On Thursday, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced legislation that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach The 1619 Project, a work created by the New York Times Magazine that proclaims that America was founded on slavery — not the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War that followed.
The NYT’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom & equality on which our nation was founded.
Federal funding shouldn’t help indoctrinate young Americans w/ this left-wing garbage.
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) July 23, 2020
Written by left-wing journalists — not historians — The 1619 Project is an attempt to replace the actual history of the United States with one that is more in line with the Marxist political orthodoxy that the New York Times ascribes to.
From The 1619 Project:
1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619? That was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.
Cotton’s legislation correctly points out the utter lie of the assertion that slavery is the nation’s origin: “This distortion of American history is being taught to children in public school classrooms via The New York Times’ ‘1619 Project,’ which claims that ‘nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional’ grew ‘out of slavery.’”
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Initially based on an historically inaccurate essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist who argues that “if true justice and equality are ever to be achieved in the United States, the country must finally take seriously what it owes black Americans,” The 1619 Project has spawned its own podcast and its own curriculum based on the belief that America was founded on slavery — not Enlightenment principles and the nation’s well-known historical documents.
Schools in several cities, including Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; Buffalo, New York; and Washington, D.C., have already begun using the propaganda in their schools. Cotton’s legislation would put a stop to any federal funding going to teach The 1619 Project.
Cotton’s legislation — The Saving American History Act of 2020 — would halt any federal funding for the teaching of the leftist propaganda.
“The true date of America’s founding is July 4, 1776, the day the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress,” the legislation states.
At least five actual historians — Victoria Bynum of Texas State Universtity, James McPherson of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York, Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, and Gordon Wood of Brown University — seem to agree with Cotton. In a letter to the Times, the historians pointed out that the 1619 Project contains several factual errors, which call into question the project’s validity as an historical teaching tool:
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. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only “white historians” — has affirmed that displacement.
The quintet of historians all signed the letter to the New York Times, in which they called on the newspaper to correct the myriad factual errors in the 1619 Project curriculum that is being offered to schools and issue corrections to its readers.
“We ask that The Times, according to its own high standards of accuracy and truth, issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in the 1619 Project. We also ask for the removal of those mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools, as well as in all further publications, including books bearing the name of The New York Times. We ask finally that The Times reveal fully the process through which the historical materials were and continue to be assembled, checked and authenticated.”
The Times’ response to those historians? Basically, “thanks, but we’ll do what we want.”
“While we welcome the criticism, we don’t believe that request for corrections to the 1619 Project are warranted,” wrote Editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein.
While the nation argues about whether to reopen public schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we should stop to remember exactly what is being taught to students these days. The 1619 Project is far from the only left-wing propaganda being parroted by school systems in this era of indoctrination over education. Maybe it’s better for the children if the schools just stay closed.
Photo: AP Images
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects. He can be reached at [email protected].
