Biden’s Missed Opportunity

By Mychal Massie, 3/21/23

Once again, Biden failed miserably to support and advance the cause of women and income equality.  Biden made quite the show of presenting a letter he received from a little girl who expressed grave concerns about the income disparity per the gender wage gap.

Biden had an opportunity to promote the values of the great media source and acclaimed oracle, The New York Times and at the same time extend presidential recognition upon one of the great success stories of the last few years.  It’s the success story of a woman who has followed very closely in the footsteps of Biden himself.

Instead, he selfishly elected to keep the secret of success to himself and his non-minority cronies – when he had the privileged opportunity to share the secret for success as a woman, is to follow in his footsteps like the true life figure I was referring to in the preceding paragraph.  That female person is Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Since Biden refused to share the secret to success as exampled by Jones in her New York Times acclaimed, ground-breaking work of historical importance called the 1619 Project – I will share it for with the young girl, who’s letter Biden boasted about.

The secret to success if you are a no-talented, hate-filled Negress who has been taught so-called White people haven’t paid their debt for having slavery in America – is too lie, just as Biden made a successful career of doing; a talent Nikole Hannah-Jones copied with great success.  Biden should have told the little girl that the trick to big money success comes from speaking appearances that promote divisiveness and acrimony.  It’s receiving praise from the rough-edged bathroom tissue New York Times. It’s found in patterning after Jones by writing the worst lies found in the binding of one book in quite possibly publishing history, which is exactly what Jones did and precisely what her 1619 Project is.

The other missed opportunity was to tell the little girl who must herself be a Negress, because unless Biden’s adulterous wife – who is a shoddy, pathetic, excuse of an educator – wrote the letter while holding the pencil in the wrong hand, the child had to be “afri-khan amurikan;” because everyone knows one of the most consistent extortive laments is how the under-performing schools are failing the inner city children juxtaposed to the far superior academic bastions, the privileged so-called White children attend.  So add to the list Biden also failed to remind coloreds how bad they have it.

That said, the only difference between Biden and Jones is that unlike him, she can find her behind with two hands due to the over gargantuan proportions of same; whereas Biden can’t find his butt with two hands and an instructional manual on how to find your behind with two hands.  The other difference being that he’s so decrepit and unbalanced that he cannot even fall down steps, he must fall up steps.  With the jello-belly she’s carrying around, Jones on the other hand, could belly flop down steps and stick a perfect marshmallow landing.  I’m thinking a red nose would compliment the red mop on her head; but I digress.

Of course, I’m being facetiously sarcastic, but my point is correct.  Wanna’ be successful and make big money without putting forth any real effort?  Write a book that portrays marginally evolved coloreds as victims of evil so-called White folks; especially Christian White folks and make sure it’s revisionist lies from cover to cover.  And voila, you’re a superstar.

The antidote to the lies Jones is spreading is the factual and legitimate work titled: Democrats and Republicans In Their Own Words or you can just believe a born liar like Jones.

Jones made over half million dollars from institutions that are supposed to be reputable bastions of academia.  Paying that kind of money for the tripe and lies Jones wrote is more profitable than being a dope dealer and/or being a welfare princess.

The purpose of this piece was to seize upon the scandalous amount of money Jones has been and is being paid for the most egregious and easily disproved lies manufactured in history.

Biden’s abuse of little girls isn’t limited to violating his daughter’s female boundaries by allegedly (wink-wink) imposing himself in taking showers with her.  Even worse than that is his inculcating little girls with the belief that they’re nothing more than objects for the personal gratification of men like himself and his depraved son, Hunter.  Then compounding his reprobate behavior, by brainwashing little girls into accepting the lie that killing babies is a legitimate and effortless form of birth control.

Obviously part of this article is unapologetic sarcasm, but the rest of it is unmitigated factual truth.  But, I would be remiss, if I failed to remind Biden and Jones that the day awaits them that their lies and molestation will be judged.

About the Author Mychal Massie

Mychal S. Massie is an ordained minister who spent 13 years in full-time Christian Ministry. Today he serves as founder and Chairman of the Racial Policy Center (RPC), a think tank he officially founded in September 2015. RPC advocates for a colorblind society. He was founder and president of the non-profit “In His Name Ministries.” He is the former National Chairman of a conservative Capitol Hill think tank; and a former member of the think tank National Center for Public Policy Research. Read entire bio here

 

Politicized Black History And The Great American Shakedown

 

March 4, 2023 By Kathleen Brush

For Black History Month 2022, Disney released a Proud Family episode asserting that slaves built America, and Hulu began streaming the 1619 Project docuseries. The latter builds on The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which presents American slavery as the cruelest in the world. This is nonsense and, even as Black History Month 2023 is in the rear-view mirror, it must be countered because it serves as the basis for a never-ending, society-corrupting shakedown.

Both productions assert that, in addition to the basic immorality of slavery itself, whites were unrelievedly cruel to black slaves. From that foundation, leftists insist that the world’s most prosperous and educated black population are still victims of white oppression, justifying economy-busting reparations. It’s a shakedown.

In fact, the uncontested winners for “world’s cruelest slavery” exist outside America’s borders and history. In Haiti, for example, slaves were treated so poorly that they died after a few years. It was cheaper to purchase new slaves than to treat slaves humanely.

Non-American slave owners discouraged reproduction because children often died before they were productive. In 1802, the U.S. black population was 1 million. If the US had duplicated conditions in the Caribbean, the black population would have been 186,000—and that attrition rate would still have been better than in Middle Eastern nations. A thousand years of black slavery are concealed by the virtual absence of black people.

In the Middle East and Africa, it was normal to castrate young boys without pain reducers. The greatest demand, though, was for female sex slaves—”mats of pleasure.” When women became old, say 40, they were often left to die. The immorality of slavery in America, notwithstanding, American enslavers were, uniquely, required to care for their slaves until they died..............To Read More

 

 

Creative Historical Interpretations Are Not History

December 16, 2022 By Jack Bovee @ American Thinker 

 

(Editor's Note:  I have not asked for nor have I received permission to publish this piece in full.  However, as a history buff I know all this to be absolutely true and feel this piece needs the fullest distribution possible.  If American Thinker or the author object I will break it down to a link.  However, the last statements are all important: 

 

"This has been the toll of the false historical narrative. Literally, the survival of our nation is at stake. How do we correct the problem? Simple.  We demand a return to the honest teaching of American history."  RK)

The dominating narrative in American schools and the popular culture today is that slavery began in America in 1619.  Unfortunately, there is about as much truth in that scenario as there was in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” media crusade in August 2014.  Nikole Hannah-Jones and her Critical Race Theory comrades prove beyond doubt the accuracy of Arthur Schlesinger’s maxim that “history is a weapon.”  They distort the historical narrative by omitting key facts that, if told, would present an entirely different view of the past.

There seems to be a general consensus, regarding the arrival of African slaves at Jamestown in 1619. They were first captured in Angola, and sold to Portuguese slavers based in Luanda. While in transport towards Mexico, two English corsairs flying a Dutch flag captured this Portuguese ship in the Gulf and removed some of the slaves, who were then brought to Jamestown, which was in desperate need of laborers. Here, “some twenty odd” Africans were exchanged for “victuals.”

Then, the historical concurrence stops.  Hannah-Jones argues that all the Africans were reduced to slavery, while others argue that they were given the same status as White contracted laborers. Some argue that the word “servant” and not “slave” was used in Virginia’s first census of 1620. What complicates matters is that indentured servants sometimes referred to themselves as slaves.

