Celebrating Independence From Anti-American History Propaganda | The American Spectator

Five years ago, on July 4, 2020, the country was in the midst of waves of rioting.

The proximate cause, the match that lit the fire, was the death of a black man, a violent ex-convict, on May 25, with fentanyl and methamphetamines in his system, while in the custody of police. As with the Rodney King incident in 1992, selective footage inspired the looting and murdering mobs.

But the tinder had been drying since the previous summer when a special issue of the New York Times Magazine was published on August 18, 2019. Schoolchildren in over 3,500 schools had been imbibing the lessons of its “1619 Project” for just as long.

Anti-American historical revisionism added fuel to the flame.

The 2020 riots, in addition to being known as the George Floyd riots, were dubbed “the 1619 riots” by Claremont McKenna College professor Charles Kesler. New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, inveighing against President Trump’s Fourth of July address at Mount Rushmore, called the “protests” a “legacy of rage dating to 1619.”

The so-called “protests” by August 22 included almost 570 violent demonstrations in 220 locations, resulting in over two dozen deaths, countless injuries, and upwards of $25 billion in property damage. The murder rate rose by 30 percent in 2020. Oddly, rioters attacked historical monuments and statues, ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Union soldiers to a pioneer woman to a moose. Symbols of the country’s heritage were painted with “1619” and torn down, sometimes on the bodies of raging protestors. At least one was killed.

On July 4, 2020, the front page of the publication that had put forth the incendiary history reported that about 80 percent of community fireworks displays had been canceled due to the “coronavirus pandemic.” The New York Times also reported on Europe’s lead in providing payments to those suffering hardships from COVID, Arizona Republican Governor Doug Ducey’s failure to require face coverings at rodeos and other Independence Day events, how Latinos felt left out of Black Lives Matter discussions, how “peaceful protests” in Minneapolis had turned into “mayhem” two days after Floyd’s death, and President Trump’s insistence on putting “on a show” with a speech at Mount Rushmore, even as COVID cases increased by 90 percent in the previous two weeks.

Yet, at the same time, claiming that “opposition to racism” was “vital” to “public health,” over 1,200 health professionals signed a letter calling for a continuation of protests. A Johns Hopkins epidemiologist tweeted that “the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceeds the harms of the virus.” Infectious disease experts debated whether they should even investigate the rise in cases from protests.

The creator of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, took pride in the fruit of her work, tweeting that it was an “honor” to have the riots named after her 1619 Project. On CNN, she justified the riots as “the language of the unheard” (referencing Martin Luther King, Jr.) and necessary to make white Americans “confront” racial injustice. On MSNBC, she said the riots were part of black Americans’ historical push “further to democracy.”

The Project

That special issue of the New York Times Magazine lured readers with a dark photograph of ocean waves.

White lettering described the scene:

“In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”

Contrary to the claim of truthfulness, the first three sentences contained multiple errors of fact, which I addressed in my book, Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America. (Numerous scholars had addressed errors piecemeal, per their own specializations.)

A pseudo-confidential statement followed, after the note that “most” Americans thought of 1776 as “the year of our nation’s birth”: “What if … we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”

Hannah-Jones reinforced the point with her Twitter account header, which had “1776” crossed out and replaced with “1619.”

The claim was taken from “Black Power” journalist Lerone Bennett’s 1962 Before the Mayflower, to which she was introduced by her high school black studies teacher. It was presented as a historical discovery.

And on it went, with numerous debunkable claims:

That the Africans on the ship were slaves sold to white Virginians, that slavery was uniquely America’s “Original Sin,” that our form of government was a “slaveocracy,” that “anti-black racism runs in the DNA of this country,” that white Americans continue to believe that “black people” are a “slave race,” that “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” and wealthy grew “out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required,” that Africans had nothing to do with the slave trade and were “kidnapped,” that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” that Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello was a “forced-labor camp” where the enslaved “struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before” (slaves were “legally tortured,” “could be worked to death,” and were not even “recognized as human beings”), and that “neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery.”

Additionally, only white people owned slaves, and only racist whites like Abraham Lincoln sought emigration for freed blacks. Black people (the ones who adhere to the current Democratic Party platform) were the “perfecters of this democracy.” And no one had known about the year 1619 until Nikole Hannah-Jones’s project.

As I pointed out, Hannah-Jones shortchanged her own black forebears who had been commemorating the year 1619, though not confusing it with the year of independence, and celebrating advancements since emancipation.

She was hardly original in her “historiography.” Nor was her inspiration, Lerone Bennett, original.

Howard Zinn, almost assuredly an official member of the Communist Party USA for several years, published in 1980 his bestselling A People’s History of the United States, an updating, as I point out in Debunking Howard Zinn, of such Soviet-funded histories as CPUSA leader William Z. Foster’s Outline Political History of the Americas.

Zinn, too, citing the same ship, the White Lion, from a book published in 1950 by African-American English professor J. Saunders Redding, claimed, in a manner like that of Hannah-Jones in 2019, that “there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.”

