America founded on racism, debunked! 

A New York Times columnist just drove a sharp stake through the heart of his own newspaper’s mendacious 1619 Project. In the Sunday New York Times itself, no less. 

“The 1619 Project has failed,” Bret Stephens writes. It is “a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around.”

Ah, but it did succeed, he writes later, in destroying the newspaper’s credibility by substituting ideology-driven cant for journalism. “Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times” — those who accuse the newspaper of being “fake, biased, partisan and an arm of the radical left … a gift.”

The bottom line of this Marxist agitprop is that America is irredeemably and foundationally racist. As such, 1619 forms the intellectual ballast justifying the toppling of Wisconsin’s Miss Forward (a porto-feminist) and Col. Heg statues — the latter an abolitionist who gave his life fighting slavery.

The 1619 Project, for the record, preaches that “the true birth date” of the United States is not 1776 but 1619. That is when the first shipload of slaves docked at Jamestown colony, Virginia. That “out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.”

“Nearly everything?” asks the incredulous columnist. 

What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing? 

Bad history, bad journalism

Stephens points out that slavery is as old as the Bible and already existed in the New World. “For all its horror, there was nothing particularly surprising that slavery made its way to the English colonies on the Eastern Seaboard.”

“What was surprising,” he writes, “was that in 1776 … “that all men are created equal” came into existence through the Declaration of Independence.” 

That the ideals of 1776 were not fully realized does not condemn the American idea but describes the human condition. “Ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized,” Stephens observes. “Most of us, at any given point in time, are falling short of some ideal we nonetheless hold to be true or good.” As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

Incredibly, and a-historically, the 1619 Project posited that the War of Independence was fought to preserve slavery! And that the struggle against slavery and for civil rights “has been borne on the backs of Black Resistance.” WRONG again! Stephens quotes Pulitzer Prize winning historian James McPherson (Do read his Battle Cry of Freedom.) 

From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism.

⇒ Purpose is to guilt Americans into paying reparations. Read it here.

Indoctrinating our children

Stephens scolds his own newspaper for pushing its racist agit-prop on the nation’s impressionable school children:

It’s one thing for a newspaper to publish the 1619 Project by way of challenging its subscribers … It’s quite another to become a pedagogical product for schoolchildren who, along with their parents, in most cases probably don’t subscribe. …

When “1619” was spray-painted on a toppled statue of George Washington, many people took angry or horrified notice. When [1619 Project coordinator Nikole] Hannah-Jones tweeted that “it would be an honor” for the summer’s unrest to be called “the 1619 riots,” the right took notice again. 

For many, the 1619 Project smacked of fake history coming from the “fake news” — with results that were all too real. As unbidden gifts to Donald Trump go, it could hardly have been sweeter than that.

⇒ It’s being taught in over 4,000 school districts, including Chicago.

UPDATED: “To answer your question relative to the teaching of the New York Times’ 1619 project in [Madison WI] classrooms, the use of this material is not an official part of MMSD curriculum.  However, we do allow teachers a degree of discretion to incorporate appropriate materials or resources into their individual instruction to coincide with (or support) our official curriculum, which might include New York Time’s 1619 project. MMSD has long practiced providing its teachers discretion to incorporate unofficial but relevant material into their instruction in order to expose students to a variety of ideas and diverse concepts.” — MMSD spokesman Tim LeMonds.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: The President has threatened to cut federal funding from any school that pumps the 1619 bilge into its classrooms. Please do so, sir. Ask Joe Biden if he would reverse that needed corrective.