The status of the Africans is also unclear because after the 1625 census we lost sight of them.  In putting forth the claim that those Africans who arrived in 1619 were life-long slaves it’s necessary to generalize events and omit key facts. For example, in 2011 Barack Obama signed a proclamation at the landing site, which read:

The first enslaved Africans in England’s colonies in America were brought to this peninsula on a ship flying the Dutch flag in 1619, beginning a long ignoble period of slavery in the colonies and, later, this Nation.

Unfortunately, that’s not the entire story. The words probably, may, and likely, are freely used to support the argument that the enslavement of Africans in colonial America began in 1619.  The Africans were indeed slaves when they arrived in Virginia, and they undoubtedly would have continued to remain slaves had they reached their intended destination in Mexico.  What the historical record in Virginia does show is that the small group of Africans was repeatedly referred to as “servants” in the annual censuses of 1620, 1624, and 1625.  Moreover, several of them appear later as free persons.  For this to happen, they undoubtedly had to have been accorded the status of their White equals (indentured servants).  Anthony  Johnson — one of the earliest Africans to arrive — began his life in Virginia as an indentured servant who gained his freedom and eventually became the owner of 250 acres of land through the headright system. His African wife, Mary, arrived in Virginia around 1622 or 1623 and was reported as living with Anthony in 1625.  They were both free before 1645 and “became comparatively prosperous landowners” on Virginia’s eastern shore.  In February 1653, Johnson’s home and some outbuildings were consumed by fire and he received public assistance from the colony because of his “hard labor and known service.” There’s more:

Two years later, when he and his family had again attained a modicum of prosperity, he successfully sued a prominent planter who he accused of illegally confiscating some of his livestock. Then in 1654, an incident took place that proved that Johnson, a black man, not only owned another member of his race, but was able to keep him in bondage for the rest of his life. The man in question was a ‘Negro called John Casor,’ who convinced a white neighbor that he was an indentured servant who should have been freed at the expiration of his tenure. Believing Casor, the man took him home to work in his own tobacco fields . . . In the end, the justices decided that Casor ‘shall forthwith be returned unto the service of his master Anthony Johnson.’

It’s ironic that this civil suit, which is cited as the first example of an enslaved African, had an African master.  The life of John Pedro provides another example: in 1625, John was listed in the household of Francis West, but was a free landowner in Lancaster, Virginia by the 1650s. Another, John Phillip, was thought to have been “the only African to arrive in Virginia free.”

Unfortunately, the scant records do not tell us much about the lives of these few dozen Africans.  Some Africans achieved free status and successfully sued — not just once, but twice — more prominent White colonists.  It is true that by the 1660s, the colonies were increasingly moving towards the institution of slavery, but when viewed within the context of global events, this is hardly seem surprising.  English civilians had long been at risk of enslavement themselves by Africans — as the White aristocrats in charge of the early Virginia colony were fully aware.  The coasts of England, Scotland, and Ireland had been targeted by Muslim slavers from North Africa.  Since the Berber invasion of Spain and France, large Islamic armies had launched massive slave raids against Christian Europe.  Unlike Europe, which sought spices, Muslim armies sought “white gold” — slaves.  Men  were prized as galley slaves, eunuchs, and laborers who were worked to death in the mines and  quarries of North Africa.  Between 1400 and 1700, hundreds of thousands of white Christian boys and girls were seized by the Ottoman Empire in a form of “child tax” called devshirme.  It should be noted the early English explorer of Virginia, James Smith, was a soldier of fortune whose military experience fighting the Ottomans helped the colony to survive.  In August 1625 — the very year the Virginia census listed 25 Africans living there — Muslim slavers from Africa seized over 60 English residents who sought refuge in a church in Cornwall.  That same month, the Plymouth mayor decried that “27 ships had been taken and all the men on board, over 200 of them – had been made slaves.”

From Lundy Island, Muslim slavers established a permanent base and preyed upon England and Ireland for years. On two occasions, they sailed to Iceland, successfully capturing nearly 400 people, leaving more than 36 dead, some burned alive.  In 1631, African slavers seized 89 women and children and 20 men from Ireland, selling them in Algiers.  African-based slavers even attacked the Faroe Islands while continuing to ravage helpless towns all over coastal Europe. One Icelandic historian writes:

By the 1650s, there were 30,000 prisoners from coastal lands all over Europe in Algiers alone… As one of the hapless 400, Guðríður spent nine years in what’s now Algiers before the Danish government finally came up with ransom money… She was ransomed in June 1636 but had to leave her son behind in Algiers.

Ben Johnson succinctly summarizes it here:

For over 300 years, the coastlines of the south west of England were at the mercy of Barbary pirates (corsairs) from the coast of North Africa… Between 1677 and 1680 the English were losing 3,000 people to Muslim slavers per year, highlighting a problem that had not abated for the entirety of the century.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, more White Europeans were seized and taken to Africa than Black Africans seized and taken to America.

Nor were the English unfamiliar with events in eastern Europe — Ottoman slave raids from the Crimean Khanate enslaved an estimated 2 million people over hundreds of years.  Nor were the colonists in America immune.  The enslavement of White Americans and Europeans continued until actions by the United States in 1815 and England in 1816 finally brought it to an end. By this time, both the nations had outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade by stationing fleets of warships to intercept and free any slaves they encountered.  It’s worth remembering that very few of the slaves from Africa ever arrived in North America.  African-American historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that — of the 10.7 million who disembarked in the New World — only 450,000 African slaves were ever brought to North America.  Africans from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, on the other hand, are estimated to have enslaved 1.25 to 1.5 million  White Europeans.  Just as the facts surrounding the details of those few dozen Africans who disembarked in Virginia remain unclear, so the total number of Europeans who suffered enslavement by people of color remains hazy.

What is clear is that there has been a deliberate omission of the historical record in American schools regarding the subject of slavery and how it influenced the foundation of America.  Nor are many Americans aware that in its first 100 years as a nation, the U.S. fought three anti-slavery wars — two to free White slaves and one to free Blacks.  To deliberately ignore these historical truths is not only deceitful and wrong, it’s malicious.  What has been the result of this deliberate distortion of our nation’s past? National division.  Increased racial tension and hate crimes, emanating from a false narrative.  A lack of patriotism in our younger generation.  New forms of discrimination and racial segregation aimed against those who supposedly “enjoy” the benefits of “White privilege.”  Increased social upheaval within our once grand cities.  A collapse of our educational system.  A weakened military. Increased tribalism all across the nation.

This has been the toll of the false historical narrative. Literally, the survival of our nation is at stake.

How do we correct the problem? Simple.  We demand a return to the honest teaching of American history.

 

I’ll Take America Over Africa Every Time

My Mychal Massie May 9, 2022 @ Daily Rant  Economy,  Political, Christian and Conservative Issues , Skin Color

Imagine an urban area where the residents must endure political corruption including political violence, rampant inflation, high unemployment, substandard education, poverty, prostitution, drugs and crime.

No, I’m not talking about New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans or Camden, New Jersey; I am talking about a place dominated by African Americans.  I am referencing the African nation of Liberia.

So-called black folks are infamous for their complaints and fallacious accusations of how bad they are treated in America.  The myths and outright lies of their origins and life in America are legion, the most recent and without question one of the most grotesque falsehoods pertaining to same being Nikole Hannah-Jones’, 1619 Project.

It would be remiss of me not to mention James H. Cone, the mouth of Belial whose chief claim to fame is his boasts to be the principle liberation theologist.

Cone insists: “Unlike Europeans who immigrated to this land to escape from tyranny, Africans came in chains to serve a nation of tyrants.” (God of the Oppressed)  Like the rest of the pernicious blowhards of false information used to inflate their standing, the truth differs greatly from Cone’s mythical Kunta Kinte fantasyland.

