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IF YOU LIKE AMERICA, THANK CHRISTIANITY: It’s not just that the 1619 Project is slanderously inaccurate, such “history” completely and purposely obscures the deeply faith-driven roots of the American political and cultural experience. That’s the view of Bradford Littlejohn, writing in “Public Discourse: The Journal of the Witherspoon Institute.”

The specifics of the Christian influence on the founding are subject to various interpretations, to be sure, but in a review of  Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans by Mark David Hall, Littlejohn impressively and critically marshals the facts, connections and logic that long pre-date the Philadelphia convention.

THE PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION CRITICIZED THE 1619 PROJECT AND OUTRAGE FOLLOWED:

The rest of the essay is an attack on presentism in recent Supreme Court decisions written by Justice Thomas and Justice Alito. Perhaps [James H. Sweet] thought that by ending with an attack on conservatives on the Supreme Court readers would be willing to overlook his criticism of the 1619 Project. But he was clearly wrong about that. I’d prefer to show you some of the tweets reacting to the essay but many of the primary sources (so to speak) have been hidden away by people protecting their tweets. So here’s a description of what happened from economist Phillip W. Magness at the American Institute for Economic Research. It’s worth noting that Magness has been a frequent critic of the 1619 Project.

Within moments of his column appearing online, all hell broke loose on Twitter.

Incensed at even the mildest suggestion that politicization is undermining the integrity of historical scholarship, the activist wing of the history profession showed up on the AHA’s thread and began demanding Sweet’s cancellation. Cate Denial, a professor of history at Knox College, led the charge with a widely-retweeted thread calling on colleagues to bombard the AHA’s Executive Board with emails protesting Sweet’s column. “We cannot let this fizzle,” she declared before posting a list of about 20 email addresses.

Other activist historians joined in, flooding the thread with profanity-laced attacks on Sweet’s race and gender as well as calls for his resignation over a disliked opinion column. The responses were almost universally devoid of any substance. None challenged Sweet’s argument in any meaningful way. It was sufficient enough for him to have harbored the “wrong” thoughts – to have questioned the scholarly rigor of activism-infused historical writing, and to have criticized the 1619 Project in even the mildest terms…

Other activist historians such as the New School’s Claire Potter retorted that the 1619 Project was indeed scholarly history, insisting that “big chunks of it are written by professional, award-winning historians.” Sweet was therefore in the wrong to call it journalism, or to question its scholarly accuracy. Potter’s claims are deeply misleading. Only two of the 1619 Project’s twelve feature essays were written by historians, and neither of them are specialists in the crucial period between 1776-1865, when slavery was at its peak. The controversial parts of the 1619 Project were all written by opinion journalists such as Hannah-Jones, or non-experts writing well outside of their own competencies such as Matthew Desmond.

Read the whole thing, and note that “Nikole Hannah Jones herself has previously stated [in a series of since-deleted but screenshot tweets] that the 1619 Project was about journalism and narrative, not history. In other words, she has admitted this was exactly the sort of exercise in ‘presentism’ Sweet was saying it was in his essay: ‘The project spoke to the political moment, but I never thought of it primarily as a work of history.’”

Live look at Sweet writing the usual groveling apology to the outrage mob:

The Red Guard parades an official through a Peking street and force him to wear a dunce cap as a mark of public shame. He is the member of an anti-revolutionary group and, according to the writing on the cap, he has been accused of being a political pickpocket. This picture was made in the Peking on Jan. 25, 1967 and was obtained from Japanese sources in Tokyo.

Steve Hayward notes that the American Historical Association has locked down its Twitter account, adding that Henry Ford was right, “History Is Bunk After All.”

HEADLINES FROM DAYS ENDING IN “Y:” 1619 Project Founder Nikole Hannah-Jones Finds Something New to Call Racist.

It all started on Monday night when Hannah-Jones tweeted (and later deleted): “Tipping is a legacy of slavery and if it’s not optional then it shouldn’t be a tip but simply included in the bill. Have you ever stopped to think why we tip, like why tipping is a practice in the US and almost nowhere else?”

Well, no, actually, I haven’t. There are all sorts of customs and cultural habits that have their roots in long-forgotten beliefs and practices. But Hannah-Jones’ claim that “tipping is a legacy of slavery” strains credulity. Did slave owners tip their slaves?

After getting some pushback for her nonsense, Hannah-Jones hastened to assure the world that she was a big tipper: “Are y’all reading what I am writing or nah? I said I tip. I tip well. I tip almost always. But I object to the idea that I am obligated to tip no matter how I am treated. Nope. And you can’t get more offended at me than employers that pay less-than-minimum wage.” As the firestorm continued, she grew weary of the topic, concluding with: “I’ve said what I have to say about this. I have been utterly disrespected at restaurants. Ignored. Rudeness. Nope.”

But it wasn’t just because Hannah-Jones has unfortunately stumbled upon racist restaurants where she was “utterly disrespected” that she is against tipping. It is also because she is a Marxist. During the controversy her initial tipping tweet created, she asked Touré, who had rejected the idea that one should tip based on the quality of service: “What do you think is the purpose of tipping, Toure? Why does it exist?” Another Twitter user answered: “to transfer labor costs from the business to the consumer.” To that, Hannah-Jones replied: “Bingo.”

