares himself to be, “a moderate, who’s down the middle…I’m more of a, you know, I’m like a Bill Kristol Republican. I’m more of a Michael Steele, Colin Powell-type Republican. That’s my thing. I’m an Adam Kinzinger Republican, you know.” All of which sounds like a perfect fit to be a guest of the long-running ABC News program. Give ‘em a shot, Joy and Whoopi!
UPDATE: Christian Toto: Conservatives Carpet Bomb Joy Behar’s Fake View Complaint.
THE PROGRESSIVE FLIGHT FROM REALITY:
Unfortunately, this phenomenon gets even more troubling. As fears of political violence have intensified since Kirk’s murder, the New York Times has posted several pieces assassinating his character. One of its star content creators, Ezra Klein, for example, provided little pushback on a recent podcast as the racialist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates repeatedly labeled Kirk a “hatemonger.” The newspaper also published a long essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led the paper’s controversial 1619 Project which tried to put slavery at the center of American history, which repeatedly called Kirk a bigot.
Her only evidence to support this inflammatory portrayal is one 168-word paragraph in a 2,568-word piece that cherry-picked, out-of-context snippets – he said ‘there’s a war on white people in this country’ he referred to a transgender athlete as an ‘abomination’ – to cast Kirk’s opposition to the woke agenda, gender affirming care and his concerns about black crime and Islam as “unabashed bigotry.”
To assess the quality of evidence, note that she repeats the long-debunked claims that Trump “called the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., ‘very fine people.’ ” To demonstrate that her views have wide currency, she writes that “Last year, The Washington Examiner, a conservative news outlet, published a column calling the organization Kirk co-founded, Turning Point USA, ‘one of the most destructive forces in Republican politics.’” What she ignored was that the author of that piece, Ben Rothove, published a short piece in the New York Times 16 days before her essay was published that declared, “I was wrong about Charlie Kirk.”
Hannah-Jones is, of course, entitled to her views – but not her own facts. It is telling that she and her editors thought it was appropriate to print a piece that made no effort to contextualize Kirk’s statements, or to try to understand why so many people in the world admired him. Their goal, instead, was to demonize an adversary by assertion. This is our truth. Perhaps more disturbing are two quotes in the piece that suggest Kirk’s murder was acceptable. “I cannot have empathy for him losing his life when he put mine at risk,” one black educator told Hannah-Jones.
“I firmly believe that no one should be killed for their beliefs, no matter how harmful those beliefs might be,” another person told her. “But we are watching our rights being stripped away.
Such views, of course, resonate with those of thousands of others who celebrated Kirk’s murder; just as many progressives have cheered Luigi Mangione’s cold-blooded murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson last December.
I hesitate to say that the Times was sanctioning Kirk’s assassination. But it is clear that progressives are proceeding down a dangerous path where facts, truths, and human decency are being overwhelmed by their dark desires.
Related: Douglas Murray on “The mainstreaming of leftist violence.”
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Democratic lawmakers and commentators found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand, most of them loathed Kirk. On the other, many felt that they should try to hold the line condemning the shooting through the throat of a young husband and father at an American university.
The New York Times’s Ezra Klein was among those who dipped his toe into the water, writing a piece within the day titled “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.” Unfortunately, Klein then found himself the subject of a backlash from others on the left who thought that by praising Kirk’s invitation to nonviolent debate, he was somehow “legitimizing” Kirk’s views.
In order to try to tidy up this controversy, Klein invited on to his NYT podcast the Democratic left’s most sacred figure – the memoirist Ta-Nehisi Coates – to carry out a public struggle-session on Klein. Giving Coates all the deference that the NYT believes is his due, Coates and Klein tried to have the “difficult conversation” about why Coates had reacted negatively to Klein’s initial piece. Coates said that since Kirk’s murder he had, with his usual degree of research, watched some “clips” of the right-wing speaker. He did not like what he saw. In fact, he concluded that Kirk was anti-black, anti-gay and anti-trans. Or, as Coates elegantly summed it up: “This dude was wrong.”
Yet the most important moment in an otherwise interminable conversation was when Klein tried to explain what he was thinking when he wrote his initial condemnation of Kirk’s murder. Coates gave the telling reply: “Was silence not an option?”
