Nikole Hannah Jones 1619 BAK
9 26
maybe premature, nope 2ndary on trump election target
SEE CRT
merri ok
see abolition
also more generic critical race theory vs 1776 story
story 2 = 1876?!
AHA DOH CULT WAR
MMA
...Nowhere, however, is the silence louder than Trump’s polling. With six weeks to go to the midterm elections, perhaps the most salient fact in American politics right now is that Trump is broadly unpopular. Poll aggregators show the president’s job approval below 40%, at or just above all-time lows. Those figures, analysts warn, could prove cataclysmic for Republican candidates and incumbents.
But Fox consistently hides the president’s unpopularity from its viewers, with hosts talking up Trump’s performance and dodging signs of dissent. The network’s most recent poll, published Wednesday, Sept. 16, found the president with a 39% job approval to 61% disapproval. Fox did not mentioned that headline figure once through noon on Friday, however, even as the network covered other numbers from the survey.
These are just three areas where Fox has avoided delivering bad news to its audience — including the president. We at Media Matters have observed the network also giving short shrift to rising inflation and gas and diesel prices; health crises like the summer’s outbreaks of measles and cyclospora; reports that the Trump administration denied disaster requests and canceled energy grants to states because they had voted for Democrats; Republican scandals like Rep. Max Miller’s alleged domestic abuse and Texas candidate Bo French’s bigotry; and the reality that most immigrants targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have no criminal record.
In place of these news stories, the network increased its already frequent culture war programming. In August, Fox’s evening shows mentioned “socialism” 730 times, the WNBA 238 times and Dr. Anthony Fauci 193 times. On Monday alone, Fox covered an essay by New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones in eight separate segments between the 7 a.m. hour and the 9 p.m. hour.
...
Follow
Which U.S. Senate seat is Nikole Hannah-Jones running for? Yesterday, Fox News mentioned her essay in the 7 a.m., 9 a.m., noon, 2 pm, 4 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm, and 9 pm hours.
ALT
ALT
ALT
capitolhunters @capitolhunters.bsky.social
NHJ's "1619 project" was an absolute obsession of the far right. They went into an unhinged rage over it, could not handle the argument that slavery was fundamental to US history. Some people would do anything to take her down.
capitolhunters @capitolhunters.bsky.social
One of the key requests of religious right leaders, in exchange for supporting Jan 6, was to rewrite US history. They demanded and got a "1776 Commission" set up in explicit opposition to Nicole Hannah-Jones' "1619 Project". They use that framing in their report.
capitolhunters @capitolhunters.bsky.social
Trump's 1776 Commission was stacked with leaders of the religious-right organizations that tried to steal the election for Trump. Examples: the chair, the Hillsdale College president, himself part of the fake-elector scheme. The head of ADF, who wrote the state-vs-states suit for Ken Paxton to file.
-=-=
-=-=
DUCK 9 26 NEWS
Newsweek on MSN.com
Nikole Hannah Jones may have just written a eulogy for woke idealism
1 day agoA New York Times writer put her daughter in a struggling school to make a point. Ten years on, she admits she was wrong.
New York Post on MSN.com
'1619 Project' scribe Nikole Hannah-Jones has only begun to face how she failed her daughter
13 hours agoNikole Hannah-Jones looks to be trying her best to honestly confront what she's done to her daughter and figure out where she went wrong, though she still seems unsure if she did. Ironically, though,
The Wall Street Journal
Nikole Hannah-Jones's Sacrifice
11 hours agoThe '1619 Project' author deliberately chose a terrible school for her kid.
New York Post on MSN.com
Nikole Hannah-Jones failed her daughter and learned absolutely nothing from it
23 hours agoOne-trick monomaniacs don't just bore their audience, they hurt those closest to them with their narcissistic need to prove themselves right. That's the unwitting admission that Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project rewriter of history and race obsessive,
New York Post
Husband of 1619 Project's Nikole Hannah-Jones claims she belongs next to MLK as civil-rights icon — then bizarrely appears to contradict her
1 day agoThe hubby of controversial New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones on Monday compared her to civil-rights icon Martin Luther King while defending enrolling their daughter in flailing public schools as a racism-fighting "sacrifice" — even after his wife admitted the kid "got cheated" by the choice.