America was not responsible for the slave trade.  Africa was responsible in the context those like Cone, Hannah-Jones et al falsely claim for gain.  It is safe to say that without the Ashanti and Dahomey tribes the slave trade would have suffered.  The Alawite Dynasty in Morocco were also prolific participants in the slave trade.  With that said, these African Kingdoms did not make an economy of slavery because the Africans are today viewed having been a crayon color; they made an economy of it because that’s what those Kingdoms have done forever. Skin color is a lie asserted to paint the so-called white peoples as evil human traders.

But, I’m getting slightly ahead of myself.  There are none more prolific in art of baseless complaint than those who use melanin as a currency.  However, what goes unaddressed is the fact that these people should kiss the ground of America and thank their African slave-trappers, because if it weren’t for the indigenous African slave traders these complainers would amount to nothing today.

Marcus Garvey was the original Pan-Africanist in his back-to-Africa movement and the foundation of Liberia.  But, Liberia is one of the worst countries on earth in which to reside.

For all of the complaint by the Negro-illuminati pursuant to how bad they have it in America, in 2020 the top ten worst countries in the world to live in according to the United Nations Human Development Index were all in Africa.

It is safe to say that LeBron “low-brain’ James can shoot his mouth off in America about how evil the so-called white police officers are and how the white man is out to get the bra-tha.  But, it’s a safe bet African children in Chad, Niger, Burundi and the like wouldn’t be paying hundreds of dollars for sneakers and jerseys with his name on them if he lived in Sierra Leone and worked as a sheep herder.

Would Oprah Winfrey be a billionaire Negress publicly wishing all old white people would die if she lived in Burkina Faso or would she be housekeeper?  The Obama woman would no doubt still be boorish, gluttonous and common if she were native to South Sudan, but she wouldn’t being living in multi-million dollar estates.

One thing James Cone said that is true: “If [his kind] cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate [them] from untruth.” (God of the Oppressed)  That is the most truth that ever came from his mouth in one sentence.

The truth is that those who are committed to making an industry of prostituting themselves as a crayon color would do well to recognize that the truth is: Nowhere on earth would they have it better than America.  America wasn’t responsible for the slave trade, but even if it were they have prospered beyond anything their ancestors could have hoped had they stayed in Africa.

If and when they embrace that reality, they will realize just how blessed they are to be the de facto modern day descendants of jungle dwellers captured by other jungle tribes and sold as part of their economy.

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About the Author

Mychal Massie

Mychal S. Massie is an ordained minister who spent 13 years in full-time Christian Ministry. Today he serves as founder and Chairman of the Racial Policy Center (RPC), a think tank he officially founded in September 2015. RPC advocates for a colorblind society. He was founder and president of the non-profit “In His Name Ministries.” He is the former National Chairman of a conservative Capitol Hill think tank; and a former member of the think tank National Center for Public Policy Research. Read entire bio here

 

Leftists Are Using the 1619 Project to Indoctrinate Florida Prisoners

It only reinforces an idea prominent among criminals: that the cards are stacked against them.

By Mary Grabar February 25, 2022 @ American Spectator

There has been an enormous backlash to the 1619 Project, causing it to be banned from public school curriculums in Florida and Texas.

But the purveyors of the 1619 Project’s false history, namely the nonprofit Pulitzer Center, which first devised the curriculum, are not dissuaded. Funded by the same people who brought “Zuckerbucks” and never-Trump pacs, the Pulitzer Center is pushing the 1619 Project into libraries, after-school programs, law schools, and — as revealed this past weekend — into prisons.

A two-day conference hosted by the Pulitzer Center this past weekend featured a number of teachers and professors who are putting up a “resistance” to efforts in red states. Two individuals featured were Andy Eisen and Pamela Cappas-Toro, who were each described in the program as a “professor & adult learning instructor.” It was revealed at the conference that the adults they instruct are incarcerated men at the Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach, Florida, which is about 15 miles from the DeLand campus of Stetson University, where they both teach. Eisen and Cappas-Toro founded and now direct the program, the Community Education Project, which is billed as “a non-profit multidisciplinary college in prison program at Stetson University committed to offering quality liberal arts education.” It began in 2015.

As someone who taught college English for 20 years, often at places that admitted students with troubled pasts and lagging academic skills, I know that literature can awaken the moral impulse. But there will be no moments of contemplating great poetry through the Community Education Project. Instead of fulfilling its promise to offer “incarcerated individuals meaningful opportunities for personal growth and intellectual engagement” through the liberal arts, it will instill racial resentment and skepticism about our justice system.

As became apparent by their presentation, teaching the liberal arts is the farthest thing from Eisen and Cappas-Toro’s goals. In their talk, they focused on the 1619 Project essay on sugar, linking, in the common critical theory manner, the connection between slavery, the “sugar industry,” the “carceral state,” and the negative impact of sugar on prisoners. The refrain is that, like other unhealthy products, such as liquor, sugar is imposed by capitalists on vulnerable minorities. According to the essay, a line connects modern-day problems of diabetes and obesity to slavery.

Their presentation offered a view into the class Public History and the 1619 Project, which the Pulitzer Center said was created by professors from the Community Education Project. The center says the Community Education Project is “part of the 2021 cohort of the The 1619 Project Education Network.” 

The course involves writing in the form of “short essay responses, creative writing, or public history pieces,” drawing from the project’s various essays, namely, Reginald Dwayne Betts’ “The Slavery Act 1793,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s “Sugar,” Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “The Idea of America,” and Bryan Stevenson’s “Mass Incarceration.”

Day two of the lesson plan, titled “Sugar and Mass Incarceration in a Local Context,” asks students to “Explore the historical connections between slavery, sugar, and mass incarceration.” 

The students, who are understood to be incarcerated, are asked to “track their sugar intake as best as possible over the course of a week, to collect wrappers from items available for purchase in the canteen, and to make note of the sugar content in the items available on the prison’s commissary list.” Students are asked what they learned “from taking stock of the sugar in the diets of incarcerated persons.” Their assignment is a 2-page reflection paper answering the question: “Why is sugar so prevalent in the prison and in what ways is this connected to histories of slavery?”

Such questions aim not to impart knowledge but to instill anger and resentment, as does the 1619 Project. From the preface by Nikole Hannah-Jones, where she charges that this nation’s “myths have not served us well” because we “incarcerate our citizens at the highest rates” and that we “suffer the greatest income inequality,” to the charges by contributor Bryan Stevenson about “racial disparities in sentencing … in almost every crime category” because of the “racialized instincts for punishment our history has created” to the false claim by Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander that “Black people are significantly more likely to be killed by police than white people,” the imprisoned will find little inspiration. There is nothing to praise in this country and therefore little to be optimistic about for life on the outside. The 1619 Project only reinforces the idea prominent among criminals: that the cards are stacked against them.

Such educational initiatives are incredibly profitable — for the publishers of the 1619 Project: the New York Times and Penguin Random House. The Times is a major holder of the copyright of the project’s hardcover books. These companies are profiting from an alliance with non-profits funded by political operatives on the left.

Funding the non-profit Community Education program are the Laughing Gull Foundation, which focuses on giving grants to Higher Education in Prison Programs and LGBTQ+ Equality Programs. Also contributing is the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, launched with the help of Cappas-Toro herself; she served as a steering committee member in 2016. It is also funded by Laughing Gull and other leftist foundations, such as the Lumina, Mellon, and NoVo (controlled by Warren Buffet’s son). Other funding for the Community Education Project comes from the campus-based Nina B. Hollis Institute for Educational Reform, which receives funding for some programs from the state of Florida and the federal government — in other words, tax dollars.

