NY Times Reports Facts Are Not Relevant As They Alter US History

December 22, 2019

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An official statement by the NY Times in response to a letter by five left-wing historians is astonishing. The professors who wrote the letter are concerned about the NY Times’ ‘1619 Project’ which alters the facts of U.S. History. The Times, in a response from the editor, basically says they no longer consider facts relevant to their reporting.

Lies won’t be corrected if they back up their progressive ideology. This is truly 1984.

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At least one reporter for the NY Times will publish an article tomorrow tearing into the historians the Times call Trotskyites. If the historians are Trotskyites as the Times says, it is important to note the Times are Stalinists, as they try to brainwash Americans into hating this country and each other.

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THE NY TIMES FINDS FACTS DEBATABLE

The NY Times is behind a paywall but we have the best paragraphs for you here. Our favorite paragraphs from the NY Times’ response to the historians are these:

We are not ourselves historians, it is true. We are journalists, trained to look at current events and situations and ask the question: Why is this the way it is? In the case of the persistent racism and inequality that plague this country, the answer to that question led us inexorably into the past — and not just for this project. The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at the magazine, has consistently used history to inform her journalism, primarily in her work on educational segregation (work for which she has been recognized with numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship)…

As the five letter writers well know, there are often debates, even among subject-area experts, about how to see the past. Historical understanding is not fixed; it is constantly being adjusted by new scholarship and new voices. Within the world of academic history, differing views exist, if not over what precisely happened, then about why it happened, who made it happen, how to interpret the motivations of historical actors and what it all means…

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What do you know, they deal with alternative facts when it supports their case for hate and leftism.

What makes this so dangerous is, as the historians wrote, the Times has curricula to go with it and they will make it available to schools.

THE HISTORIANS

The Times wrote their response after they read these words in an excerpt from the five historians:

We write as historians to express our strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project. The project is intended to offer a new version of American history in which slavery and white supremacy become the dominant organizing themes. The Times has announced ambitious plans to make the project available to schools in the form of curriculums and related instructional material.

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We applaud all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history. Some of us have devoted our entire professional lives to those efforts, and all of us have worked hard to advance them. Raising profound, unsettling questions about slavery and the nation’s past and present, as The 1619 Project does, is a praiseworthy and urgent public service. Nevertheless, we are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.

These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only “white historians” — has affirmed that displacement.

The Professors, the best in their field, say the facts of history the Times is referencing are not “framing” — these are matters of “verifiable fact.”

The Times doesn’t care and will not correct the errors.

The Times wrote that they used historians as sources [hard-left America haters].

For those who haven’t guessed by now, the new history depicts America before it was a nation and they claim it was essentially — evil.

The aim can only be to destroy our belief system so they can put their own in place.

The Times plans to teach this angry, hate-filled version of history to the youth and destroy us once and for all.

Slavery and white supremacy are the dominant themes in the Times version of history and they plan to make all of the white Europeans who founded the country into evildoers.

The Project states the Revolution was to ensure slavery would continue, not to guarantee freedom. The Times’ Project doesn’t even like Lincoln.

The Times editor concluded his response:

That, above all, is what we hoped our project would do: expand the reader’s sense of the American past. (This is how some educators are using it to supplement their teaching of United States history.) That is what the letter writers have done, in different ways, over the course of their distinguished careers and in their many books. Though we may disagree on some important matters, we are grateful for their input and their interest in discussing these fundamental questions about the country’s history.

Sincerely,
Jake Silverstein
Editor in chief

He isn’t trying to expand anything. He’s rewriting history.

The left on social media is now trying to destroy the reputation of the five professors who are leftists like them. They once again, eat their own.

THE HISTORIANS’ LETTER TO THE EDITOR

We write as historians to express our strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project. The project is intended to offer a new version of American history in which slavery and white supremacy become the dominant organizing themes. The Times has announced ambitious plans to make the project available to schools in the form of curriculums and related instructional material.

On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false. Some of the other material in the project is distorted, including the claim that “for the most part,” black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone.”

Still other material is misleading. The project criticizes Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, for blacks as well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him. The project also ignores Lincoln’s agreement with Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was, in Douglass’s words, “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” Instead, the project asserts that the United States was founded on racial slavery, an argument rejected by a majority of abolitionists and proclaimed by champions of slavery like John C. Calhoun.

The 1619 Project has not been presented as the views of individual writers — views that in some cases, as on the supposed direct connections between slavery and modern corporate practices, have so far failed to establish any empirical veracity or reliability and have been seriously challenged by other historians. Instead, the project is offered as an authoritative account that bears the imprimatur and credibility of The New York Times. Those connected with the project have assured the public that its materials were shaped by a panel of historians and have been scrupulously fact-checked. Yet the process remains opaque. The names of only some of the historians involved have been released, and the extent of their involvement as “consultants” and fact checkers remains vague. The selective transparency deepens our concern.

We ask that The Times, according to its own high standards of accuracy and truth, issue prominent corrections of all the errors and distortions presented in The 1619 Project. We also ask for the removal of these mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools, as well as in all further publications, including books bearing the name of The New York Times. We ask finally that The Times reveal fully the process through which the historical materials were and continue to be assembled, checked and authenticated.

Sincerely,

Victoria Bynum, distinguished emerita professor of history, Texas State University;
James M. McPherson, George Henry Davis 1886 emeritus professor of American history, Princeton University;
James Oakes, distinguished professor, the Graduate Center, the City University of New York;
Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 professor of American history, Princeton University;
Gordon S. Wood, Alva O. Wade University emeritus professor and emeritus professor of history, Brown University.

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THE NY TIMES FINDS FACTS DEBATABLE

THE HISTORIANS

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