Washington Examiner on MSN.com
Why Nikole Hannah-Jones is wrong about failing schools
3 hours agoNo institution in American life has perpetuated "systemic racism" quite as effectively as the big-city public school system. And no institution has fought harder to preserve segregated communities more than teachers unions.
New York Post
Woke NYT, 1619 Project writer deliberately sent daughter to troubled schools as a 'sacrifice' — and it backfired spectacularly
2 days agoThe writer behind the New York Times' controversial 1619 Project deliberately sent her daughter in poor New York City schools as a "sacrifice" in an attempt to help the
Fox News on MSN.com
1619 Project founder regrets school choice for her daughter, admits putting ideals ahead of her education
2 days agoNikole Hannah-Jones says she regrets her Brooklyn public school choice after her daughter said she never got the education she truly wanted.
Yahoo Finance
1619 Project creator expresses regret over school choice for her daughter
22 hours agoAttorney Maud Maron discusses 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones admitting she regrets her daughter's school choice on 'The Bottom Line.'
The Western Journal on MSN.com
1619 Project creator said America destroys Black children, now her child says mom's the one who destroyed part of her life
6 hours agoNikole Hannah-Jones is perhaps one of the best-known columnists for The New York Times. If not prolific (she's only published three pieces in the paper this calendar year, including the one we're going to talk about),
EURweb on MSN.com
Nikole Hannah-Jones chose a struggling school for her daughter — years later, she questioned that decision
1 day ago*Nikole Hannah-Jones is facing criticism after revealing the consequences of deliberately sending her daughter to struggling, predominantly Black public schools in Brooklyn. The New York Times journalist and 1619 Project creator revisited the decision in a deeply personal essay published Sunday.
National Review
The Strange Racial Solidarity of Nikole Hannah-Jones
15 hours agoHannah-Jones, who achieved notoriety as the lead editor of the paper's 1619 Project, believed that putting her daughter in rotten elementary and middle schools would strike a blow for racial equity. In her view, it's unfair that so ...
BizPac Review
Sunny Hostin jumps into the Nikole Hannah-Jones school controversy — with a very different story
4 hours agoA friend's revelations about ruining her child's education found a co-host on ABC's "The View" playing the victim card for her own kids, resulting from a "very […]
Townhall
1619 Project Founder Nikole Hannah-Jones Exposed the Real Problem With Public Education
7 hours ago"Behind me is the public school where the founder of the 1619 Project, one of the main advocates of DEI and equity and affirmative action, sent her daughter to prove that it was indeed funding and racism the problem of American public schools and learned the hard way that it was not," Di Martino said.
New York Post on MSN.com
'Perverse priorities' made Nikole Hannah-Jones put her cause before her child
11 hours agoNew York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones thought she was making her educational choices to favor the interests of black people, and she was — just the wrong ones. In a long essay for The New York Times Magazine,
Townhall
Nikole Hannah-Jones Admits She Ruined Her Daughter's Education Over Politics
1 day agoHannah-Jones tried to justify her decision to her daughter. Then she tried to justify the decision to her: pic.twitter.com/6efVZ81cDy — Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) September 20, 2026 "Glancing between her and the road,
The Wall Street Journal
The Oblation of Nikole Hannah-Jones
12 hours agoThe 1619 Project author offered her daughter at the altar of social change.
Harper's Bazaar
Why Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Starting a Black Literary Salon
2 years agoFive years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones published The 1619 Project in The New York Times. Timed to coincide with and reflect upon the 400th anniversary of Black people's arrival in America, the project had an immediate, visceral impact. For many readers, the ...
