Progressive Tribalism & The 1619 Project

Progressive Tribalism & The 1619 Project (Updated)

AUGUST 21, 2019 BY WOLF HOWLING 69 COMMENTS

The 1619 Project – a media driven campaign to view everything about this nation through a dark and myopic racial prism — is pure evil. It is the basest of modern lies, told to stir the basest of emotions, all to separate society and, thereby, to achieve a political end unrelated to the lies.

Deprived of the Russian Conspiracy hoax, the New York Times is moving on to a new project:

Perhaps when you think of the founding of the United States, you think of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers. Now, the New York Times wants to “reframe” your understanding of the nation’s founding.

In the Times‘ view (which it hopes to make the view of millions of Americans), the country was actually founded in 1619, when the first Africans were brought to North America, to Virginia, to be sold as slaves.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of that event, and the Times has created something called the 1619 Project. This is what the paper hopes the project will accomplish: “It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

Byron York, New Goal For New York Times To Reframe American History & Target Trump Too.

With the 1619 Project, America is being subjected to the biggest single toss of the race card in our nation’s post-civil war history.  According to the race hustlers and progressives pushing this hoax, our nation today has not advanced an inch from the horrendous racism of 1952 Mississippi, that racism is responsible for all the ills of society, that racism is the foundation of capitalism, and that racism is at the root of all the ills of black society today.  Anything negative that happens to a black is because of racism, regardless of their own actions.  This from Damon Linkler, discusses some of the things the NYT, in its 1619 Project, tie to racism and slavery:

Throughout the issue of the NYTM, headlines make, with just slight variations, the same rhetorical move over and over again: “Here is something unpleasant, unjust, or even downright evil about life in the present-day United States. Bet you didn’t realize that slavery is ultimately to blame.” Lack of universal access to health care? High rates of sugar consumption? Callous treatment of incarcerated prisoners? White recording artists “stealing” black music? Harsh labor practices? That’s right — all of it, and far more, follows from slavery.

The most impressive authors, like Times op-ed columnist Jamelle Bouie, are honest enough to admit that their chosen subject (Bouie writes about the hardball tactics of congressional Republicans since 2011) may have “nothing to do with race at all.” Yet in the end even Bouie comes back around to asserting that Republican “methods of action … are clearly downstream of a style of extreme political combat that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage.”

The least persuasive, and unintentionally comical, contribution to the issue is a relatively brief essay by Princeton University’s Kevin Kruse, a historian who’s justly gained a large online following for his deft skewering on Twitter of Dinesh D’Souza and other know-nothing pundits of the far right who like to publicly display their ignorance of the American past. For the 1619 Project, Kruse writes about how notoriously bad traffic jams on Atlanta highways are — you guessed it — the legacy of “a century-long effort to segregate the races.”

It is of course not just the NYT.  As Heather McDonald writes at the WSJ, the mainstream media at large is, in the era of Trump, pushing race, racialism, and white privilege into every story it produces.  It’s just the NYT that is at the center of organizing it and normalizing it at the moment.

The 1619 Project is, as Rich Lowry writes in the NY Post, a revision of history, one in which the history of slavery and race is in part warped and in part omitted.  According to the 1619 Project, slavery only happened in America, for the black and Muslim enslavers and slave traders in Africa are never mentioned as an important part of the story.  In America only white men owned slaves — never blacks, Indians, etc., and the white men, of course, were never Democrats. Nowhere does the material already published fairly discuss abolition’s complex history. The Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement are erased.  Martin Luther King’s grand — and ultimately successful plea — to have all men judged by the content of their character, “not the color of their skin,” is ignored.  Our Constitution and laws are painted as illegitimate because they are, allegedly, systemically racist.  All non-progressives are portrayed as inherently racist or as uncaring enablers of racism.  Hell, we’re finding out today that even Mount Rushmore is an homage to slave-owning racists (our Founders) and white supremacy.

In short, and I can’t say this too often, this is pure evil. Nothing in our country has proven more divisive nor more destructive than racism in all its forms.  From the Civil War to Ferguson, Baltimore and BLM, racism, the perception of racism, race hustlers, and the efforts to consign racism to the waste bin of history have singly and together been the greatest cause of violence and bloodshed in our nation.  To use baseless claims of racism now, as a political tool to, as Rod Dreher writes, “radicaliz[e] the United States along racial lines,” is not merely deeply cynical, it is pure evil.

The goal, of course, is to give progressives enough political power that they can right these wrongs rework the nation to their ends.  Trump is now the Grand Kleagle of racism and Trump voters . . . they’re barely bothering to hide their white hoods.  All blacks MUST stay on the Democrat plantation keep voting Democrat.  The progressive left will be happy to ride this nation into tribalism and chaos, so long as progressive (whites) emerge on top and can then rework our nation into some socialist utopian obscenity.  Put another way by Thaddeus McCotter at American Greatness:

[T]he majority of our fellow citizens believe America is an inherently good nation that continues its pursuit of a more perfect union; the Left believes America is an inherently evil nation that must be transformed fundamentally into an oppressive socialist state—at best.