And there it was. The same people who had been telling Americans for the past decade that “silence” in the face of violence is “complicity,” that “silence is violence,” now preaching that silence should, in fact, be an option after a political assassination. Welcome to the current state of the American left.
As Andrew Sullivan wrote on Friday:
Ezra’s true capitulation came, of course, on the trans question. Coates:
So, when I read [Kirk’s] words toward trans people — Jesus … I’m all for unifying, I’m all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity. I just can’t. … If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.
Coates, mind you, is the author of this career-defining sentence:
I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died [at Ground Zero on 9/11]. They were not human to me. [My italics]
Klein first makes a pragmatic case — “In losing as badly as we have, we have imperiled trans people terribly … We’ve just begun to lose that argument terribly — and that has put people in real danger” — and then tips his hand:
A huge amount of the country, a majority of the country, believes things about trans people, about what policy should be toward trans people, about what language is acceptable to trans people, that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong.
Bingo. That’s Starmer on immigration: restrictionists are immoral but we’ve got to do something or we’ll keep losing. And somehow Keir and Ezra think we can’t see through them. Of course we can. Behind the rhetoric, the woke mindset still reigns.
Exit quote: “We’re not stupid. No amount of fake rhetorical moves to the center will work. When very basic things that most human beings take for granted — that foreigners are not citizens and citizens come first, that men are not women, that children are not adults — are deemed fundamentally immoral in one political party, that party deserves to lose. And they will.”
1619 PROJECT CREATOR ON ZARUTSKA STABBING:
The Gray Lady is too busy working out its own “Republicans Pounce” angle before it can actually report this news to its readers:
So why does the Times appear to be paralyzed? “This incident really does combine all the kryptonite elements into one:”
CIVICS REVOLUTION: Conservatives Are Reviving Traditional Education With a Modern Twist.
The Philadelphia-based Jack Miller Center and other civics advocates have settled on a synthesis of both perspectives, avoiding the extremes of cynicism and nostalgia that reduce the nation’s history to tropes and caricatures. The center’s eponymous founder committed his fortune from the office supply business to “solving the national crisis of uninformed citizenship by teaching America’s founding principles and history.” The center aims to de-escalate the subject by bypassing interpretive textbooks and online learning aids and going directly to the original documents – the Federalist Papers, presidential speeches and letters, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and much more.
Its K-12 teacher workshops include the types of readings and writers that were largely ignored in the stodgy civics instruction a generation ago: first lady Abigail Adams, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the Slavery Provisions of the U.S. Constitution, pro-slavery advocate John Calhoun, poets Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, Nikole Hannah-Jones (the architect of the NYT’s 1619 Project), and Amanda Gorman, the African American poet who recited her verse, “This Hill We Climb,” at President Biden’s 2021 inauguration.
This viewpoint diversity reflects the Jack Miller Center’s philosophy that American identity is forged out of disagreement, and that understanding the nation’s history and development requires familiarity with the historical and literary documents written by the leading voices in those controversies, said Lucas Morel, professor of politics at Washington & Lee College in Virginia. He leads Jack Miller Center teacher seminars and serves on the organization’s board of directors.
“The founding in itself and the early American period – these were products of debate and discussion,” Morel said. “And we have found over time that the teachers find these programs so engaging precisely because the Jack Miller Center does not say, ‘These are the eight things you have to believe about the Declaration of Independence, and you have to write lesson plans that have these answers.’”
Read the whole thing.
GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING:
A very incomplete list of prominent Republicans prosecuted during the Biden Admin:
Donald Trump (4 separate jurisdictions)
Rudy Giuliani
Mark Meadows
John Eastman
Sidney Powell
George Santos
Jeff Fortenberry
Steve Bannon
Peter Navarro
Kenneth Chesebro
Jenna Ellis
Jeffrey Clark… https://t.co/IJxbu985AO— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 26, 2025
GREAT MOMENTS IN CHUTZPAH: NPR Platforms Nikole Hannah-Jones: Reviewing Museums for Wokeness Is ‘Fascism.’