Similarly, Zinn asserted that “Slavery developed quickly into a regular institution, into the normal labor relations of blacks to whites in the New World. With it developed that special racial feeling — whether hatred, or contempt, or pity, or patronization — that accompanied the inferior position of blacks in America for the next 350 years.”

Hannah-Jones might have presented herself as original but in 1980 the commie professor was sarcastically pointing out that American exceptionalism included “income inequality,” “inequities” in “public health and education,” “endemic racial fears and hatreds,” and an “electoral system” that was built on “economic might.” Jefferson, Zinn also noted, owned “hundreds” of slaves, and his “great manifesto of freedom” did not apply to them.

Zinn threw into question the very legitimacy of the country, from the “discovery” by the capitalist Christopher Columbus to the protection of “property” in the Constitution instead of the “life, liberty, and happiness” of the Declaration of Independence. The country was founded to protect the rights of the wealthy, who then held all political power, the middle class being a “buffer” between the owning classes and the enslaved blacks and poor whites.

Cutting through the nonsense in 2020 was President Trump making his speech at Mount Rushmore, on the eve of Independence Day (called a “diatribe” by the newspaper that had much at stake in The 1619 Project). Addressing the “campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” Trump vowed that, unlike other monuments, the one with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, would never be “desecrated.”

He called July 4th, 1776, “the most important day in the history of nations.” With a rebuke of the 1619 rioters, he said, “Every American patriot should be filled with joy, because each of you lives in the most magnificent country in the history of the world.”

“Our Founders launched not only a revolution in government, but a revolution in the pursuit of justice, equality, liberty, and prosperity,” he continued. “No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the United States of America.”

The 56 courageous “patriots who gathered in Philadelphia 244 years ago and signed the Declaration of Independence … enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever when they said: ‘all men are created equal.’”

Indeed, those “immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom,” as “Our Founders boldly declared that we are all endowed with the same divine rights — given [to] us by our Creator in Heaven.”

Hannah-Jones cast Thomas Jefferson as akin to a Nazi camp overseer. President Trump summarized the strategy of such “history”: “Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but … villains.  The radical view of American history is a web of lies — all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”

He recounted how “the great Thomas Jefferson” at age 33 “brilliantly authored one of the greatest treasures of human history, the Declaration of Independence,” and drafted Virginia’s constitution, and conceived and wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, “a model for our cherished First Amendment.” He listed Jefferson’s accomplishments as the first secretary of state, and then vice president, and then president, who “ordered American warriors to crush the Barbary pirates,” “doubled the size of our nation with the Louisiana Purchase,” and “sent the famous explorers Lewis and Clark into the west on a daring expedition to the Pacific Ocean.” Trump called Jefferson “an architect, an inventor, a diplomat, a scholar, the founder of one of the world’s great universities, and an ardent defender of liberty.”

Trump then convened a history conference 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 rioting 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.” In my remarks as a panelist, I drew upon my book, Debunking Howard Zinn. As President Trump also said there, the 1619 Project “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”

President Trump Ending the Grift

As I reported, since the 2024 election, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s grift on American taxpayers seems to be dying.

She was recently asked by Ms. Magazine, “Five years after the racial reckoning of 2020, what did that moment ask of you — and what, if anything, did it give back?”

“Everything,” she replied. “The allies who marched in the street for racial justice have gone largely silent, and companies have abandoned their efforts. Black people striving for equality have been blamed for the electoral choices of White voters. People are being killed by the police in higher numbers than they were when George Floyd was murdered. And a significant segment of the media has abetted the backlash. Things have reverted so fiercely that the racial reckoning feels like it was but a dream because we are most certainly now living in a nightmare.”

One of Hannah-Jones’s recent gigs was at a hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. She addressed the Cleveland NAACP Annual Freedom Fund Dinner. (She also was relegated to a hotel room for her commencement address to black Harvard graduates.) Her upcoming events include a “black women’s summit,” alongside such luminaries as Maryum Ali, daughter of Malcolm X; Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, recently rejected by the Democrats for a leadership position; and former MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid (fired, she claimed, for going “hard” on the 1619 Project, and Black Lives Matter, Gaza, illegal immigration, and Trump — the “backlash,” apparently). Tickets for the “transformative day of education, inspiration, and celebration of sisterhood,” put on by the Black Promoters Collective, start at $100. Capitalism means the freedom to waste your own money.

At Mount Rushmore, President Trump, referring to the mobs “trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” distinguished between the blindly ignorant and those who “know exactly what they are doing.” The latter “think the American people are weak and soft and submissive.” He kept his vow. The American people, “strong and proud,” “will not allow our country, and all of its values, history, and culture, to be taken from them.”

I can’t wait to celebrate Independence Day next year, on the 250th anniversary, with Donald Trump as our president.

READ MORE from Mary Grabar:

Partial History: FDR and America First

Black Anti-Communists Have Been Memory–Holed

The History of Communism Must Not Be Repeated