Iowa state Republicans recently voted to advance a bill that would cut funding for schools that teach the New York Times’ 1619 Project as part of their history curriculum. Top historians have slammed the project for inaccurately reframing America’s history and arguing that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA” of America.
The 1619 project has been one of the most dangerous conspiracy theories traveling around schools for its anti-historical and one-sided claims that racism is the central theme of American history and is a permanent condition. It includes a collection of essays and pieces from writers that talk about the roots in slavery being found in everything from mass incarceration to rush-hour traffic. The project also claims that the nation’s “true founding” was in 1619 when the first African slave ship arrived in Virginia. The New York Times even removed a controversial claim from the from a statement describing the project as “our true founding.”
The project has been shredded by numerous historians and educators. Professor emeritus of history at Princeton University James McPherson said he was disturbed by what seemed like “a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution.”
Historian and Brown University professor emeritus Gordan Wood, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Revolutionary War, said he was surprised by the scope of the project, especially since it would become a basis for high school education. He asked how New York Times had such authority behind doing that and said it was “wrong in so many ways.”
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Skyler Wheeler, said the project was based on politics, not history. It attempts to deny or obfuscate the fundamental principles upon which the United States was founded on. “It seeks to divide, not unify. It aims to distort facts, not merely teach them. It does so as leftist political propaganda masquerading as history,” he said.
If passed, the bill states that schools would be punished for utilizing curriculum that is derived from the New York Times ‘1619 Project’ or any similarly developed curriculum. In violation of the bill, a school districts’ budget would be “reduced by one one-hundred-eightieth for each day of the previous budget year for which the school district used school curriculum.”
Democrats are only interested in promoting their own narrative of this nation’s history through the public school system instead of educating young people on the accurate accounts of history and raising knowledgeable and patriotic citizens. The leftist political propaganda is trying to slip its project into the classroom, yet there isn’t even one major theory in the piece remotely true.
All they do is censor and lie.