Martin then asked Hannah-Jones about Trump’s claim that the museums don’t have any “brightness” about America, and she made the argument that in 2017, Trump praised the African-American history museum. But hasn’t it changed since 2020, after the George Floyd riots?
Hannah-Jones then cried Fascism: “The museum hasn’t changed, so what has changed? And what has changed is, I would argue, that Donald Trump is engaging in what Jason Stanley, in his book How Fascism Works, calls trying to create this mythic past. And this mythic past is a past that was racially pure, and one that is being used to really distract us as our democratic norms are being eroded.”
Flashback: 1619 Project Founder Admits It’s ‘Not a History,’ But a Fight to ‘Control the National Narrative.’
Woman who created mythic past projects wildly that Trump is creating a a mythic past.
And speaking of mythic pasts: No Dice: Thread Shows Just How Woke the Smithsonian Has Become, and Why Trump Is Right to Overhaul It.
HISTORY OF THE AMERICANS: Sidebar Conversation: Phil Magness on The 1619 Project.
HOLY CHOOSING THE WRONG SIDE, BATMAN! Trailer: Warner Brothers reveals Aztec Batman, where evil white Europeans come to destroy the peaceful natives.
In it’s continued quest to viciously deconstruct and murder every comic book IP in their possession, Warner Brothers is bringing you a new spin on your favorite caped crusader, and it looks so bad we have to share it with you so you can laugh at it too.
* * * * * * * *
A new legend rises. AZTEC BATMAN: CLASH OF THE EMPIRES is coming to Digital 9/19. pic.twitter.com/YXn8VTzIng
— Warner Bros. Entertainment (@WBHomeEnt) July 25, 2025
So the Aztecs are the good guys, and the European explorers are the evil bloodthirsty villains? Wow, we’ve never seen that one before.
As a refresher, here’s what the Aztecs were actually like:
Read the whole thing.
In 1998, DC Comics published “The Berlin Batman:”
In Berlin, Germany in the year 1938, wealthy socialite Baruch Wane learns from his friend Komissar Garten that the police have confiscated the library, works, and notes of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, due to his stance against the Nazi Party policy of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Unbeknownst to Garten, Baruch is actually the mysterious Batman who has been terrorizing the wealthy members of the Nazi Party.
Years ago, when Baruch was still a child, he watched his Jewish parents get beaten to death by an anti-semitic mob. From that point on, Baruch swore that he would avenge their deaths and spend the rest of his life on a war against all criminals and injustice. As he grew up, he developed his mind and his body, and upon inheriting his parents wealth and estate, he became inspired by a bat which flew into his home and decided to use this symbol as a means to frighten criminals.
The following night of his visit with Garten, Baruch suits up and heads down to the trainyard in order to steal back Mises’s works. He tries to stop the train, but when Garten’s men surround him, he instead blows up the train so that way Mises’s works and ideals do not fall into the wrong hands.
I suppose it’s only a matter of time before that Batman’s role in that story gets swapped out to aiding the bad guys as well. (And it’s hard to believe that DC would allow a von Mises-supporting Batman in 2025 as well.) When George Lucas wanted to make a film in which the Vietcong were the good guys, at least he was smart enough to bury that idea deep into its subtext and build an entirely fantasy universe on top of it to hide his motives. When does Batman go off and fight for the 1619 Project?
JAMES PIERESON: What, to the New York Times, Is the Fourth of July?
The editors and journalists at the New York Times plan to celebrate the Fourth of July with the rest of us. One has to wonder why.
After all, the far-left newspaper has declared, through its sponsorship of the 1619 Project, that July 4 is a bogus holiday and the Declaration of Independence was (and is) a fraud. The real “founding” of the country occurred, not on July 4, 1776, with the separation from Great Britain and the publication of the Declaration, but in 1619 when the first slaves arrived on American shores. While most Americans will celebrate the nation’s independence on July 4, there is little reason for the Times to do so.
Read the whole thing.
FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: The New York Times published Tom Cotton’s editorial on June 3rd, 2020, and the repercussions continue to this day. From Noah Rothman, then-with Commentary, the next day: The New York Times and the Vanguard of the Incognizant.