Yahoo
Nikole Hannah-Jones' school choice for her daughter sparks a debate over Black parents, education and sacrifice
1 day agoThe acclaimed author and Pulitzer Prize winner's candid account of educating her daughter in New York City public schools has
AOL
Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 Freedom School seeks to lift up Waterloo one learner at a time
3 years agoTwo Black students held backpacks in their hands. The pair walked briskly, smiling, to a classroom on the second floor of a building in Waterloo. Minutes later, Nikole Hannah-Jones followed. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was back home to attend a ...
Fox News
1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones decried over public school hypocrisy
2 days agoPodcaster Kira Davis analyzes the impact of progressive education policies on children on 'The Ingraham Angle.'
El-Balad
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Kate and 1619 Project on D.C. Title I School
11 hours agoA 1619 Project response argues a D.C. Title I school worked for one family and helped its community, even with low-income challenges.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones talks '1619 Project' at Sonoma State University
1 year agoNikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and creator of "The 1619 Project," was welcomed to the stage at Green Music Center on Sonoma State University's Rohnert Park campus Thursday night with a standing ovation from a packed audience.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
-=-=
AN PHOENIX FLA 7 26
“‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’”
That’s how federal judge Mark Walker began his 2022 injunction blocking enforcement of Ron DeSantis’ “Stop Woke Act” in Florida institutions of higher education.
In case you don’t recognize the quotation, it’s from George Orwell’s “1984:” You know, the novel where the Ministry of Truth rewrites history and forbids free enquiry.
Certain words are banned; wrong thinking is punished. Even hearing about disfavored ideas is considered an attack on decency and order.
As defendant in the case, the State of Florida argued (apparently with a straight face) university professors have the right to free speech, sure, but only if the state approves of that speech.
The law forbade teaching anything that explores racial or gender injustice.
You weren’t allowed to say, given how we still struggle to overcome discrimination against minorities, women, and the disabled, that maybe diversity, equity and inclusion programs helped a lot of people; you must embrace color-blindness in all things (because we all know race doesn’t matter in America!); yet, woe betide you if you ever made a white person feel “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.”
Like many of us teaching in the state university system, the judge was unimpressed.
DeSantis and the legal team from his Ministry of Truth appealed up the food chain to the 11th Circuit, and what do you know?
‘Breathtaking assertion of power’
The majority opinion, by a Trump appointee, is unsparing.
Judge Britt C. Grant wrote, “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”
She called the Stop Woke law “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.”
Naturally, the governor pitched a little hissy fit, taking to social media to say, “State universities are funded by taxpayers and directed by elected officials and their appointees. The state has both a right and a responsibility to ensure instruction at these universities is consistent with the underlying mission and to exclude indoctrination and ideological agendas.”
He called the decision “judicial overreach.”
Let’s talk about gubernatorial overreach. Or, to put it another way, what is this guy’s problem with education?
Is he really that frightened of ideas?
If he and his education appointees are so convinced their positions — slavery had an upside, gender is 100% biological, capitalism is divinely ordained, a woman’s highest destiny is to be a mother, vaccines are unnecessary, climate change isn’t real — are valid, surely they’d welcome testing them with historical records, expert reports, and empirical evidence.
Facts, even.
Reading books by and about, say, gay people, teaching the history of Stonewall, or examining central Supreme Court decisions such as Obergefell v. Hodges, do not mean straight people will somehow become gay, any more than studying Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” will necessarily inspire you to assassinate any official you think has gotten too big for his britches.
Gender studies will not destroy heterosexuality; it’s simply a way to talk about the ways people understand who they are, how they present themselves, how other people see them.
Snowflakes
Universities are supposed to be where you encounter people who aren’t like you, unfamiliar, maybe upsetting, points of view, tricky topics, and ideas your parents don’t approve of.
Intellectual freedom means we should be able to discuss almost anything.
Yet the DeSantis administration act like snowflakes, hypersensitive, unwilling to contemplate anything outside their very white, very Christian, pathetically nationalist, bubble.
DeSantis is especially nervous America’s racial history, trying to outlaw “The 1619 Project,” a brilliant collection of writings about how the arrival of the first slaves on the Virginia shore has informed and shaped our country, shutting down or crippling African American Studies programs.