Citizens should know about these behind-the-scenes efforts buried by an alliance of radical educators and non-profits. Citizens will have to live among violent statue-toppling graduates of high schools, colleges, and prison programs.

 

1619 Project Creator Nikole Hannah-Jones on Parental Rights: Transparency for Me, but Not for Thee

Mary Grabar Feb 22, 2022 @ Townhall.com

In the preface to the recently published bestselling hardcover edition of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones uses an incident from 2015 to demonstrate what she claims is a need for The 1619 Project.

The incident involved Roni Dean-Burren who was alerted by her teenage son to a caption in his geography textbook that read, “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the Southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”

The number of Africans brought not only to the Southern United States but to all the British North American colonies, and then the states are grossly exaggerated here; it is not “millions” but about 400,000.

But that was not the concern. Dean-Burren opposed the choice of the word, “workers.” A Washington Post article cited by Hannah-Jones quoted Dean-Burren, who charged the publisher with “erasure” and “retelling” history in the way “the winners would like it told.” Reporter Yanan Wang explained, “In calling slaves ‘workers’ and their move to the United States ‘immigration,’ [Dean-Burren] noted in viral Facebook posts . . . the textbook suggests not only that her African American ancestors arrived on the continent willingly, but also that they were compensated for their labor.”

“‘Minimizing slavery,” said the Black Lives Matter hash-tagging mom, was “a way of saying those black lives, those black bodies, that black pain didn’t matter enough to give it a full description.’”

After two days of outrage on Facebook, McGraw-Hill Education announced that a review showed that “‘our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.’”

“We believe we can do better,” the statement continued. They promised to update the caption in the textbook’s digital version and then in the next print run to “describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor.” 

Dean-Burren gave the company a “thumbs up for listening,” but wanted them to go further, to recall the books and send out a supplement because few students used the digital version and another print version would not be coming out for another decade. 

This was for one word in a textbook. Since it was only on this page that the word choice was noted, we can assume that the other material in the textbook made it clear that these were enslaved “workers,” among other types of workers, indentured and free.

Without acknowledging the company’s response, Hannah-Jones presents the incident as an example of the alleged “confusing and obfuscatory (sic) way school curricula tend to address the institution of slavery.” Per The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, McGraw-Hill remains guilty of referring to “African people brought to the Americas in the bowels of slave ships not as the victims of a forced migration who were violently coerced into labor but as ‘workers,’ a word that implies consensual and paid labor.” The incident stands as Exhibit A for the need for Hannah-Jones’s ostensibly corrective history.  

The 1619 Project when it was first published as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine on August 18, 2019, came with ready-made lessons that were injected immediately into 3,500 schools across the country—without the usual writing and review process that textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill undertake and certainly without any vetting by parents. Woke teachers eagerly adopted the lessons for the Project that displays American history in racially charged language, with the founders described as “enslavers,” plantations “forced-labor camps,” and this nation a “slavocracy.” Sweeping charges are made about “white Americans,” who “strung [black people] from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them,” and on.

Some districts, such as Buffalo, New York, even began mandating it. Yet, today Hannah-Jones does not want parents “deciding what’s being taught,” as she said on Meet the Press, where she echoed failed Democratic candidate for Virginia governor, Terry McAuliffe. Today, Hannah-Jones wants decisions made by “people who have an expertise in the subject area.” She said she trusted her daughter’s teachers because she herself is “not a professional educator,” Yet, Hannah-Jones herself has conducted numerous teacher workshops on using her own creation, The 1619 Project, in classrooms.

She has continued the campaign against transparency laws on Twitter. On January 10, she responded to Christopher Rufo’s tweet advocating for “curriculum transparency” as a way to “deflate” the argument about “bans” and “bait the Left into opposing ‘transparency.’” Hannah-Jones stated, “I hope journalists do a better job reporting on this than they did the original CRT propaganda campaign.” On January 20, Hannah-Jones opined, “The anti-CRT propaganda campaign is being called out for what it is, so they’re changing the tactics to maintain a veneer of legitimacy by pretending all they want now is ‘transparency.’” Parents could just ask the teacher, she suggested rather flippantly. On January 23, she again commented on Rufo’s statement claiming that transparency bills would “force ideological actors to undergo public scrutiny.” We should just accept these bills at “face value,” she said, sarcastically.

For Hannah-Jones transparency laws, ironically, constitute “repression and suppression of truth,” as she told Chuck Todd. All efforts to scrutinize her demonstrably false history are part of a “Republican propaganda campaign” against “the teaching of more accurate history.” During “The AP Interview,” she charged that “powerful people” were seeking to “discredit” and “censor” her work. The charge of “censorship” has become a mantra for Hannah-Jones, even when it comes to parental rights, the same rights she championed for Dean-Burren. 

The question remains: if Dean-Burren was allowed to see her son’s textbook and get the publisher to make changes with more accurate language, why can’t other parents today? 

Author of 1619 Project Nikole Hannah-Jones Decries 'Propaganda and Inaccurate History'

Humberto Fontova Jan 22, 2022 @ Townhall.com

The author of the preposterous 1619 Project seems miffed by the growing grass-roots backlash against the force-feeding of her anti-historical rubbish and it’s offshoots to American schoolchildren. Over in Virginia, for example, Gov. Younkin kicked off his term with an executive order banning Critical Race Theory in Virginia’s public schools.  And down in Florida Gov. De Santis is pushing a bill to do much the same.

 “Many in mainstream media got caught up in the Republican propaganda campaign, which tried to conflate the teaching of a more accurate (italics mine) history, the teaching of structural racism, with trying to make white children feel badly about themselves or guilty,” whined  Nikole Hannah-Jones during a recent interview with the Associated Press.

Ms Hannah-Jones seems to imply that she’s a hard-nosed investigative historian who shrewdly and instantly detects propaganda and inaccuracy. Well: 

“Education is the cornerstone of the (Cuban) revolution. Nearly everywhere among the magnificent Havana architecture signs speak of equality and liberation through education," said a euphoric Nikole Hannah-Jones after a Potemkin tour of Stalinist Cuba. 

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted,” famously boasted Vladimir Lenin

Appropriately enough, Castroite Cuba’s most famous “elite” high school is named for Vladimir Lenin.  

“This summer (2008) I (Nikole Hannah-Jones) traveled to Cuba with six journalists, documenting the experiences of the African diaspora in the Western Hemisphere for the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies in North Carolina. While there, I found a Cuba you may not know. A Cuba with a 99.8 percent literacy rate, the lowest HIV infection rate in the Western Hemisphere, free college and health care…When Castro took power, fewer than one-quarter of Cubans were literate. Many couldn't afford school. One of Castro's first acts was to universalize education…. Cuba's universal health care system is seen by many as a world model.”

Fact-Check: In fact, when Castro took power, which was barely 50 years after a devastating war of independence that cost Cuba almost a fifth of her population, Cuba boasted almost 80 percent literacy and budgeted the most (23 percent of national expenses) for public education of any Latin American country. 

Fact-Check: In 1958, Cuba had a higher standard of living than Ireland and Austria, almost double Spain and Japan’s per-capita income, more doctors and dentists per capita than Britain and lower infant mortality than France and Germany — the 13th lowest in the world, in fact. Today, Cuba’s infant-mortality rate — despite the hemisphere’s highest abortion rate, which favorably skews the figure -- is much lower from the top. So relative to the rest of the world, Cuba’s health care has worsened under the Castros and a nation with a formerly massive influx of European immigrants needs machine guns, water cannons and Tiger sharks to keep it’s people from fleeing, while half-starved Haitians a short 60 miles away turn up their nose at any thought of immigrating to Cuba. 