“One thing above all else will restore order to our streets,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton, “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain, and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” The senator has advocated extraordinary measures involving the domestic deployment of uniformed soldiers for several days—as we’ve witnessed mass protests in American cities during the day and wanton violence, rioting, and looting by night. This exhortation is not new for him, but the venue in which it was placed—the New York Times opinion page—inspired a frenzied revolt from within the journalistic institution that published him. More remarkable, the aggrieved staffers and writers at the Times generally declined to issue a counterargument. They simply declared Cotton’s arguments anathema and sought to wield whatever power they could muster to see them banished.
One by one, New York Times staffers added their voices to a coordinated campaign of shame directed squarely at the paper’s management. “Running this puts Black [New York Times] staff in danger,” wrote technology reporter Taylor Lorenz, writers Caity Weaver and Jacey Fortin, climate reporter Hiroko Tabuchi, book critic Parul Sehgal, graphics assistant Simone Landon, reporter Katherine Rosman, styles desk editor Lindsey Underwood, culture writer Jenna Wortham, contributor Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and columnists Kara Swisher and Charlie Warzel. The News Guild of New York soon chimed in with a statement: “[Cotton’s] message undermines the journalistic work of our members, puts our black staff members in danger, promotes hate, and is likely to encourage further violence,” the Guild affirmed in what was billed as a “response to a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.”
As I wrote back then (and the rest of this post continues in the original post’s tense), as a result of their staff’s meltdown over the Cotton op-ed, the New York Times, already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series, promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more. Or as Tina Lowe writes at the Washington Examiner, “New York Times employees can bully their bosses into submission — just don’t criticize a celebrity:”
A newspaper, beyond its moral purpose to tell the truth, is functionally a business. To turn a profit, it must balance journalistic integrity with revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Thus, it came as absolutely no surprise when the New York Times fired Alison Roman, the up-and-coming chef who irked professional celebrity Chrissy Teigen with a rude remark in an interview that was falsely smeared as racist and subsequently piled onto by Teigen.
* * * * * * * *
As you may recall from a long day ago, after the opinion page published a fairly straightforward op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton, arguing to utilize the military in quelling protests — a position shared by the majority of Americans and 46% of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, mind you — several staff members instigated a civil war, all sharing the same copypasta bullying their bosses: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”
* * * * * * *
Publishing the opinions of the Taliban wasn’t a bridge too far for the staff, and employees claiming that destroying property isn’t violence on national television isn’t a bridge too far for the management. But a sitting United States senator’s opinion that’s shared by the majority of the electorate is, and as a result, journalism will suffer in the future.
The bitter babies at the New York Times wanted less speech, and they got it. They’ll now publish fewer op-eds overall. There is a wholly illiberal war on the free press, and its primary aggressors aren’t in the White House or corrupt police stations. It’s being waged from within the inside.
Bari Weiss, one of the saner voices at the Times, responded to her colleagues’ collective primal scream in a Twitter thread earlier today:
Naturally, as this Mediaite headline notes: NY Times ‘Civil War’: Opinion Writer Bari Weiss Gets Buried By Colleagues for Tweeting Her Takes on Newsroom Friction After Cotton Op-Ed.
In 2015, Ashe Schow, then with the Washington Examiner wrote, “With all the attention being paid to college-aged social justice warriors and microagressions, one has to ask: What happens when all these delicate snowflakes enter the workforce?”
The Gray Lady is finding out, good and hard.
Meanwhile, Daily Beast editor-at-large Goldie Taylor threatens violence against Weiss, in a since-deleted tweet:
As William F. Buckley famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
A PINCH OF PROJECTION BY THE GRAY LADY:
How odd that the New York Times, which arbitrarily decided in 2019 that America’s real founding was 1619, not 1776, and got a number of schools to sign on that notion, is angry about Trump arbitrarily renaming the Gulf of … Oh wait, I don’t want to deadname something that has fully transitioned to its new aquatic identity:
In February when Don Surber wrote “Mocking Woke Speech: The real reason is it is the Gulf of America is the name bugs the right people,”
Glenn responded that “Changing names and words and demanding that people go along with the change has been the left’s game for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s always a power move disguised as courtesy.”