I guess white people are so used to considering themselves the “real” Americans who had all the good ideas, invented all the good stuff, and “built this country,” the reality that Africa is as central to our identity as Europe is scary.
The governor and his crew seem especially freaked out by the possibility students might encounter Critical Race Theory. Listening to them, you’d think CRT is to blame for everything from high gas prices to the common cold.
CRT is pretty simple: Race is socially constructed (not biological) and racism is not merely a product of individual bias (though that’s part of it) but embedded in our legal, educational, medical, and financial systems.
Say a white person and a Black person commit the same crime. It would make sense if they got the same sentence, right?
But in most cases the Black person will get a longer sentence.
‘The perfect villain’
The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank, has repeatedly shown structural racism (conscious or not) in the medical profession means doctors and nurses misdiagnose Black, Latino, and members of other ethnic communities far more often than they do whites, and, unlike with white patients, tend to dismiss their pain.
Infant mortality among people of color is at least twice as high than it is for whites.
There’s nothing sinister or anti-American in acknowledging, as Justice Thurgood Marshall said, the original Constitution was “defective from the start,” given that it upheld slaveholders’ rights in their human property and protected the slave trade.
Slavery was at the heart of our republic since its beginning.
It still reverberates in our culture.
There’s nothing anti-white in pointing this out. The Founders installed in the Constitution ways to amend it, fix social problems, even change American society.
The country is an ongoing project: We’re still striving for that “more perfect union,” and acknowledging the blindingly obvious ways in which our deals don’t match up with our reality is not a heinous assault on patriotism.
CRT was developed by legal scholars, and has long been part of law school curricula. Nobody much noticed it until 2021, when a right-wing activist called Christopher Rufo kicked off a national moral panic.
You might remember Rufo from the 2024 presidential campaign, amplifying J.D. Vance’s lies about Haitians in Ohio eating cats and dogs.
Before that, Rufo had made a name for himself as a warrior against anything he saw as “woke,” especially in higher education.
DeSantis appointed Rufo to New College’s Board of Trustees (he’s since left) to help destroy what once was an admired, creative, and tolerant liberal arts school, labeling any teaching he didn’t like “Critical Race Theory.”
CRT, he said, is “the perfect villain.”
Army of lefties
Having tried to banish CRT along with sociology, the unpleasant parts of American history, the novels of Toni Morrison, and any science that might reveal things are more complicated than they’d like, DeSantis, the various mediocrities running Florida’s Department of Education, and fellow travelers such as Moms for Liberty, have convinced themselves universities are hotbeds of “Marxist indoctrination.”
Apparently, professors — especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences — are not merely “woke,” we’re a bunch of commies, determined to brainwash the Youth of Florida into hollering “Workers of the World Unite!” — assured they have nothing to lose but their chains.
Or something like that.
Alas, all my colleagues and I must be really lousy at indoctrination. I don’t know anybody who’s been successful in producing even one committed Marxist.
But DeSantis et al. are convinced higher education is a plot to produce an army of lefties.
Not that they can produce much evidence of this.
They’re more ideologically rigid than the most committed Trotskyite, and less logical than the American officer who, standing in the ruins of a Vietnamese provincial capital in 1968, told reporter Peter Arnett, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
Maybe the administration’s idea is to destroy higher ed in order to save it.
Hypotheticals
No doubt DeSantis took some comfort from the dissent in the 11th Circuit’s ruling.
Judge Barbara Lagoa, a former member of the Florida Supreme Court, (indeed, a DeSantis appointee and often mentioned as a potential U.S. Supreme Court justice), argues, what if “a professor who says that Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel was ‘exhilarating’ and something to be celebrated and encouraged?”
She goes on to say, “Florida acts well within its authority to curb professorial endorsements of that kind within its own classrooms.”
First of all, if someone were stupid enough to say such a thing, that professor could be disciplined for creating a hostile educational environment.
But taking a hypothetical case of poor judgment and concluding somehow professorial speech must always be equivalent to the views of the state violates the First Amendment.