Without Castro, Cuba’s full literacy would have come about probably as quickly and without firing squads, mass graves and a political incarceration rate higher than Stalin’s. Most countries in Latin America with lower literacy rates than Cuba in 1958 have done just that. 

Better still, before the Castros and Che Guevara converted Cuba into an intellectual, moral and material sewer, Cubans were actually educated —not indoctrinated with worthless Marxist claptrap, as will many U.S. schoolchildren if Biden’s Education Department in cahoots with such as Nikole Hannah-Jones prevails. 

Instead of being force fed essentially the same Marxist imbecilities the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory force-feed its hapless victims, children in pre-Castro Cuba were allowed (encouraged, actually) to read such as George Orwell and Thomas Jefferson not just the arresting wisdom and sparkling prose of Che Guevara. A specimen:

"To the extent that we achieve concrete successes on a theoretical plane — or, vice versa, to the extent that we draw theoretical conclusions of a broad character on the basis of our concrete research — we will have made a valuable contribution to Marxism-Leninism, and to the cause of humanity." 

I quote "this intellectual, this most complete human being of our time" (Jean Paul Sartre’s description of Che Guevara) exactly. Cuba’s prisons aren’t its only torture chambers. With such reading assignments Cuba’s classrooms amply qualify for an inspection by Amnesty International. 

“Black Cubans especially are wary of outsiders wishing to overthrow the Castro regime,” Nikole Hannah-Smith reported after her Potemkin Cuban tour. “They admit the revolution has been imperfect, but it also led to the end of codified racism and brought universal education and access to jobs to black Cubans. Without the revolution, they wonder, where would they be.”

They would have been spared the boot-heel, lash and slave-yoke of a totalitarian regime which jailed and tortured the longest-suffering black political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere, that’s where.  Many Cuban blacks suffered longer incarceration in the dungeons of Che and the Castros than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa’s. Eusebio Penalver, Ignacio Cuesta Valle, Antonio Lopez Munoz, Ricardo Valdes Cancio and many other Cuban blacks suffered almost 30 years in the Castros’ prisons. Bloodied in their fight against Hannah-Jones’ tour guides, they remained unbowed.

But have you ever heard any of their names mentioned by the U.S. media? Eusebio Penalver became a U.S. citizen and lived in Miami for almost 20 years. He would have been a cinch for the media to track down. Has CNN interviewed any of them? Have you ever see any of them on “60 Minutes,” or read about them in The New York Times? Have you ever heard of them on National Public Radio during Black History Month, seen them on the History channel or A&E? Has the NAACP or Congressional Black Caucus mentioned them?

As Ernesto “Che” Guevara wrote in his famous “Motorcycle Diaries” (but was “overlooked” in the famous movie), "The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and drink, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent." And as he famously sneered at a black Cuban questioner during a press conference in early 1959 who asked him what the revolution planned for blacks: “We’ll do for Cuban blacks exactly what Cuban blacks did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean: nothing!” 

Che was much too modest. “Nothing” is not at all an accurate description of Castroite treatment of Cuba’s blacks. In fact, these lily-white European soldiers' sons (Fidel and Raul) along with Che forcibly overthrew a Cuban government where Cuban blacks served as President of the Senate, Minister of Agriculture, Chief of Army, and Head of State (Fulgencio Batista, a grandson of slaves who was born in a palm-roofed shack). Not that you’ll learn any of this from the liberals’ exclusive educational source on pre-Castro Cuba: the Godfather II movie, or –gulp—if Biden’s Education Department gets its wish, from the writings and blathering of Nikole Hannah-Jones. 

In fact: “(Pre-Castro) Cuba had probably the nearest thing to perfect equality between whites and blacks in the world.”

“Aaaaw come ON, Humberto!” some amigos snort. “I mean, let’s not get carried away here! It’s one thing to correct the left’s historical exaggerations! But let’s not exaggerate in the other direction. Puh-leeeze!”

Fair enough, amigos. Fine, then don’t take it from me. Take it from Life Magazine (not exactly a bastion of “embittered- right-wing-Cuban-exiles-with-an-axe-to-grind), where the “perfect equality between races” statement formed the headline on an article they wrote about Cuba in November 1938.  

Democrat Party Created To Subjugate

  January 10, 2022 Mychal Massie @ Daily Rant

When I say the Democrat Party is the very personification of divisiveness, deprivation of God-given unalienable rights, and subjugation I speak the truth and I present facts to support the truth I speak.

They have been same from their very first party platform.  The Democrat Party was founded upon hatred, racism, and subjugation.  Practices that continue to this very moment under Biden – but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s go back to their very beginning and what they represented.

A party platform is a document produced by a political party every four years (prior to each presidential election) that sets forth that party’s beliefs and values as well as its policy positions on important issues of the day. (“Democrats and Republicans: In Their Own Words – A 124 Year History of Major Civil Rights Efforts Based Upon a Side-by-Side Comparison of the Early Platforms of the Two Major Political Parties”)

The Democrats’ Platform in 1840, 1844, and 1848 all read: “All efforts by abolitionists … to interfere with questions of slavery … are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences and … have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union.”

The Democrat Party Platform in 1852 including language:  “The Democrat Party will resist all attempts at renewing  — in Congress or out of it – the agitation of the slavery question [i.e., will oppose all efforts to abolish slavery].”

In the years preceding this platform, numerous occasions had arisen in Congress in which pro- slavery forces sought to extend slavery and anti- slavery forces sought to prohibit it. For example, in 1820, the Democratic Congress passed the Missouri Compromise. 

That law first repealed the pro- visions of the original 1789 anti-slavery law for- bidding the extension of slavery into any federal territory, and then authorized the extension of slavery into new federal territories. Founding Fathers still alive at that time – including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Rufus King – loudly denounced the Missouri Compromise and the expansion of slavery. Subsequently, John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster became congressional leaders in opposing slavery while those such as John C. Calhoun fought aggressively to strengthen and expand it. 

This plank in the Democratic platform condemned the efforts of abolitionists such as John Quincy Adams (a member of Congress at that time, and titled the hell-hound of abolition for his efforts against slavery), asserting that the end of slavery would not only reduce the happiness of America but would also lead to its destruction.

This brings me to one of today’s most ghastly and hideously loathsome promoters the continued objectives of Democrats since their beginning.  Said person is Nikole Hannah-Jones.  She like others of her persuasion are born liars and wholly committed to the bastardization of factual history for the express purposes of advancing their demonic agenda of discord, division, and acrimony.

Jones doesn’t hide the fact that her so-called 1619 Project is based wholly on lies.  She Tweeted: “The fight over the 1619 Project is not about [factual] history.  It is about memory.  I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history.  It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory.  The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.”

In other words she admits to creating a fallacious construct for the purpose of creating dialogue debating the truth of fictional journalism that purposes at the end of the day to be recognized as truth based upon discussion of a falsehood.

An example would be that their kind are demanding the tearing down of statues of people who historically fought them on slavery.  And yet today, thanks “discussions” based upon lies the factual truth  that it was Democrats who yet today oppose freedom.

The pathetic excuses for professors fighting to have such outright lies and the fraudster who is responsible for inventing them to be granted full tenure proves the depth of their unworthiness in academia.

