President Trump is making moves.
As you may have recently read, the Commander-in-Chief canceled “white privilege” training for federal agencies.
On Saturday, RedState’s Bonchie explained thusly:
[The President] has apparently had enough of seeing taxpayer money wasted on things like teaching critical race theory and white privilege at the federal level. Numerous agencies have previously paid obscene amounts of money to race hustlers to come in and tell them how racist they are.
Along somewhat similar lines, on Sunday, The Donald tweeted an announcement about that great bastion of conservatism, California:
“Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!”
The Leader of the Free World was referring to a social media post claiming Cali’s implemented 1619 Project education into its public education system — “soon you won’t recognize America.”
Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded! https://t.co/dHsw6Y6Y3M
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2020
If you’re unfamiliar with New York Times-organized 1619, Here’s a description courtesy of Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who introduced legislation in July to bar federal funds from promoting it:
“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage.”
Primarily written by NYT reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, the interactive program pinpoints 1619 — the purported year of Virginia’s first slaves — as the birth of the nation.
The Chicago Tribune likes it:
The 1619 Project from the New York Times should become required reading. It’s past time to connect the dots of America’s original sin to the black resistance of today, writes columnist @DarcelTribune. https://t.co/0MD4mly3pG
— Chicago Tribune (@chicagotribune) August 20, 2019
So does the Pulitzer Center — so much, they awarded Nikole in May:
Teachers: looking for ways to use the @nytimes #1619Project in the classroom? You can find free curriculums, guides, and activities for students developed by the Pulitzer Center here: https://t.co/qO3keEWV47 pic.twitter.com/Pqig7uVHGk
— Pulitzer Center (@pulitzercenter) August 14, 2019
But Newt Gingrich’s not on board:
The NY Times 1619 Project should make its slogan “All the Propaganda we want to brainwash you with”.it is a repudiation of the original NY Times motto.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) August 18, 2019
As noted by the New York Post, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz feels similarly:
Wilentz makes mincemeat of The 1619 Project lead Nikole Hannah-Jones’ contention that protecting slavery was a main motive of the American Revolution, her statement that Abraham Lincoln “opposed black equality” and her avowal that blacks fought “alone” for equal rights after the Civil War.
Wilentz was a co-signer of a letter to the Times lamenting factual errors in its articles, along with Brown University’s Gordon Wood, Princeton’s James McPherson and the City University of New York’s James Oakes. Wood is a premier historian of the American Revolution.
“I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves,” he wrote in a separate letter to the Times’ editor-in-chief, as reported by the World Socialist website. “No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776.”
As for Nikole, she’s certainly got a point of view, and it isn’t limited to expression within 1619.
According to The Federalist in July, she sent a letter to Notre Dame’s The Observer which contained the following:
“[T]he white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. … Europeans have colonized and destroyed the indigenous populations on every continent of this planet. They have committed genocide against cultures that have never offended them in their greed and insatiable desire to control and dominate every non-white culture.”
She also contends black explorers reached the New World before the Italians:
“The difference is that Africans had the decency and respect for human life to learn from the Native Americans and trade technology with them. The pyramids of the Aztecs and the great stone heads of the Olmecs are the lasting monuments to the friendship of these two peoples.”
From her mouth to your California public school student’s ears — allegedly.
And if the lesson plan isn’t from 1619, perhaps it’ll be something more robust.
Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal:
The largest state in the union is poised to become one of the first to mandate ethnic studies for all high-school students, and the model curriculum makes the radical “1619 project” look moderate and balanced.
Last year California’s Assembly passed its ethnic-studies bill known as AB 331 by a 63-8 vote. Then the state department of education put forward a model curriculum so extreme and ethnocentric that the state Senate’s Democratic supermajority balked. The curriculum said among other things that “within Ethnic Studies, scholars are often very critical of the system of capitalism as research has shown that Native people and people of color are disproportionately exploited within the system.”
The bill was put on ice, but protests and riots in recent months gave Sacramento’s mavens of racial division more leverage. The education department delivered a new draft model curriculum this month, and AB 331 has been revived. It passed a Senate committee Aug. 20 and is expected to go before the full body soon. If Gov. Gavin Newsom signs it, the legislation would require all school districts to offer a semester-long ethnic studies class starting in 2025.
Back to Trump’s tweet, Forbes had a decisive take on it:
There ya have it, Agents of Division. Take your pick — this or that.
Now, not only is politics halved, but history is.
It’s sure gonna be an interesting election.
-ALEX
See more pieces from me:
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You Won’t Believe What Was Dropped Onto Israel This Week
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