The First Amendment protects offensive speech — even hate speech.
In George Orwell’s essay “Freedom of the Press,” he writes, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Or to quote again from the majority opinion, the university’s mission is to get students to “puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
Professors call this “teaching.”
an 1 26
One high-ranking Republican state lawmaker in New Hampshire was recently seen advocating for racially segregated public schools in her state, according to a new report.
In a Wednesday article, Granite Post – the New Hampshire-based website for the liberal Courier Newsroom media brand – reported that state representative Kristin Noble (R), who is the vice chair of the House Education Policy and Administration Committee, posted favorably about separating students by race in a group chat for Republican lawmakers. A screen recording of the "EdPolicy2026" group chat an unnamed member of the Education Committee leaked to Granite Post shows a user using the vice chair's first and last name talking about "fun stuff" that could be done "when we have segregated schools."
"Imagine the scores though if we had schools for them and some for us," Noble wrote.
Republican state representative Katy Peternel – who is the assistant majority leader in the New Hampshire House of Representatives – responded to Noble's message with a laughing-crying emoji.
Noble's comments were roundly condemned by Democrats. State representative David Landau, who is the ranking member of the House Education Funding Committee, said Noble's remark was "more than shocking" and "disgusting."
"It’s not who we are as a state. It’s not who we are as a country. And we’re better because we go to schools together and because we learn together and we work together, because ... that’s how life is," Landau told Granite Post.
According to the outlet, Noble has sponsored 2026 legislation that would ban the teaching of "critical race theory," or CRT, in public schools. The NAACP has previously argued that the push to ban CRT is rooted in a desire by conservatives to limit curriculum teaching students about slavery and Black history.
AlterNet has reached out to Rep. Noble for comment.
Click here to read Granite Post's report in full.
an 1` 23
no lnx
as he gears up for a possible presidential run,Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to be a highly polarizing figure. The far-right Republican, who was reelected by 19 percent in the 2022 midterms, is a rock star in the MAGA movement. But when he visited Philadelphia in late January to receive the Union League’s medal of honor, his visit inspired angry protests from a combination of Democratic officials, activists and Black church leaders.
Pennsylvania State Sen. State Vincent Hughes, Philadelphia City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson and the Rev. Robert Collier of the Black Clergy of Philadelphia, all of whom are African-American, were among the protestors. All of them viewed the award as an insult to Philly’s Black community in light of DeSantis’ recent decision to ban an advancement-placement Black studies course from Florida’s public high schools. DeSantis claimed that the course isn’t historically accurate — a claim that many historians have vehemently disagreed with.
DeSantis’ ban has drawn widespread criticism. Some of it is coming from journalist Mark Whitaker, author of the forthcoming book “Saying It Loud: 1966 — The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement.”
READ MORE:Scholars and lawmakers are outraged over DeSantis’ rejection of AP African-American curriculum
In an op-ed/think piece published by the Washington Post on January 31, Whitaker lays out some reasons why he believes DeSantis is dead wrong about the merits of that AP course.
“Although DeSantis and his allies have insisted that they are not against teaching ‘the history of African-Americans,’” Whitaker argues, “their rhetoric suggests that they are hostile to the idea of treating Black studies as a separate field of study, and that they believe it serves only to turn impressionable young people of different backgrounds against one another.”
Whitaker goes on to discuss the history of Black studies in the U.S., going back to the 1960s, the Black power movement and the Black Panther Party. During the 1960s, the author recalls, there was plenty of white pushback against teaching Black studies — the same type of pushback coming from DeSantis in 2023.
“In America,” Whitaker writes, “teaching history in high school has long been seen as having not just an educational, but a deeper civic purpose. DeSantis seems to be playing to his political base by harking back to a day when that meant offering students a one-size-fits-all, uplifting national story dominated by the noble deeds of great white men. But as far back as the 1960s, members of the Black power generation announced they were no longer accepting that sanitized narrative, and since then, they have been joined by millions of young women and members of other ethnic and LGBTQ communities.”