NEWSPAPER THAT SOUGHT TO RECAST AMERICA’S FOUNDING FROM 1776 To 1619 SUDDENLY WORRIED ABOUT “LANGUAGE POLICE:”
The tweet goes to a story headlined: The MAGA War on Speech.
In 1791, the nation’s founders ratified the First Amendment to the Constitution. It would come to offer protections in the new nation essentially never seen before: the right to ask things of and to criticize the government; to express opinions, popular or not; to assemble peacefully; to practice diverse religious beliefs; and to have a free press that publishes information without fear of censorship or retribution.
“New nation?” The New York Times assured me in 2020 that it was actually founded in 1619, so it would have been almost 175 years old by 1791.
This constitutional provision reflects the framers’ intent to establish a society where individuals have the ability to voice their views and participate actively in shaping the nation’s governance while holding their leaders accountable. Together, these five guaranteed liberties continue today to make the people of the United States the freest in the world.
Sounds good! So why the Times’ deep love of the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century? Any plans to return Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer?
President Trump and many of his supporters — from tech leaders like Elon Musk to populist politicians like Vice President JD Vance — have spent the past several years portraying themselves as free-speech crusaders. Capitalizing on the censorial strains of the left, they regularly lecture about the necessity of letting people say whatever they want, even if it’s hateful, asinine or corrosive.
Tell me more about “the censorial strains of the left,” including the Times’ role in 2020, please.
Over the past month Mr. Trump and his allies have embarked on an expansive crackdown on free expression and disfavored speakers that should be decried not just as hypocritical but also as un-American and unconstitutional.
In the distorted view of the Trump administration, protecting free speech requires controlling free speech — banning words, phrases and ideas that challenge or complicate a government-favored speech. Officials in Washington have spent the past month stripping federal websites of any hint of undesirable words and thoughts, disciplining news organizations that refuse to parrot the president’s language, and threatening to punish those who have voiced criticism of investigations and prosecutions.
Banning words, phrases, and ideas, that sounds bad. Good thing the left would never do such a thing!
● NYT columnist Farhad Manjoo calls for the abolition of gendered language.
● Professor of ‘art crime’ instructs protesters on better way to topple statues that offend them.
● NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones Endorses Riots And Toppling Statues As A Product Of The 1619 Project.
The reckoning for the Jacobin left’s attempt at making 2020 Year Zero was long overdue, and their freakout will be fascinating to watch. This headline will also drive them absolutely bonkers: Trump To Make English The Nation’s Official Language.
UPDATE: VDH asks: Who caused the counter-revolution?
JAMES PIERESON: Is this the end of the DEI regime?
The “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” regime originated and expanded mostly through executive and judicial power, not by legislative action or electoral mandate. It was never popular: on the few occasions in which voters had a say, the preference regime always lost, which is why advocates typically dialed things back whenever elections were near. There is an irony in the fact that President Trump is attacking the regime by the same means used to institute it: by using his control over the federal bureaucracy and federal spending to stamp it out. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
If Trump can keep the pressure on for four years, or especially if his successors can do so for another four or eight years, then advocates will find it difficult to recreate the regime if and when they regain power. After all, it took them decades to build it up, but it took Trump but a few days to bulldoze it to the ground. By that time, perhaps four or eight years hence, advocates will be out of their jobs and scattered to the four winds, their groups dormant or out of money, and their consulting companies and interest groups bankrupt and drained of funds. When the try to reconstruct the regime at some point in the future, they will have to reckon with the reality that the next Republican administration will once again knock it down with Trump-like executive orders. At that point, everyone may conclude that, after six decades, the old regime is dead once and for all.
It is a good question why opinions about the DEI regime changed so radically in recent years, when up to now corporate leaders and Republican presidents were willing to go along with it, up to a point, while ignoring conservative writers who had built a strong case against it. Republican presidents prior to Trump never made serious efforts to eliminate the diversity regime. Many point out that it originated in the first place under the Nixon administration in the early 1970s. There is little question now that Trump and his advisors view the DEI regime as hostile to their domestic agenda, perhaps as one of the pillars of the administrative state, and as an expensive operation to boot.