Democrats were calumniators and pernicious anti-freedom progressives from their inception.  They have always been about creating and maintaining discord.  The fact that they have so thoroughly blinded crayon color people to commit the destruction of their well-being, and the abolishment of their freedom and dignity is proof of the evil and insidious Satan machination of Satan.

If you have friends who are Democrat-progressives take a good hard look at them.  Ask yourself how easy it is to have cordial conversation unless it agrees with them?  Ask yourself how flexible and understanding they are of common sense family issues?

It is time people stopped trying to have polite conversations with the progeny of Satan and separated ourselves from them while there is still time before the Lord’s return. Democrats are minions of Satan but the Republican Party of today differs only in approach not desired outcome.

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About the Author

Mychal Massie

Mychal S. Massie is an ordained minister who spent 13 years in full-time Christian Ministry. Today he serves as founder and Chairman of the Racial Policy Center (RPC), a think tank he officially founded in September 2015. RPC advocates for a colorblind society. He was founder and president of the non-profit “In His Name Ministries.” He is the former National Chairman of a conservative Capitol Hill think tank; and a former member of the think tank National Center for Public Policy Research. Read entire bio here

 

A Gift from the Mendacious Nikole Hannah-Jones to Conservative Lawmakers

The creator of The 1619 Project exposes herself on national television and Twitter. 

Tue Jan 4, 2022 Mary Grabar 54 comments

 

If political leaders across the country are looking for more evidence that they are justified in banning The 1619 Project curriculum in schools they can refer to comments made by the Project’s own creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, on December 26, during the Sunday show line-up, on NBC’s Meet the Press.

In her comments to Chuck Todd, she revealed herself to be a dissembler regarding her role in promoting 1619 Project classroom lessons. Then in tweets that insisted that all critics henceforth engage only with her new book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a 600-page expansion, she admitted that the original project, upon which the lessons are based, is flawed.

Shortly after the program aired, at 10:21 a.m., Hannah-Jones tweeted, “It is revealing when critics of the 1619 Project, 2 yrs later, refuse to critique the book & instead keep rehashing arguments abt the magazine. That’s because we responded to good-faith critique, we revised in response, we included 1,000 endnotes, historians wrote half the essays.” Phil Magness, Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, who has been among the earliest and most frequent critics of the economic claims promoted by The 1619 Project, and who had reached out to Hannah-Jones, commented, “I witnessed this process directly as one of those critics over the last 2 years. And there’s not a word of truth to what she is claiming.” Hannah-Jones, who refuses to engage in debate, in typical fashion, attacked the economic historian’s credentials.

Sixteen minutes later, at 10:37 a.m. she went after Victoria Bynum, one of the historians who early on requested corrections to the Project. In December 2019, Bynum had signed Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s letter to the editor, which was also signed by historians James McPherson, Gordon Wood, and James Oakes. At 6:28 a.m. Bynum had commented on Oakes’s recent article in Catalyst magazine responding to New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein’s November 12 defense of the Project—a promotional lead-up to the November 16 publication of the hardcover book, which is copyrighted by the Times. Bynum summarized it as a critique of the political agenda, specifically Black Nationalism, motivating the project. Hannah-Jones tweeted, with no reference to these points, “Is it common ‘very serious’ practice, 2.5 years later, to critique the unrevised work and to not engage the updated version? Asking for a friend.” Bynum politely replied that neither she nor Oakes was commenting on the new book. As revealed by her defensive response, Hannah-Jones was admitting that the original 1619 Project, the August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine, was error-riddled. As Magness noted, “Nikole Hannah-Jones’s latest argument is to claim that the original 1619 Project—as published in the New York Times as part of a multimillion dollar advertising blitz—was just a rough draft, and the new book is the revised version by which it should be judged. Seriously.”

There was also an education blitz. Immediately upon the publication of the original in 2019 prepackaged lessons were shipped to 3,500 schools, a number which soon rose to 4,500. It is hard to know how many teachers are using these materials today. Hannah-Jones has many teachers among her hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. And if one follows the nonprofit Pulitzer Center which developed the lessons, and pushed them into schools with contests, payments to teachers, and webinars—several of them featuring Hannah-Jones—it becomes apparent that teaching The 1619 Project has taken off like wildfire.

But that is not what Hannah-Jones indicated to Chuck Todd on December 26, as she repeated points from “The AP Interview” and elsewhere, about laws banning her work in schools evidencing a “backlash” against “a work of journalism”—but also part of a “Republican propaganda campaign” against “the teaching of more accurate history.”

Hannah-Jones told Todd that she was “concerned” because her “work of journalism” was being “banned by name in Georgia, Florida, in Texas.” She also referred to “efforts to ban the teaching of this history in Oklahoma, in South Dakota, in Tennessee.”

She then repeated what she had been saying about authoritarianism and fascism, points she gleans from reading anti-Trump polemics. A society that “bans books or bans ideas, that is not a free and tolerant democratic society,” she intoned, “is a society that is veering towards authoritarianism.” She predicted “a dark age of repression and suppression of the truth”—"unless people who believe in free speech, who believe in our children being intellectually challenged, begin to get organized and speak up.” The laws keeping her materials out of classrooms “are paving the way for the taking of other political rights like voting rights, like women's reproductive rights, like rights for LGBTQ people.”

Hannah-Jones also weighed in on the recent Virginia governor’s race. According to her, Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory resulted from “a right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents that they needed to fight against their children being indoctrinated” and “being called racists.” The black and Latino parents in Virginia, who wanted “more teaching about race . . . the history of racism,” she told Todd (but contradicted by surveys and 1776 Unites), “were not being featured in that coverage”

She then asserted that parents should not be deciding “what’s being taught” (except presumably the black and Latino parents she claimed wanted more “teaching about race”). She admitted that she is “not a professional educator. I don't have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have an expertise in the subject area. And that is not my job.” She expressed agreement with Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, who had stated that parents should not “be telling schools what they should teach.” His statement, she said, was “just the fact. This is why we send our children to school and don’t homeschool.”

One wonders why the “not a professional educator” Hannah-Jones has felt qualified to conduct webinars for K-12 teachers with the Pulitzer Center. On February 18, 2021, alongside Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, she was featured in a “Webinar for Educators: Examining Essays from The 1619 Project with Nikole Hannah-Jones.” A week later, on February 25, 2021, she participated in an event called “Panelists Give Advice on How to Teach Black History to Elementary and Middle School Students” with LaGarrett King, director, University of Missouri Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education. On March 10, 2021, she served as a panelist in a “conversation” about using The 1619 Project in law schools.

Most recently on December 13, Hannah-Jones was featured in a webinar called “Teaching the 1619 Project: A Virtual Event for Educators and Librarians.” The webinar offered tips for skirting laws and announced an event in February that would present student work and share information about “how teachers have protected themselves.” Calling the anti-1619 Project legislation “memory laws,” Hannah-Jones expressed gratitude to “the educators” for their courage and desire “to teach what is not easy to teach to your children, because you know that our children deserve to be taught a truer version of what this country is … We have choice and agency — all of us — in the country that we want to build” (emphases added).

The Pulitzer Center article about that webinar advertised the upcoming conference and bragged that “the first cohort of the Network has grown to 41 teams of four to 10 educators representing 21 states. There are now 170 teachers and administrators working on units utilizing 1619 materials that align to many subjects and grade levels.” Teachers were encouraged to use the lesson plans created by the Pulitzer Center and through the Network as an “entry point into the project.”

That’s a lot of material, not to mention the accompanying videos and podcasts. Will these be updated to reflect the second draft of the 1619 Project, the one historians should now consult, as Hannah-Jones demands?