READ MORE: Ron DeSantis claims he banned teaching Black history because it includes 'indoctrination' on 'queer theory'
:{:{}:
Read Mark Whitaker’s full Washington Post op-ed at this link.}:
From Your Site Articles
'Not worthy': Some Union League members threaten to resign after group bestows gold medal on DeSantis ›
'Goes beyond ignorance' Historians slam DeSantis' claims about American slavery ›
'My heart is broken': Florida teachers ordered to remove, block class libraries or face felony prosecution ›Related Articles Around the Web
Black education activist slams DeSantis over canceling AP course ... ›
Students threaten to sue DeSantis over rejection of AP course on ... ›
DeSantis crusades against AP African American course to keep the ... ›https://www.c-span.org/video/?523455-1/reconstruction-americas-story
OCTOBER 6, 2022
Lectures in History
Reconstruction & America's Story
University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Kermit Roosevelt, who teaches Constitutional law, asserted that modern America traces its political sentiments to Lincoln and the Reconstruction era, rather than the Founding Fathers and the Revolution. Kermit Roosevelt is the great great grandson of Theodore Roosevelt
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/ron-desantis-florida-real-history/
an 7 22 raw
fuck your feelings: [cspan book TV had several on slavery eg UVA?] free exge of idea (free mkt in the gift shop? buy it or not, or buy and burn it.
Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy lashed out on Sunday because she said she was made to feel "ashamed" and "guilty" after visiting the home of former President Thomas Jefferson and learning about how he owned slaves.
During a discussion on Fox & Friends,host Pete Hegseth complained about how the "whole tone" at Jefferson's Monticello home has changed to focus on his slave ownership.
"It's overwhelmingly negative!" Hegseth exclaimed. "You go to visit the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and you learn about what a terrible person Thomas Jefferson was."
Hegseth said that one visitor noted that "half of the comments on Jefferson were critical."
Campos-Duffy recounted her visit to Monticello.
"I visited many of these homes," she recalled. "And that is definitely what I picked up from all of this, that there is a reorienting, reconstructing of the history to basically make sure that the idea that they had slaves is on the same level as what they did for our country."
"There are slaves across human history," the Fox News host continued. "I get that. It's a terrible history we should talk about but we should not feel guilty or ashamed of our leaders when we go and visit the people who brought us the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. You leave feeling that way."
Campos-Duffy complained that "anti-racism" books could be found in the gift shop at Jefferson's home.
"These were great men as far as their ideas go but they were able to build this on the backs of slaves and we honor that," co-host Joey Jones chimed in. "And we talk about that. That's different than re-writing the importance of Jefferson, the importance of Washington or whoever it may be. And why have Monticello at all if you're only going to use it for grievance?"
Jones argued that liberal leaders are not "perfect" either.
"Socialists," Campos-Duffy quipped. "You come away thinking how terrible this country is."
"Where's all this coming from?" she asked. "The homes of these presidents are being populated -- this is avery diabolical plan on the part of the left. So what they've done is they've taken their donors on the left and they've populated the boards of these estates with leftists."
"Don't look over here at all the amazing things that Thomas Jefferson unleashed," Hegseth agreed. "It's always about inclusivity. It's the buzzword they use. And we fall into the trap! Because good, earnest historians who take care of Monticello sit there and they go, 'Oh, you're right. You know what? We haven't included enough about the fact that he was a slave owner. So let's include more of that.' And then the ideologues come in with their money and say, let's make it all about that!"
"And then you get kids coming through thinking Thomas Jefferson was a bad guy," he remarked. "We get accused of wanting to 'whitewash' or not talk about that. We will talk about that. We know that. That's a real deal. But making it about America being an evil place is when we get into the realm of a cultural revolution."
Watch the video below from Fox News.
an 11 21
After the Rittenhouse: Will 'white freedom' spell the ruin of America?
Chauncey DeVega and Salon November 22, 2021
"White freedom" could bring the ultimate ruination of America. By that term, I do not simply mean "white privilege" or "racist" behavior that violates social norms and is considered unacceptable or aberrant.White freedom is much more powerful than that: it is a core organizing principle of American society.
