We might never know the LSAT scores of Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s pick to replace Stephen Breyer, the retiring associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
But we do know that she doesn’t know much history. And she apparently holds the same skewed view of it as so many Americans fooled by the retconned version that overemphasizes the country’s shortcomings.
It’s bad enough that Biden picked a hard-core racial leftist or perhaps even a cultural Marxist. But he could have at least picked one who doesn’t peddle bogus scholarship such as the 1619 Project, which is Critical Race Theory masquerading as history.
Then again, maybe the two are inextricably woven together.
Bogus History
Like Hannah Nikole-Jones, or because of her, Jackson apparently believes that real American history begins with the first slaves who landed here. They initiated the “true founding” of the country, Nikole-Jones claimed in August 2019 when her project launched, and “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”
“It is Jones’s provocative thesis that the America that was born in 1776 was not the perfect union that it purported to be, and that it is actually only through the hard work, struggles, and sacrifices of African Americans over the past two centuries that the United States has finally become the free nation that the Framers initially touted,” Jackson falsely said in her MLK Day lecture at the University of Michigan Law School in January 2020. (Emphasis added.)
Jackson then quoted Nikole-Jones verbatim:
We are raised to think about 1776 as the beginning of our democracy. But when that ship arrived on the horizon … in 1619[, the] decision made by the colonists to purchase that group of 20 to 30 human beings — that was a beginning, too.
And it would actually be those very people who were denied citizenship in their own country, who were denied the protections of our founding documents, who would fight the hardest and most successfully to make those ideals real, not just for themselves, but for all Americans.
No one, Jackson continued, would have civil rights today without “trailblazing” black “civil rights leaders,” such as, of course, hard-left rape accomplice Martin Luther King Jr.
The problem with citing Nikole-Jones, of course, was her project’s central thesis before the Times was forced to correct it. The United States seceded from Great Britian, we were supposed to believe, to preserve slavery. It was a strikingly ignorant, categorically false claim.
A SCOTUS nominee of Jackson’s putative surpassing intellect would know that.
Corrected Account
The trouble for the Times’ rewritten version of history began, as Jackson should have known, when five historians wrote a letter to the editor in December 2019 to correct it.
The errors in Nikole-Jones’s history “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing,” the historians wrote:
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.
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. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false. Some of the other material in the project is distorted, including the claim that “for the most part,” black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone.”
That wasn’t all, and that said, when the central thesis of a major historical effort is false, that effort must be discarded.
The editor’s nearly 2,200-word response, about four times longer than the experts’ 590-word letter, boiled down to one key sentence: “We don’t believe that the request for corrections to The 1619 Project is warranted.”
That claim went up in smoke when a fact-checker on the 1619 Project divulged that the Times ignored her when she warned editors that the central claim of the effort was utterly false.
Writing in Politco in March 2020, history professor Leslie Harris explained that an editor at the paper of record sent her this claim in 1619: “One critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which had produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”
Harris “vigorously disputed the claim,” she explained, because “the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.”
Despite that advice, the Times published the falsehood, and “in addition, the paper’s characterizations of slavery in early America reflected laws and practices more common in the antebellum era than in Colonial times, and did not accurately illustrate the varied experiences of the first generation of enslaved people that arrived in Virginia in 1619.”
The obvious question is whether a SCOTUS nominee who holds a false, racially and ideologically tainted view of history is suitable timber for such an important position.
That question aside, GOP senators must look at her record to see if her jurisprudence is likewise tainted.
H/T: Fox News