And what about the new volumes that are promised in the book’s Acknowledgments? Caroline Que, of “the New York Times books division” is thanked for her help “as we sought to turn the 1619 Project into a series of books, of which this is the first.” Will more and more lessons be produced? Will Hannah-Jones demand that everyone scramble to keep up with the ever-shifting “work of journalism” that still insists at bottom that this nation, a slavocracy, was founded in 1619?

Hannah-Jones, who presumes to be more qualified to engage in such academic debates than accomplished historians and economists, rails on, propped up by corporate interests, such as the New York Times and its books division, the multinational publisher Penguin Random House, and the profiteering educational companies. We know (and she must know) that she is out of her depth.

She unwittingly exposed herself to a national audience on December 26. The revelation about her work-in-progress is a perfect Boxing Day gift for legislators concerned about education and the future of our country.

Mary Grabar, Ph.D., is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the author of Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America and Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America.

  

The 1619 Project Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

Phillip W. Magness – December 11, 2021 @ America Institute for Economic Research

 

When Nikole Hannah-Jones published the 1619 Project in August 2019, it initially came under an unfair line of attack from historians who took issue with aspects of its discussion of Abraham Lincoln. Hannah-Jones had correctly identified Lincoln as a supporter of black colonization – a common 19^th century “solution” to slavery that involved coupling emancipation with the resettlement of the freedmen abroad in locations such as Liberia or Central America.

Lincoln’s speeches and writings contain dozens of unambiguous endorsements of colonization, which he intended to subsidize through the US government, albeit on a voluntary basis for the freedmen colonists. Though misguided in its aims, Lincoln’s brand of colonization was also motivated by his antislavery beliefs and specifically the notion that resettlement abroad would permit African-Americans an opportunity to enjoy the rights and freedoms that were denied to them in the United States. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s colonizationism has long been a sore spot for Lincoln scholars due to the complexities it introduces to the “Great Emancipator” political iconography. Several generations of historians have put their pens to work seeking a way to give Honest Abe an out where colonization is concerned. Most contend that Lincoln abandoned the scheme mid-presidency, reading an active repudiation into his public silence on the measure in the final year of the Civil War. Others even put forth the theory that Lincoln only advocated colonization as a political ruse – a “lullaby” to coax public opinion closer to the Emancipation Proclamation.

Reality is much more straightforward. In addition to being a sincere antislavery man, Lincoln was also a sincere colonizationist who meant what he said when he espoused this position. A substantial body of my own work on the Civil War era investigates this exact question, conclusively showing that Lincoln continued to pursue colonization schemes through diplomatic channels well beyond the Emancipation Proclamation, and likely into the last months of his presidency. When Nikole Hannah-Jones made similar claims in 2019, she was drawing directly on my work as a historian of that subject.

In fact, Hannah-Jones stated as much in a series of now-deleted comments as some of the other historian-critics questioned her claims about Lincoln and colonization.

On November 22, 2019 she tweeted out a link to my co-authored 2011 book on the subject, Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement.

Three days later, Hannah-Jones wrote, “For instance, recent scholarship shows Lincoln did not abandon colonization at Emancipation but worked on it until he was assassinated.” In another comment, she criticized historian James McPherson’s “dated scholarship on Lincoln ending his efforts to colonize black people at Emancipation” (McPherson is one of the main proponents of the above-mentioned “lullaby” thesis). Quite the contrary, Hannah-Jones continued, “recent scholarship shows [Lincoln] continued these efforts until his death.”

In both cases, the “recent scholarship” that she referred to was my own work, which I summarized in a series of articles in 2012 and 2013 for Hannah-Jones’s own employer, the New York Times.

There were certain interpretive differences between my work and the 1619 Project on this point – for example, Hannah-Jones understated the extent to which antislavery motives shaped Lincoln’s support for the measure, which he saw as a pathway to wean the country away from the brutal plantation system. But the historical evidence of Lincoln’s deep connections to colonization was clear, and at least on that point the 1619 Project got it right.

That is, until Hannah-Jones realized that the historian she was citing was also an outspoken critic of other aspects of the 1619 Project.

“What are the credentials, exactly of Phil Magness?” Hannah-Jones fumed in another now-deleted comment after she realized that I had offered a less-than-favorable assessment of her project’s other historical claims, and particularly its error-riddled essay on the economics of slavery by Matthew Desmond. Her fury intensified in January 2020 after Alex Lichtenstein published a lengthy defense of the 1619 Project against his historian critics, attempting to invoke his authority as the editor of the American Historical Review to arbitrate the disputes over its claims about slavery in the Revolutionary through Civil War eras. At the time I pointed out that Lichtenstein – a 20^th century historian – was not an expert in the antebellum United States, and was thus not qualified to assume the role of historical judge and jury on specialist claims about that era. Hannah-Jones snapped back, “Lol. You aren’t a specialist in that era either yet that didn’t stop you.”

Setting aside the fact that only a few weeks prior Hannah-Jones herself had been explicitly touting my work on Lincoln’s colonization projects to justify her own claims in the 1619 Project, I’ll simply note that I’ve authored over two dozen scholarly works on slavery and the Civil War era. This includes my aforementioned book, the chapter on colonization in the Essential Civil War Curriculum, as well as multiple peer-reviewed articles on slavery in the U.S. and broader Atlantic world. Hannah-Jones, by contrast, has no known original scholarship to her name of any kind on slavery or this period of American history.

At first, I chalked this bizarre exchange up to Hannah-Jones’s increasingly unprofessional approach to defending the 1619 Project. Instead of responding to substantive and factual critiques of her work, Hannah-Jones began directing personal abuse and insults at her critics.

When James McPherson offered his own less-than-flattering take on Hannah-Jones’s work in November 2019, she responded dismissively: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” McPherson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War, and author of what is widely considered the standard single-volume treatment of the subject, Battle Cry of Freedom. In December 2019, McPherson joined distinguished scholars Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes in questioning Hannah-Jones’s attempts to recast the American Revolution as a fight to preserve slavery. Rather than answer them, she dismissed the group as a whole by labeling them “white historians.”

Hannah-Jones saved her most brazenly abusive attacks though for African-American critics of the 1619 Project, such as Columbia University professor John McWhorter and journalist Coleman Hughes. When McWhorter, Hughes, and other African-American scholars launched a competitor 1776 Project in February 2020 through the Robert Woodson Center, Hannah-Jones lashed out on Twitter by posting photos of herself making derogatory gestures at her black interlocutors. Although she later deleted the tweets at the apparent request of her employer, Hannah-Jones made Hughes in particular a focus of her continued verbal abuse. “That Ivy League education certainly didn’t do you any favors,” she wrote in another comment to Hughes in August 2020. “Next time screenshot me and don’t quote text me because I’d rather not read your drivel. I tried to find something to quote tweet in that profoundly mediocre 1776 Project essay you wrote, but alas, nothing was worthy.”

It comes with little surprise, then, that my own experiences with Hannah-Jones followed a similar course after she realized that I was the author of the works on black colonization that she had previously been citing. Rather than engage with the evidence surrounding the disputed claims of her work, Hannah-Jones’s first impulse is to insult, attack, and dismiss the critic as “unqualified” to evaluate her work. Only historians that she cherry-picks to affirm her preconceived position, such as the University of South Carolina’s Woody Holton, are permitted under her credential-touting games.

Except in the case of Lincoln and colonization, Hannah-Jones even went so far as to modify her previous historical claims in order to avoid having to cite and credit a 1619 Project critic. As a result, I have the unusual distinction of having fallen from Hannah-Jones’ grace after she previously invoked my scholarship to support her work back in 2019. When an extended version of the 1619 Project came out in book form in November 2021, Hannah-Jones had not only excised substantial portions of her previous arguments about Lincoln – she cast about and found a new source to justify her revised interpretation on Lincoln.