In the wake of the George Floyd episode in 2020 and the hysteria it induced around the country regarding race and diversity, advocates went too far in pushing the movement in an increasingly radical direction. They scrapped the concept of diversity in favor of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” an ideological construct that took the movement far beyond ideals of equal opportunity and fair-hiring practices. They imposed ridiculous pronoun rules on employees under their supervision (rules now banned in the federal government by a new executive order). The regime’s transgender advocates insisted that men “transitioning” to women should be allowed to play on female athletic teams. Advocates embraced a new ideological doctrine of DEI from The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which declared that the United States was founded on the basis of racism and slavery, with those original sins embedded in its founding institutions.
Joel Kotkin adds: Trump’s assault on DEI will bring us closer to a post-racial America.
Indeed — which is why the army of grifters such policies enable will not go quietly into the night: Smashing the ‘rice bowls’ — how elites are lashing out at Trump and Musk’s reforms.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: New York Times: Harris only ‘patriotic choice’ in presidential election.
The New York Times editorial board is backing Vice President Harris for president this fall over former President Trump.
In an editorial published on Monday, the Times said it is “hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump.”
“He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest,” the newspaper wrote of Harris’s Republican opponent. “He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.”
For these reasons, the outlet continued, Harris is “the only patriotic choice for president,” regardless of “any political disagreements voters might have with her.”
As Byron York notes, the “Times editorial board didn’t just endorse Kamala Harris for president. It declared Donald Trump supporters unpatriotic.” But all leftists believe that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,”* and the New York Times, through much of its reporting, and in particular its “1619 Project,” believes that America is built on Original Sin, so how can one be patriotic about it?
The last Republican that the Gray Lady endorsed for president was Ike, in 1956.
* Robert Heinlein had some choice thoughts on that quote, and the man who said it.
J. PEDER ZANE: The Sins of the Gray Lady. The following is a chapter from the recently released book, Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You.
Readers of the New York Times know the news may change, but the message is always the same in their paper of record. It will play up every Republican kerfuffle and downplay Democratic scandals while presenting the choice between the two parties as a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Now clad in rainbow colors, the Gray Lady will, in the name of inclusion, celebrate a wide range of heretofore marginal behaviors – homosexuality, polyamory and transgenderism – while sowing divisions by separating Americans into warring camps based on race, gender, and ethnicity.
The transformation of the Times, and much of American journalism, during the last decade from a traditional newspaper that largely reports the news into the daily call sheet for the “woke” revolution that seeks to undermine the traditional pillars of American society is now so complete that it may seem unremarkable. Both its defenders and critics know exactly what to expect when they open its pages. Such acceptance, or resignation, is dangerous because it normalizes the great sin of the New York Times: the betrayal of hitherto bedrock journalistic principles of fairness, objectivity and pluralism that made the Fourth Estate a pillar of American democracy during the 20th century.
In his 2010 book Gray Lady Down, William McGowan began with a look at the New York Times of the 1970s:
A tribute of sorts to the ideological neutrality of Times news reporting under Rosenthal had come from a rather unusual source: William F. Buckley’s National Review, the very bible of American conservatism. In 1972, as Spiro Agnew railed against the “elitist Eastern establishment press,” and Richard Nixon was livid over the Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers and its looming endorsement of George McGovern, the National Review produced an article examining the charges of left-leaning bias. Conservatives had long dismissed the Times as “a hopeless hotbed of liberalism, biased beyond redemption and therefore not to be taken seriously,” the magazine observed, asking, “But to what extent was this impression soundly based?” A subheadline telegraphed its findings: “Things on 43rd Street aren’t as bad as they seem.” The National Review audit examined five developing stories, which it said had a “distinct left-right line,” and concluded: “The Times news administration was so evenhanded that it must have been deeply dismaying to the liberal opposition.” It went on to state that conservatives and other Americans would be far more confident in other media—specifically newsmagazines and television networks—if those media “measured up to the same standard” of fairness. “Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated,” National Review said, “the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.”
This was very much a validation for [NYT editor Abe] Rosenthal, and for Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger, who also upheld the tradition of politically agnostic news reporting despite the shrill liberalism of the editorial page and, increasingly, the journalistic activism of a new generation of reporters touched by the lengthening shadow of the counterculture. Indeed, Rosenthal would cite the National Review piece on other occasions when challenged by accusations of political bias at the Times. Even Joseph Lelyveld, who took over the top editor’s job in 1994 and was undoubtedly to the left of Rosenthal, saw need for vigilance. “Abe would always say, with some justice, that you have to keep your hand on the tiller and steer to the right or it’ll drift off to the left.”