Earlier: “Tipping is racist. That’s the argument being forwarded by some liberal activists and politicians as a way of stigmatizing laws that exempt certain professions, mainly restaurant workers, from the federal minimum wage. However, there is little historical evidence for the argument.”

Why would that stop Hannah-Jones now?

UPDATE: Right on cue, the “botched joke” defense:

Flashback: “Ah, well. Let’s just chalk it all up to nuance. Lefties want a free reign to speak in absurdities, but also want us to go along with their calling verbal mulligans when their absurdities become punchlines.”

(Updated and bumped.)

OLD AND BUSTED: The 1619 Project.

The New Hotness? The 1917 Project! Russians Wanted the Soviet Union Back. They Got It. “Sure, Moscow hasn’t secured any of its strategic objectives in Ukraine, and Russia is sure to emerge from this conflict an isolated and diminished global power wholly dependent on rogue states for its survival. But Putin has the visuals he wanted. Today, the flag of the Soviet Union once again adorns tanks rolling into Europe, and the 1945 victory banner flies over Ukraine. The sound of dissent arising from the streets is muted amid the terrified screams of the brutalized and oppressed. The market has been tamed, and the Russian people have been rendered placid and governable once more. This is the ‘greatness’ Russians supposedly longed for. Now they have it.”

LEFTIST HISTORY MYTHS DEBUNKED AGAIN: 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. . . . 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.

Airbrushing is an established leftist technique.

WHY THE NEW YORK TIMES REWRITES HISTORY:

With the 1619 Project, the New York Times’s business interests are just as decisive a factor. The Times’s management is well aware that it has to replace its audience of ageing liberals with young adherents of progressive ideologies impassioned enough to pay for the digital subscriptions that are at the heart of its business model. For the Times, this is a matter of existential significance. As a New York Times Company vice president has explained, one of the aims of 1619 is, according to NiemanLab, to “convince more of its 150 million monthly readers to pay for a subscription”.

This makes good sense considering that over a third of the Times‘s revenue now comes from digital subscriptions — and nearly two-thirds of the Times’s American audience is made up of millennial and Gen Z readers. Print subscriptions, meanwhile, are in “steady decline”; advertising is falling by close to (and sometimes more than) double digits each year.

Like all dynasties, the Sulzbergers, the billionaire family that controls the New York Times, are, in part, motivated by financial self-interest. But in the current cultural environment, where a movement of ideological upheaval is at work, it is power as much as money that lies behind what is the most significant journalistic endeavour of the past decade. The Times’s progressive turn (like that of so many American brands) is more top-down than bottom-up; it is a quest for influence rather than principle. The Times knows which way the wind is blowing and in a raging storm why not sail downwind?

The only problem with this approach — in business as much as in life — is that it doesn’t work. As Captain MacWhir in Joseph Conrad’s novella The Typhoon shouts through the raging storm to the story’s young protagonist: “They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind.” In its cynical embrace of progressive politics, the Times runs the risk of capsizing in storm waters it mistakenly believes it can control.

The Gray Lady is also perfectly willing to gaslight the first draft of history as well: New York Times Writer Sarah Jeong Says Inflation in the News Is Just ‘Rich People Flipping Their Shit.’

You may remember Jeong from her prior instances of ill-advised tweeting, which presented a wrinkle when the Times hired her as a tech writer back in 2018. Those tweets, from 2013 and 2014 when she was 25 or 26, read: “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy i get out of being cruel to old white men” and “are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.” Jeong has long been hobbled by her extremely online style of tweeting—ironic detachment coupled with racial generalizations against disfavored groups like white men—which is fashionable among certain sets on the left.

For Jeong, this is par for the course. But choosing flippant tweeting over thoughtful analysis is a bad look for New York Times contributors* who really ought to be more concerned with the plights of everyday Americans forced to tighten the purse strings for reasons far beyond their control.

Joe Biden believes that paying higher taxes is “patriotic” — or least did so before his brain became tapioca. What he didn’t tell voters is that he’d be raising everyone’s taxes: “government-driven inflation is essentially a hidden form of taxation.  The ability to inflate currency to stealth-tax citizens matters politically, aside from the erosion of our incomes and savings, because it enables politicians to grow the government and spend more taxpayer money than they would be able to get away with if they actually had to directly raise peoples’ taxes. This is bad news for anybody who values economic freedom, free-market capitalism, and the prosperity they bring.”

ICYMI: Sean Wilentz Fires Back on the 1619 Project and the Climate of Anti-History.

Sean Wilentz is a proud liberal and sometimes a hard-edged Democratic partisan. But he is also a distinguished Princeton University historian whose academic work is broadly respected across the political spectrum. That has not stopped some progressives from attacking his work for reasons more of politics than scholarship — specifically, for the sin of writing the book No Property in Man, which argues that the Constitution was shaped in good part by Founding-era resistance to empowering, entrenching, or even naming slavery. He has recently found himself in their crosshairs for his vocal criticism — along with that of other leading liberal historians — of aspects of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project.

