The headline for this post comes straight from Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research, and a two-time guest on the Power Line Podcast. It refers to the de facto admission today from the impresario of the New York Times‘s egregious “1619 Project,” Nicole Hannah-Jones, that in fact it is a purely political propaganda effort. Here’s Hannah-Jones’s extraordinarily candid Tweet today:
“Not a history”!! A “work of journalism”!? This, after slagging the many eminent U.S. historians (many of them mainline liberals like Sean Wilentz) with the usual slurs of being old, privileged white males after they called bullshit on the tendentious 1619 Project.
Is it or isn’t it a history? Unlike Schroedinger’s cat, we can confidently pronounce that the substance of the 1619 Project critique is definitely dead, no matter what kind of epistemological box you try to put it in.
When Twitter pounced on Hannah-Jones today, she kept shoveling deeper, oblivious of “Healey’s First Law of Holes”—if you’re in one, stop digging :
“Never pretended to be a history”?? Nice of her to admit it now. Notice how defensive she suddenly is about the 1619 Project curriculum being pushed on the public schools.
Also, I’ve been curious for a while that for her Twitter handle Hannah-Jones has appropriated the name of the civil rights activist Ida Wells. Okay, I suppose. But just what would someone think if, say, Al Sharpton used “Martin Luther King Jr” as his Twitter handle? I think a lot of people would find it presumptuous?