Flash-forward to 2019. As Zane writes:
In August 2019, the newspaper devoted an entire issue of the New York Times Magazine to The 1619 Project. Its stated “goal” was “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 [the year enslaved sub-Saharan Africans first landed in North America] as our nation’s ”real” birth year. Doing so,” the magazine’s editor Jake Silverstein wrote in an introduction, “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.” Through eighteen articles and fifteen artistic contributions that spanned the length of American history, the project abandoned journalism’s traditional mission of presenting the complexity of consequential issues in order to make the argument that the nation’s past, present, and future have been and forever will be defined by anti-black racism. There were no dissenting views, and few countervailing facts.
The vast ambition of The 1619 Project underscores the Times’ transformation into a tool of the cultural revolution whose aim is to disrupt traditional understandings and beliefs about almost every aspect of American life. The hubris is astonishing. While newspapers have often revisited episodes of the past in response to scholars having unearthed new information, the 1619 Project started with an ideological position about the sweep of American history which it then set out to demonstrate through tendentious pieces. The lead essay was not written by a scholar, but an activist black journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones.
The backlash was immediate, as many leading historians wrote lengthy critiques of nearly every article. This included a letter to the Times signed by five prominent scholars – including James M. McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University and Gordon Wood of Brown University – which challenged two of Hannah-Jones’ most sweeping assertions regarding the Revolutionary War and Abraham Lincoln.
“On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain ‘in order to ensure slavery would continue.’ This is not true. … The project criticizes Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, for blacks as well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him.”
The historians wrote that “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”
Rather than engage these prominent scholars, Hannah-Jones dismissed them as “white historians.” A few months later, their interpretation of the Project’s ideological spirit was underscored by Leslie M. Harris, an African-American historian at Northwestern University who helped fact-check Hannah-Jones essay. She wrote in Politico that she was stunned by Hannah-Jones’ assertion “that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America,” because “I had vigorously argued against [it] with her fact-checker.”
As Zane writes, the 1619 project was buttressed between the Times pushing the Russian Collusion hoax involving Donald Trump, and afterwards, the paper’s young staffers getting the vapors over Tom Cotton’s op-ed in June of 2020.
Exit quote:
During the last decade, the Times has transformed itself into a very different publication. It is not an honest broker but an organ of advocacy. To its critics, this is a tragedy for journalism and the nation. But, as a free-standing business, that is also its right. Perhaps the Times could defend these changes. Its refusal to do so, to report on the world as it is, not as it would like it to be, does a grave disservice both to journalism and the nation.
I hope it was all worth it for the Sulzbergers and others concerned with the paper’s survival.
FOUR YEARS AGO THIS WEEK: The New York Times published Tom Cotton’s editorial on June 3rd, 2020, and the repercussions continue to this day. From Noah Rothman, then-with Commentary, the next day: The New York Times and the Vanguard of the Incognizant.
“One thing above all else will restore order to our streets,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton, “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain, and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” The senator has advocated extraordinary measures involving the domestic deployment of uniformed soldiers for several days—as we’ve witnessed mass protests in American cities during the day and wanton violence, rioting, and looting by night. This exhortation is not new for him, but the venue in which it was placed—the New York Times opinion page—inspired a frenzied revolt from within the journalistic institution that published him. More remarkable, the aggrieved staffers and writers at the Times generally declined to issue a counterargument. They simply declared Cotton’s arguments anathema and sought to wield whatever power they could muster to see them banished.
One by one, New York Times staffers added their voices to a coordinated campaign of shame directed squarely at the paper’s management. “Running this puts Black [New York Times] staff in danger,” wrote technology reporter Taylor Lorenz, writers Caity Weaver and Jacey Fortin, climate reporter Hiroko Tabuchi, book critic Parul Sehgal, graphics assistant Simone Landon, reporter Katherine Rosman, styles desk editor Lindsey Underwood, culture writer Jenna Wortham, contributor Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and columnists Kara Swisher and Charlie Warzel. The News Guild of New York soon chimed in with a statement: “[Cotton’s] message undermines the journalistic work of our members, puts our black staff members in danger, promotes hate, and is likely to encourage further violence,” the Guild affirmed in what was billed as a “response to a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.”