In a thoughtful but unsparing essay titled “The 1619 Project and Living in Truth” in the Czech historical journal Opera Historica, Wilentz has fired another salvo against the 1619 Project, its editor and lead essayist Nikole Hannah-Jones, Times Magazine editor in chief Jake Silverstein, and more broadly, the intellectual climate of “anti-racist” politics that produce warped history while intimidating serious scholars into silence. Wilentz is scathing on Hannah-Jones’s preposterous and unsupported claim, in the lead essay, that “one of the primary reasons” for the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence was American colonial fear that the British would restrict or abolish slavery. . . .

Wilentz notes that he believed, naïvely, that the Times Magazine would correct the record without much difficulty if approached by distinguished historians with the truth on their side. But, of course, that misunderstands both the narrative goals of the 1619 Project and the power of Hannah-Jones (backed by devotees of that narrative) within the Times organization, a subject Wilentz touches upon. That narrative, which is a classic of the critical race theory approach to history, needed the American Founding to be irredeemably corrupted by racism and slavery as its core purposes; thus, even though Hannah-Jones’s essay would read perfectly well without the discussion of the Revolution at all, it was intolerable to her and her aims to amend that conclusion. And her power in the organization meant that, if never admitting error on this point was important to her, it would be important to Silverstein, truth be damned. Critics were there to be silenced or dismissed, not engaged in respectful debate. Wilentz repeatedly reminds his Czech readers of parallels to this approach that they know only too well.

As I say, the history that is increasingly being taught in American “educational” institutions is the kind of history that a conqueror would impose on a defeated people to break their will.

ICYMI: RealClearInvestigations: 1619 Project, Touted as Racial Reckoning, Ignores Democratic Party Racism.

Democrats who advanced a bill in June to remove statues of white supremacists from the U.S. Capitol ignored a central fact about those figures: All of them had been icons of their party, from Andrew Jackson’s adamantly pro-slavery vice president, John C. Calhoun, to North Carolina Gov. Charles B. Aycock, an architect of the white-supremacist campaign of 1898 that ushered in the era of Jim Crow.

At a time when governments, sports teams, schools and other bastions of American society are rushing to expunge legacies of slavery or racism, this was another instance of the Democratic Party’s failure to acknowledge that it did more than any other institution in American life to preserve the “peculiar institution” — and later enforce Jim Crow-style apartheid in the Old South.

“I think it’s absolutely fair to criticize the history of the Democrat Party when we’re literally changing the names of birds because they’re named after racists,” said Jarrett Stepman, author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” referring to a new racism-cleansing push in, yes, ornithology.

Democrats’ circumspection in the face of this trend is especially noteworthy because it comes at a time when they are criticizing Republican legislation to block the teaching of critical race theory on the ground that the GOP wants to whitewash American history. But one of the most noteworthy efforts to reframe American history in terms of race, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, virtually ignores the Democrat Party’s role in advancing and sustaining racism in the United States.

Ignores it? It’s meant to obscure it.

IS THE NEW YORK TIMES A LIBERAL NEWSPAPER? OF COURSE IT IS:

1619 Project, Touted as Racial Reckoning, Ignores Democratic Party Racism.

Is There More Than Anti-Trump Politics Behind a Reported New York Times Decision Not to Investigate COVID’s Origins?

Abhorrent! New York Times Calls Osama Bin Laden ‘Devoted Family Man.’

The latter story is par for the course for the newspaper that accidentally ran a piece praising Bill Ayers on September 11th, 2001.

UPDATE: Why the New York Times praises ‘cancel culture’ but skips over its own racist history.

(Classical reference in headline; updated and bumped.)

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: 1619 Project, Touted as Racial Reckoning, Ignores Democratic Party Racism.

Democrats who advanced a bill in June to remove statues of white supremacists from the U.S. Capitol ignored a central fact about those figures: All of them had been icons of their party, from Andrew Jackson’s adamantly pro-slavery vice president, John C. Calhoun, to North Carolina Gov. Charles B. Aycock, an architect of the white-supremacist campaign of 1898 that ushered in the era of Jim Crow.

At a time when governments, sports teams, schools and other bastions of American society are rushing to expunge legacies of slavery or racism, this was another instance of the Democratic Party’s failure to acknowledge that it did more than any other institution in American life to preserve the “peculiar institution” — and later enforce Jim Crow-style apartheid in the Old South.

“I think it’s absolutely fair to criticize the history of the Democrat Party when we’re literally changing the names of birds because they’re named after racists,” said Jarrett Stepman, author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” referring to a new racism-cleansing push in, yes, ornithology.

Democrats’ circumspection in the face of this trend is especially noteworthy because it comes at a time when they are criticizing Republican legislation to block the teaching of critical race theory on the ground that the GOP wants to whitewash American history. But one of the most noteworthy efforts to reframe American history in terms of race, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, virtually ignores the Democrat Party’s role in advancing and sustaining racism in the United States.

Ignores it? It’s meant to obscure it.