It seems like the 1619 Project isn’t as popular or welcoming as everyone thought. And according to the Democrats, most of them really don’t want to be affiliated with it.
In emails recovered from 2019, Arkansas Gazette publisher Walter Hussman Jr argued against hiring the ‘1619 Project’ founder Nikole Hannah-Jones for a five-year teaching contract. Hussman, a UNC alumnus, donated $25 million to the university’s journalism and media school and wrote that he worries about the “controversy” of tying the UNC journalism school. He said he finds himself more in agreement with “Pulitzer Prize-winning historians” like James McPherson and Gordon Wood, rather than Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Hussman also contends that the New York Times project is littered with political ideology over objective journalism – and that the school’s image would be tarnished over the assertion that America was founded primarily to prolong slavery. He said that her words were trying to push a specific agenda and manipulate historical facts to support it.
“My hope and vision was that the journalism school would be the champion of objective, impartial reporting and separating news and opinion, and that would add so much to its reputation and would benefit both the school and the University. Instead, I fear this possible and needless controversy will overshadow it,” Hussman wrote.
But dean Susan King blasted the move and said that Hannah-Jones was fully deserving of the teaching position. She said she represents the “best of our alumni and the best of the business.”
Hannah-Jones threatened to sue the school if it does not reinstate the offer by June 4. She wrote that as a “black woman who has built a nearly two-decades-long career in journalism” she feels she should be able to expose uncomfortable truths about the past and follow those pursuits without risk to their civil and constitutional rights. Of course, she never acknowledged the historical clash with her project or even bothered to fact-check a few things. She was there to push an objective.
Dr. Allen Guelzo, a Princeton University professor and acclaimed scholar of American history, said that the New York Times ‘1619 Project’ is riddled with so many mistakes and exaggerations, with the most egregious error being the claim that the American Revolution was designed to protect slavery.
The project claims that President Abraham Lincoln was a racist who regarded Black people as a “problem.” But critics argue that it’s beyond imagining that the same Lincoln who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation to free 3 million slaves and put Black men in U.S uniforms to kill White Supremacists would be racist.
The paper also claims that plantation slavery was a “model” for a capitalist economy. They cited plantation bookkeeping and concentrations of Southern capital as proof that American capitalism had origins in slavery, but economic data on Northern bank capitalization shows otherwise. Southern slaveholders and apologists had attacked capitalism as their enemy and compared plantation slavery not to capitalism, but to socialism.
We have seen journalistic irresponsibility and liberal-based government pet projects before – but the 1619 Project is just more fake news.
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