As I wrote back then (and the rest of this post continues in the original post’s tense), as a result of their staff’s meltdown over the Cotton op-ed, the New York Times, already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series, promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more. Or as Tina Lowe writes at the Washington Examiner, “New York Times employees can bully their bosses into submission — just don’t criticize a celebrity:”
A newspaper, beyond its moral purpose to tell the truth, is functionally a business. To turn a profit, it must balance journalistic integrity with revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Thus, it came as absolutely no surprise when the New York Times fired Alison Roman, the up-and-coming chef who irked professional celebrity Chrissy Teigen with a rude remark in an interview that was falsely smeared as racist and subsequently piled onto by Teigen.
* * * * * * * *
As you may recall from a long day ago, after the opinion page published a fairly straightforward op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton, arguing to utilize the military in quelling protests — a position shared by the majority of Americans and 46% of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, mind you — several staff members instigated a civil war, all sharing the same copypasta bullying their bosses: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”
* * * * * * *
Publishing the opinions of the Taliban wasn’t a bridge too far for the staff, and employees claiming that destroying property isn’t violence on national television isn’t a bridge too far for the management. But a sitting United States senator’s opinion that’s shared by the majority of the electorate is, and as a result, journalism will suffer in the future.
The bitter babies at the New York Times wanted less speech, and they got it. They’ll now publish fewer op-eds overall. There is a wholly illiberal war on the free press, and its primary aggressors aren’t in the White House or corrupt police stations. It’s being waged from within the inside.
Bari Weiss, one of the saner voices at the Times, responded to her colleagues’ collective primal scream in a Twitter thread earlier today:
Naturally, as this Mediaite headline notes: NY Times ‘Civil War’: Opinion Writer Bari Weiss Gets Buried By Colleagues for Tweeting Her Takes on Newsroom Friction After Cotton Op-Ed.
In 2015, Ashe Schow, then with the Washington Examiner wrote, “With all the attention being paid to college-aged social justice warriors and microagressions, one has to ask: What happens when all these delicate snowflakes enter the workforce?”
The Gray Lady is finding out, good and hard.
Meanwhile, Daily Beast editor-at-large Goldie Taylor threatens violence against Weiss, in a since-deleted tweet:
As William F. Buckley famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN OBJECTIVITY: Associated Press Coverage of Courts, Climate Bankrolled by Dozens of Left-Wing Foundations.
The Associated Press, the country’s top wire service, is now bankrolled in part by millions of dollars from left-wing foundations, including one founded by “1619 Project” author Nikole Hannah-Jones.
The news organization last year announced a series of “partnerships” to subsidize reporters covering climate change, race, and democracy. A review of the donor roster shows that the vast majority fund left-wing political causes, while none are supporters of conservative initiatives.
The Ida B. Wells Society, founded by “1619 Project” lightning rod Hannah-Jones, has teamed up with filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s Hearthland Foundation, for example, to foster “more inclusive storytelling” at the Associated Press.
In some ways, it was a natural partnership: The AP’s global investigations editor, Ron Nixon, serves on the Ida B. Wells Society’s board of directors. In others, it may prove more problematic, given that Hannah-Jones’s own reporting has been disputed by historians, who have argued—among other things—that her account of the motivations of the American revolutionaries is factually inaccurate.
The funding, much of it from these sorts of overly political actors, will make it more challenging for the Associated Press to swat away accusations of political bias. In one high-profile example, critics blasted the organization for revising its style guide to instruct reporters to avoid the use of terms like “the French,” which the AP indicated was “dehumanizing.”
AllSides, a group that tracks media bias across the industry, last year changed its rating for the AP from “center” to “leans left,” citing what it said was an increase in “word choice bias” and “bias by omission of views” in its coverage. AllSides says it closely monitors the Associated Press’s content because the AP’s content is “broad and far-reaching.”
Just think of AP as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
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