End the 1619 Project Indoctrination
The reelection of Donald Trump is rightfully being seen as repudiation of “woke”—DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and CRT (Critical Race Theory). Trump is planning to root out the toxic, often deadly, ideology in federal departments.
First comes the abolishment of fake history, work Trump started toward the end of his hoax- and impeachment-beleaguered first term with the White House Conference on American History on Constitution Day 2020. Looking forward to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he said that radicals burning American flags “want to burn down the principles enshrined in our founding documents. . . . In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we came from, and what we believe.”
The summer 2020 rioting, which included attacks on historical monuments, was “the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. . . . Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.” As one of the panelists, I drew upon my book, Debunking Howard Zinn.
As President Trump also said, the 1619 Project “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.” I was then writing Debunking The 1619 Project. I have monitored the creator, New York Times race reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, since the initial project came out in August 2019 as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine accompanied by a newspaper supplement. Hannah-Jones presented 1619, when the first Africans arrived in Virginia, as her own discovery and aims to replace 1776 with 1619 as the year of our founding—of a “slavocracy.”
Hannah-Jones and an interlinking network of nonprofits and for-profit companies have found a “cash cow” in the 1619 Project. By 2021, two spin-off books—a children’s book and an expanded collection of writings and art, had been published by Penguin Random House. Films were produced by Oprah Winfrey. Hannah-Jones was garnering speaking fees averaging $25,000 at universities on a twice-monthly basis. By January 2022, she was commanding $55,000 to appear at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
These are veritable lovefests. Hannah-Jones refuses to engage in scholarly debate. When I revealed that she had admitted on Twitter that slaves were not “kidnapped” by Europeans but were bought from African chiefs, she blocked me after accusing me of affirming “white supremacy.”
She applies the same racial interpretation to current events. On CNN, she justified the 2020 riots as necessary to make white Americans “confront” racial injustice and on MSNBC categorized them as part of black Americans’ historical push “further to democracy.” On public radio, she called the January 6, 2021, protest an “insurrection,” and to “hold onto white power,” as she elaborated, upon receiving an award from the Roosevelt Institute.
Recently, on a CNN panel, Hannah-Jones in discussing the “anti-woke vote” for Trump, said, “When I hear anti-woke, I hear anti-Black.” That included “the majority of Latinos” who “self-identify as white.” During the discussion of the harmful effects of DEI in the military, Hannah-Jones contended that “the military has long been woke” as the “first institution in the United States to integrate.” “Racial polarization,” she insisted, was “bad for military strength”—thus falsely equating DEI with integration (and reversing her own position in the 1619 Project).
But Hannah-Jones seeks to increase racial polarization. From her Project, schoolchildren, beginning in second grade, learn about blacks being “strung from trees,” beaten, “assassinated . . . in their front yards,” “firebombed,” and “mauled by dogs”—by “white Americans.” Her children’s book, Born on the Water, taught beginning in pre-kindergarten, promotes her lie that “mommies” and “daddies” were “kidnapped” from Africa by white men and enslaved.
Educators Defying the Law
For good reason, many states have outlawed the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, and DEI in public schools.
But educators flaunt state laws. For example, in Texas, K-12 administrators state that they don’t say “1619 Project” but do teach its “principles,” while college officials there rebrand DEI with such names as “belonging” or “Campus Access and Engagement.” Such strategies are shared at education conferences.
Nonprofits funded by left-wing billionaires and American taxpayers are pushing the 1619 Project through free materials, education workshops, and financial incentives. In this way, taxpayers subsidize the New York Times and Penguin Random House.
The taxpayer-supported Smithsonian Institution was a partner in developing the 1619 Project’s newspaper supplement and hosted a symposium on The 1619 Project featuring Hannah-Jones on October 30, 2019.
The Pulitzer Center (receiving funds from Mark Zuckerberg, who has also promoted The 1619 Project on his Facebook platform) and the Mott Foundation, are funding lesson-writing and pushing the 1619 Project into schools and institutions, including prisons. During the Pulitzer Center December 13, 2021, webinar, New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein moderated a “conversation” between education coordinator Donnalie Jamnah and Hannah-Jones. These webinars give sales pitches for New York Times classroom subscriptions and offer tips on skirting laws, for example, by assigning the Project as “alternate” readings. Teachers “facing legal barriers” share “their stories in learning communities,” and with the help of organizational partner PEN America, learn how to understand “education censorship laws.” They also get $5,000 grants to teach the 1619 Project.