The 1619 Project book now states only that Lincoln supported “colonization schemes as late as 1862,” and further implies that Lincoln abandoned the program after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Hannah-Jones’s new source for this revised claim appeared in footnote 38 of her essay: a 2016 popular press book entitled Stamped From the Beginning by Critical Race Theory activist Ibram X. Kendi.

Hannah-Jones’s new version of Lincoln’s colonization initiative is unambiguously wrong as a matter of history. One of the many discoveries I made while researching this subject was a colonization agreement that Lincoln signed on June 15, 1863 with the colonial government of British Honduras, or modern-day Belize. This document resides in the National Archives of Belize where I discovered it in 2011, and was previously unknown to any historian.

But as a broader matter of principle, Hannah-Jones’s behavior illustrates the absence of basic scholarly integrity from her approach to writing history. Rather than following the evidence where it leads, Hannah-Jones picks and chooses bits and pieces of her arguments from a secondary literature based on whether it conforms to her preconceived political narrative. She approaches citations as a tool by which she can reward other scholars who affirm that narrative. And if a previously-cited scholar runs afoul of Hannah-Jones, she is perfectly willing to alter the “history” presented in the 1619 Project in ways that excise the offending work and replace it with a completely different narrative – provided that its author flatters Hannah-Jones’s own personal politics and ambitions in the process.

READ MORE

Phillip W. Magness

Phillip W. Magness is Senior Research Faculty and Interim Research and Education Director at the American Institute for Economic Research. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston).

Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College.

Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains active research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic thought. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

 

Books by Phillip W. Magness

Pulitzer Center Helps 1619 Project Teachers Subvert Laws Banning Racism

The nonprofit, leftwing billionaire-funded center hosted a webinar for educators and librarians offering tips on how to use their 1619 Project material and skirt laws banning its use.

By Mary Grabar December 17, 2021 @ The Federalist

On December 13, the nonprofit Pulitzer Center hosted a webinar for educators and librarians offering tips on how to use their 1619 Project material and skirt laws banning its use.

The leftwing billionaire-funded center slipped premade 1619 Project lessons into thousands of schools immediately after the publication of the original 1619 Project, a special issue of The New York Times Magazine on Aug. 18, 2019. The mishmash of essays, articles, literary writing, and photographs claimed to reframe our nation as a “slavocracy” that began in 1619 — the year about 20 Africans arrived in Jamestown — not 1776. Per the formula of critical race theory, the rest has been a race struggle between white oppressors and black victims.

In the webinar, New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein moderated a “conversation” between 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones and Donnalie Jamnah, a former high school English teacher hired by the Pulitzer Center to coordinate with educators. This webinar further confirmed that The 1619 Project is an indoctrination tool.

The webinar advised educators that although a law may prohibit requiring The 1619 Project, it may not necessarily forbid its use as an alternate reading. And though a school board may ban The 1619 Project, teachers should find out if the board has the authority to do so. It directed educators to an upcoming event in February that would present student work and share information about “how teachers have protected themselves.”

The December virtual event was a continuation of the outreach that offers educators downloadable curricula, ongoing continuing education, and $5,000 teacher grants. Such efforts to subvert laws intended to protect students from propaganda is funded, ultimately, by taxpayers, through tax subsidization of nonprofits and their billionaire funders, and through salaries for teachers and librarians.

Questionable Collaboration with For-Profit Companies

The webinar also revealed the questionable collaborative efforts between for-profit companies (The New York Times) and nonprofits (the Pierre Omidyar- and Mark Zuckerberg-funded Pulitzer Center). On behalf of The New York Times, Madeline Felix in her introductory remarks gave a sales pitch and encouraged the 6,000-plus viewers (including K-12 teachers, librarians, community college instructors, homeschooling parents, and nursing school personnel) to purchase the newspaper at the discounted campus-wide rate.

Librarians have become especially useful for getting materials to students outside of the formal class setting. They are important in ensuring that libraries have the two 1619 Project books recently published by Penguin Random House — “Born on the Water,” a picture book, and “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” a 600-page expansion of the original work. In another display of for-profit/nonprofit coordination, Penguin Random House is using a consortium of bookstores, a nonprofit that distributes “diverse books” (partially funded by Penguin Random House!), and Hannah-Jones via Twitter to encourage fans to purchase copies to donate to libraries, schools, organizations, and after-school programs.

The two books (both copyrighted by The New York Times) are clearly intended for use in schools. Penguin Random House offers teachers of all grades a guide for the books, which are produced by the educational arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Learning for Justice.

Author Says Historical Critiques Equal Censorship

Hannah-Jones insisted that objections to the use of her materials in classrooms is censorship because the historical accuracy could not be a legitimate concern.

Informed by her reading of such anti-Trump tracts as “How Fascism Works” by Jason Stanley, she interpreted the efforts to keep her “journalism” out of classrooms as part of the larger effort towards “authoritarianism” and fascism. It is no coincidence, she said, that the states “censoring” her work were also enacting laws restricting abortion and voting. Hannah-Jones has become a political pundit, appearing on MSNBC to describe how “1619 explains” current events, such as January 6. (White supremacy, like everything bad, began in 1619.)

The political intent of the expanded 1619 Project is clearer than ever. Most of the historical errors of the original Project remain and are even compounded. The endnotes and references are intended to put on a scholarly gloss. The quasi-historical/political essays, creative prose, “poetry,” and photographs serve as preparation for the final essay’s argument for reparations.

Defenders Deny Project Is Divisive

To Silverstein’s recounting of the claims that the project is “divisive” and makes “kids feel bad,” Jamnah said nonsense. Anything that could make white students feel evil was “not in the project.”

Jamnah apparently sees nothing objectionable in this sentence from the original project and repeated in Hannah-Jones’s essay, “Democracy,” in the book, intended for high-school students: “In response to Black demands for [their] rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled their dogs, peeled back their skin with firehoses, and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.”

“White America” also constructed “a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid” that also provided “inspiration” for Nazi Germany’s racial policies. Nor did Jamnah object to kindergartners being read “Born on the Water” and hearing about how “white people” “kidnapped” “our people,” “forced them into the bottom of an evil ship” and about how “white men” “traded another’s child, another’s momma and daddy.”

As Jamnah revealed by referencing 170 teachers and administrators who are developing materials for several subject areas for kindergarten through college, The 1619 Project is intended to saturate the educational experience of Americans at every stage and in every subject. (Already, students who have been subjected to it in high school find themselves studying it again in college classes.) By sheer reach alone, The 1619 Project will have the effect of replacing 1776, despite Hannah-Jones’s protestations to the contrary.

As teachers spend weeks and weeks on The 1619 Project, valuable time is lost for studying real history, civics, and literature. This is not to mention the human waste in emotionally scarred and ignorant young adults readied to ravage cities in a reprise of The 1619 Project riots of 2020.

We need to remain vigilant, even in states that have passed laws forbidding the use of The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory in public classrooms. Publishing corporations are raking in profits producing materials that American taxpayers clearly don’t want.

Mary Grabar earned her PhD from the University of Georgia and taught college English for 20 years. She is now a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York, and author of the new book "Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America" (Regnery, September 7, 2021). Her writing can be found at DissidentProf.com and at marygrabar.com.

 

1619 Project Born on the Water Jake Silverstein k-12 education Mark Zuckerberg New York Times Magazine Nikole Hannah-Jones Penguin Random House Pierre Omidyar public schools Pulitzer Center The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story