For the Left to win this existential argument, it must distort and revile America’s history to destroy the truth of American Exceptionalism. If the past is evil, the present has no choice but to reject America’s history and its defenders; and to embrace the dishonest leftist ideology and the agenda of those who loathe America.

If you want the gist of the 1619 project in a nutshell, just look to Ibram X. Kendi, Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, in his article at The Atlantic, The Hopefulness and Hopelessness of 1619:

Her name was Angela, one of the first known Africans in British North America.

His name was John, the first known antiblack racist in colonial America.

In 1619, this black woman and white man—what they embody—arrived months apart in 12-year-old Virginia, the first of the 13 British colonies that became the United States. Angela was the original embodiment of enslavement, of survival, of the 400-year African American struggle to survive, to be free of racism. John was the original embodiment of elite white male power, of the democracy of racists, of its 400-year struggle to survive, to be free of anti-racism.

 Instead of David and Goliath, African America is the story of the petite Angela hopefully and hopelessly fighting off the giant John from 1619 to 2019 for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She was, perhaps, the beginning of hope, the North Star essential to anti-racism. He was, definitely, the beginning of all that makes her hopeless, the eclipse essential to racism. African Americans have every reason to be hopeful and every reason to be hopeless on this 400th anniversary of our birth in this land. [emphasis added]

That’s evil, folks.  This is not a mistake.  It cannot be forgiven.  It cannot be reasoned with.  And that, writ large, is the 1619 Project.  It is a revision of history on a grand scale for a political purpose.

More specifically, the 1619 Project is a coordinated campaign by progressive media, led and coordinated by the NYT.  Wiki describes the origins of the 1619 Project as the brainchild of the NYT, still one of the nations top five “newspapers” in circulationtoday:

The 1619 Project is a program organized by The New York Times with the goal of re-examining the legacy of slavery in the United States, timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival in America of the first enslaved people from West Africa. It is an interactive project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, with contributions by the paper’s writers, including essays, poems, short fiction, and a photo essay.  Originally conceived of as a special issue . . . , it was soon turned into a full-fledged project, including coverage in the paper and on the website.

We are getting this now from the NYT, not because racism is either at the heart of this nation or the heart of this nation’s problems.  We are getting this from the NYT because it has ceased being a newspaper and is now nothing but a progressive shill.  The NYT’s editor held a conference with the staff several days ago, during which they discussed the 1619 Project. The meeting was stunning for the honesty of its revelations — the biggest of which is that the NYT is not reporting the news, it but is now dedicated to trying to shape the nation’s future to its progressive agenda.  The tape of the meeting is here.

During the meeting, the editor of the NYT, Dean Baquet, states that the NYT “built our newsroom” over the past two years to cover the Trump Russia hoax.  Baquet is proud and in no way shamed by the Pulitzers his paper won despite the fact that its coverage was factually wrong. Indeed, the fact that the whole Russia criminal collusion narrative was a hoax is unimportant to the editor of the NYT.  He and his staff are not sorry for spending two years ripping this nation apart by reporting fantasy and lies as news; they are only sorry that Mueller could find nothing with which to bring down Trump and overturn the election.  The unfortunate — for the NYT — ending to the hoax has “caught” the editor of the NYT a “tiny bit flat-footed.”

 “I think that we’ve got to change,” he told the [NYT staff]. Baquet says the Times’ new focus is to “write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.”

While you’re letting that sink in, here’s more.

“I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks?” he said. “How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump?”

And just a bit more.

“How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.”

So after burning his paper’s credibility with respect to Trump by flailing away at the Russia hoax for two years and now admitting that the entire thing was a colossal whiff, Pulitzer Prizes notwithstanding (those ring about as hollow as the Nobel Peace Prizes given to Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, in retrospect), Baquet now wants to spend the next two years forcing the ashes of that credibility down the collective throat of the American people by spreading non-stop the further hoax of the president’s racism.

Scott McKay, Dean Baquet Kills The New York Times

Not surprisingly, the 1619 Project was ready-made for the NYT by black victims studies profs in academia, proof yet again that the poison that starts in academia does not stay there.  All of the canards associated with the “third wave feminism” women’s studies programs across all campuses have fully leaked into society, like so much excrement from a backed up septic tank.  Like Women’s Studies, the 1619 Project is nothing more than the African American Studies Programs across America now leaking their own brand of particularly virulent toxin into society, all in partnership with the NYT and other like minded media outlets.  All victims studies programs have at their core a belief in post modernism, that facts are subjective and thus reality is whatever they want it to be — because their subjective “facts” trump yours, so to speak, so shut up.  The women’s studies programs have warped society and ruined lives.  I expect the 1619 Project to do far worse.  This is that evil.