To fight “censorship,” Penguin Random House used 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. Learning for Justice, the educational arm of the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, which has promoted The 1619 Project from its inception with bogus surveys, has with the Pulitzer Center written book guides for Penguin Random House. Other collaborators include the nonprofit Anti-Defamation League and the Zinn Education Project, and the NEA and the AFT teachers unions. Yet, the New York Times is the main copyright holder to the two 1619 Project books published by Penguin Random House.
Five Years of 1619 Project Indoctrination
The Pulitzer Center’s five-year report brags that over one million people had “engaged with the reading guides we published in 2019 as the first initiative for this partnership” [sent to 3500 schools for fall semester 2019]. Five-hundred-and-forty-one “educator partners” reach over 25,000 pre-K-12th grade students and “over 2,500 adult learners.” They “facilitated 203 events and workshops attended by over 15,000 people.” Their programs “built partnerships with over 120 K-12 schools and districts in 30 states and Washington, D.C.” and “with professors at 22 colleges and universities in 15 states”; they “facilitated 17 workshops at academic education conferences” and “collaborated” with Penguin Random House “to connect professors of education with 1619 resources”—135 curricular materials at 1619education.org.
They had also “designed and hosted three annual 1619 Education Conferences” and connected with teachers “through collaborative events” with the National Council for the Social Studies (Hannah-Jones spoke at the 2020 conference) and the National Council of Teachers of English (Hannah-Jones at the 2021 conference). Taxpayers pay for educators’ expenses.
Indeed, the Pulitzer Center sees “the questions the Project raises about how we define the United States and understand its history” as “more relevant than ever” as they look ahead “to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence” in 2026.
Rain on the 250-Year Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
Already, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond is planning to display artifacts from the groups oppressed by the “White male property-own[ing]” founders—Indians, women, and slaves, along with the “original copy of Lord Dunmore’s November 1775 proclamation that offered freedom to enslaved people in Virginia who fought for the crown,” reports Sean Salai. “’The 1619 Project’ uses this evidence in its argument that America began as a racist nation.”
Indeed, Hannah-Jones claims that protecting slavery was a major reason for the American Revolution. In her book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, she fails to note such events as the battles of Lexington and Concord (on April 19) and that George Washington assumed command of the Continental Army on July 3—well before Dunmore’s Proclamation.
According to the America250 website, partners include the National Congress of American Indians, the National Women’s History Museum, and a dozen federal agencies, including the Smithsonian Institution.
But the Smithsonian has gone far astray from its mission of the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” through scientific, technological, and cultural collections and events—from choosing a display featuring Black Panthers, hip-hop, Black Lives Matter, and Anita Hill, over an exhibit of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, hosting teacher workshops on using Zinn’s Marxist history, collaborating on the 1619 Project, and posting the notorious “Whiteness” web page. In spite of public outcry, the “whiteness” poster presenting such characteristics as individualism, politeness, the nuclear family, the scientific method, Christianity, hard work, self-reliance, delayed gratification, and English common law-based justice as hallmarks of white privilege, remains, as does plagiarist Robin DiAngelo’s video, “Deconstructing White Privilege.”
The propagandizing continues with curation of the January 6, 2021, protest as a violent attempt to subvert the election and a related website created with the University of Alabama Department of Religious Studies offering “interpretive essays” on such things as “Christian Nationalism” and “who does and does not count as ‘white’ in America.” In her contribution on Blacks for Trump, Melissa Matthes, a “full professor at the United States Coast Guard Academy,” misrepresents the Gospel of Matthew, claiming that by recruiting “Black men ‘slaves’, Trump was able to secure the victory. . . .”
There, 1619 Project contributor Anthea Butler claims that “democracy itself” hung on “gallows” erected on the Capitol grounds. Calling the protestors “insurrectionists,” “eager executioners,” and a “lynch mob,” she speculated that had “Pence been captured and marched out to the gallows,” it would have confirmed “the barbarity and murderous intent that has undergirded American history.” The essay remains even though Georgia Congressman Barry Loudermilk is seeking answers about the illegally placed symbolic (non-weightbearing) gallows constructed at 6:30 a.m.
We should investigate how tax dollars support the 1619 Project and other propaganda and the tax-exempt status of nonprofits claiming to do educational work.