In his recent book "White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea," Tyler Stovall explains this concept as "the belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free."
Contrary to what many Americans would like to believe, the country's founding was not a project dedicated to universal human rights. Instead, America's "democratic" experiment was based on a racialized understanding of democracy and of who counts as fully human — and who does not.
In the 18th century, full citizenship rights and "democracy" were exclusive to white men who owned property. As Charles Mills, Edmund Morgan and other scholars have documented, Black and other nonwhite people were the boundary against which "democracy" and white freedom were to be demarcated and built upon.In his 1999 book "The Racial Contract," Charles Mills summarizes this as: "Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations."
White freedom is everywhere in America. Black and brown people (and some white people as well) condemn it as a manifestation of the lies which undercut any claims that America is an "exceptional" nation and the world's greatest democracy.
Many or most white people, however, take white freedom for granted and are likely to deny its very existence, even as they remain extremely protective of its power. This is but one example of the lies that are central to race itself, and the transhistorical project of making and remaking whiteness.
The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, and his acquittal on all charges, offers one of the most recent high-profile examples of how white freedom functions in America.
Last August, Rittenhouse, who was then 17 years old, traveled across state lines, armed himself with an AR-15 assault style rifle, joined forces with a local militia group and put himself in the middle of the civil disturbances caused by the police shooting of a black man named Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse shot three men, killing two of them, allegedly in self-defense. When he attempted to surrender to police they ignored him, and then he was cleared of all legal responsibility in a criminal trial whose judge was blatantly biased in his favor, and based on gun laws and definitions of self-defense that advantage white defendants. He is already a right-wing media star, and will likely soon become a wealthy celebrity.
Consider the fact that Rittenhouse was not shot dead by the police as he walked down the street with an assault rifle, immediately after shooting three people in the street. That is an iconic illustration of white freedom's power over life and death in America. White vigilantism is perhaps the ultimate expression of white freedom.
I asked Tyler Stovall to share his thoughts about the role of white freedom in the Rittenhouse saga. He responded by email:
The recent acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse by an essentially white jury for murdering two unarmed men simply underscores the widespread belief in the fragility of white privilege and the overwhelming need to preserve it. Rittenhouse's argument that he acted in self-defense proved compelling, even though it was not backed up by any substantial proof, and the jury simply ignored the facts that he chose to enter an area armed with a high-powered rifle and became the only person to kill another human being that night. Rittenhouse's trial became a textbook case of the need to preserve white freedom, to prevent a tearful young white man from going to jail even though he permanently deprived others not only of their liberty but of their lives. ...
One only need imagine what would have happened if Kyle Rittenhouse were a young Black man who claimed to have shot others in self-defense. Consider the case of Tamir Rice, shot by Cleveland police in 2014 at the age of 12 for holding a toy rifle. The claim of the police, upheld by the judicial system, was that his murder was justified because he presented a possible threat. If Rittenhouse were Black his victims would doubtlessly be seen as justified in attacking him, in self-defense, because he held a rifle (a real one), and Rittenhouse would most likely have been convicted of murder. But Rittenhouse is white, and self-defense works in his case because it is ultimately a defense of white power, white privilege and white freedom.
Rittenhouse's actions were easily avoidable: If he had simply stayed home, no one would have died in Kenosha that night. That human tragedy also offers an example of the ways white freedom is central to a larger dynamic of escalating right-wing political violence and other threats to American democracy.
The ongoing Republican coup and Jim Crow 2.0 assault on multiracial democracy is an act of white freedom, in which Black and brown people's civil rights are being usurped as part of a larger plan to create a new American apartheid system. Moreover, white freedom is so powerful that these fascistic attacks on multiracial democracy are largely legal — or at least occur on the debatable margins of legality — and cannot simply be corrected by enforcing existing laws.
The coup attempt and attack on the Capitol last January by Donald Trump's followers was also an example of white freedom. The insurrectionists felt emboldened in their violence, overt racism and anti-democracy fervor because they believed, with good reason, that white freedom granted them the "right" to act with impunity.
Trump and the other plotters who planned and executed the events of Jan. 6 -- and many other aspects of the ongoing coup against American democracy -- have not been punished for their evident or likely crimes. For the most part, the foot soldiers arrested in the wake of Jan. 6 have received relatively light sentences for their crimes against democracy and the rule of law.
All of these events are part of a much larger campaign against democracy, which law enforcement and national security experts warn may lead to a violent insurgency against the Biden administration, the Democrats and other groups targeted by the far-right "patriot" movement. This too is another example of white freedom.
Black and brown people (or "leftists" of any race, for that matter) would never be allowed to operate with such impunity, or with reasonable assurance that they would face no serious punishment. They certainly would not be described in empathetic detail by voices in the mainstream news media as people who were "angry," "upset," "confused" and likely "misunderstood."
White freedom is also exemplified by America's criminogenic politics — which go back well before the Age of Trump — in which the wealthiest individuals (nearly all white) and largest corporations (nearly all controlled by white men) can act with impunity, concealing their wealth and income to avoid taxes, destroying the environment and evading virtually any responsibility for their individual and collective crimes against society.
White freedom also manifests through collective narcissism. The Republican death cult repeatedly emphasizes the language of "freedom" to encourage its followers not to wear masks and to refuse vaccination against COVID-19, not merely risking their own lives but endangering public health on a grand scale.
Across a range of public policies, today's Republican Party and the larger "conservative movement" have advocated and enacted laws that have increased human misery and loss of life among the American people, as well as around the world. White freedom permits, encourages, enables, protects and normalizes such antisocial and sadistic behavior.
Neofascism may represent the final form of white freedom in American democracy. Right-wing political violence and other forms of terrorism are becoming normalized. The Republican-fascist movement led by Trump is a political cult prefaced upon using white freedom to attack its "enemies" with impunity. Those who are deemed inferior, according to the ideology of white freedom, are to be denied any fundamental human rights or liberties.
Loyalty to white freedom, and the retrograde reactionary values and politics it represents, empowers a wide range of antisocial and anti-human behavior against marginalized individuals and groups, not always based on race, color or ethnicity. White freedom by definition is exclusionary, and this form of "freedom" is defined by white people's ability to define and limit the freedom of others
Leonce Gaiter, who has written extensively on questions of race, masculinity and violence, offered this additional context for understanding white freedom and American history, in an email to Salon:
When white supremacy is challenged, white reaction follows. Reconstruction brought reclamation. The '60s and '70s rights revolutions brought Reagan. Obama's election brought the tea party and Trump.
In this nation's 245 years, African Americans have enjoyed statutory equal rights for only 56 — since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Think about it. White supremacy and forms of apartheid have been the status quo in this nation for 77% of its history. The very ideas of black equal rights and full black citizenship are shockingly new. This is something we dare not forget. After Obama's election, the post-racial nonsense flew in all directions, flung by white pundits desperate to forget American history. Instead, we got Trumpism and a Republican Party cheering racist violence to maintain white supremacy.
To a large percentage of the white population, their "white identity" can be reduced to "white supremacy." There is no "white" American identity because there is no aspect of American "white" identity that Black and brown Americans have not overtly impacted (speech, art, letters, music, dance, morality, notions of freedom) — save white supremacy. "White" is a null identity — it was created in opposition to those it wished to exploit. It does not celebrate what you are. It insists on what you are not. Thus the identity is so fragile that any perceived threat requires the appearance of long guns.
Gaiter concluded:
The Rittenhouse trial and verdict — a judge coddling the white man on trial for murdering white men seen as black allies — an overwhelmingly white jury, white "self-defense" as an excuse for murdering men after overtly seeking violent confrontation… it's all America's normal. We are not better than this. It is a large part of who we have always been. Supposed "moderates" and liberals have never had the stomach to sever the diseased limb of white race hatred from the body politic. