Mike Gonzalez is Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow of the Heritage Foundation and author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution
Awakened hardcore leftists think if they can change America’s perception of the past, they can control the present, own the future… and make a whole lot of money in the process.
Just pay close attention to Nikole Hannah-Jones.
In fact, it’s pretty hard not to.
Your 1619 project is now on Hulu, so you can’t avoid seeing a promotion for it if you’re looking for Frasier reruns after a long day.
Or the ubiquitous Hannah-Jones might come to a library near you that you pay for with your taxes.
Just ask the people of Fairfax, a leafy county in Virginia, 20 miles west of America’s capital, whose public library has agreed to pay Hannah-Jones $29,350 for a one-hour lecture on February 19th.
Apparently that wasn’t enough to afford Hannah-Jones, so the nearby McLean Community Center, which also benefited from a real estate surcharge, shelled out another $6,000. That’s $589 per minute – paid for by all local taxpayers, whether they believe in their mission or not.
Not bad for a woman whose job it is to make Americans feel really, really ashamed of their home, their life, their country and everything else because some people they never met 200 years ago are of have benefited from a system they recognize as abominable: slavery.
Don’t just take my word for it. According to her own statements, Hannah-Jones plays with the guilt of the white people.
“I am not writing to convert Trump supporters. I write to try to get liberal whites to do what they say they believe in. I argue morally,” she said at the University of Chicago in October 2019. “My method is to blame.”
Awakened hardcore leftists think if they can change America’s perception of the past, they can control the present, own the future… and make a whole lot of money in the process. Just pay close attention to Nikole Hannah-Jones (top, center)
The 1619 Project addresses the idea that 1619 is the year of America’s real founding, not 1776 when the founders signed the Declaration of Independence amid some troubles with the mother country.
Why 1619? In August of that year, a pirate ship brought 20 Angolans to be sold near the Jamestown port of Point Comfort in the English colony of Virginia. That’s how the United States began, say Hannah-Jones and her advocates, because four centuries later, everything in America is still about slavery.
Never mind that, as with all major claims of the 1619 Project, the story of the 20 Africans has been debunked. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and a man who, unlike Hannah-Jones, has a PhD in anthropology, says: “Africans were treated as indentured servants and were soon set free.”
Hannah-Jones, writes Wood, “presents slavery as beginning in Jamestown in 1619 and spreading from there to become the bedrock of American society. This is a false story, a myth.”
Her Hulu series also makes exaggerated claims that support her broader narrative that America is an oppressive, racist society.
In the first episode of the series, Hannah-Jones goes back to her earlier claim that the American colonists decided to break free because they feared Britain would free the slaves.
When the claim was first made in the opening salvo of Project 1619 in 2019, when The New York Times dedicated an entire issue of its weekly magazine to the project, historians howled so loudly that the paper issued what was not quite a correction , but a “clarification”.
“We recognize that our original language could be read as protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all colonists,” the paper said in March 2020. “The passage has been amended to make it clear that for some a major motivation was the colonist.’
“Some” is such a vague word, making it perfect for Hannah-Jones’ purposes. Note that they didn’t opt for the more descriptive phrase “a majority of.”
Her Hulu series also makes exaggerated claims that support her broader narrative that America is an oppressive, racist society.
Why not? Could it – gasp – not be true?
With her Hulu series, the obviously lewd Hannah-Jones comes back to bite the apple again and reaches for another, flimsy, proof of her slanderous claim.
This is important to her because she is evidently pointing out that the nation’s Founding Fathers were not paragons of virtue striving to create a nation devoted to liberty, but scheming, greedy slavers intent on protecting their “white privilege.” to maintain.
Hannah-Jones cannot abandon this central deception, for without it her brand “1619 Project” perishes.
She enlists the help of a revisionist history professor at the University of South Carolina, Woody Holton. He dramatically tells Hannah-Jones on camera that the Virginia colonists only decided to take up arms because the colony’s Perthshire-born governor, John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore, promised to free the slaves. who had fought on the British side.
Here, too, real historians are at a loss. “The scene is an authoritative statement laced with stunning cinematography, but it’s also a false story.” writes Phillip Magness, who is completing his Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University in Virginia.
Dunmore’s push to free the slaves would not have persuaded the Virginia colonists to join the revolution, as they had already largely made up their minds.
Dunmore’s “Proclamation” was not issued from his governor’s mansion, but from aboard HMS William. He fled there five months ago when his rebellious subjects threatened to attack his home.
His call to free the slaves was not the work of a great humanist. He was a slave owner himself. It was the scheme of a desperate royalist fomenting chaos.
Not surprisingly, this story isn’t even briefly mentioned on Hannah-Jones’ show.
Why 1619? In August of that year, a pirate ship brought 20 Angolans to be sold near the Jamestown port of Point Comfort in the English colony of Virginia. (Above) The engraving shows the arrival of a Dutch slave ship with a group of African slaves for sale, Jamestown, Virginia, 1619.
“There is no path we would steer away from [Lord Dunmore’s significance]’ Hannah-Jones told an admittedly friendly Washington Post reporter, ‘because it’s right.’
But even her ally at the post office couldn’t help but insert a caveat that bends your back until it breaks.
He dutifully noted that Princeton historian Sean Wilentz called this account of Dunmore “highly misleading.”
So why embark on this deceptive mission to tarnish your country’s history and its very raison d’être?
All of these things serve a purpose—indeed, the old purpose of the left, which is massive wealth transfer.
Like Phineas Taylor Barnum (the famous 19th-century American showman/huckster known to friends and history as PT), Hannah-Jones obviously believes that a sucker is born every minute.
Her goal, as she told the University of Chicago audience, is “reparations” to be paid by non-blacks to American blacks.
This is a point she reiterated in a massive 8,500-word essay for The New York Times.
Readers who have made it to the end will have read these words: “If we are to be saved, if we are to be true to the great ideals on which we were founded, we must do what is right. It’s time for this country to pay its debts. It’s time for reparations.’
Hannah-Jones is in the white guilt business and business is good – to tell you the truth.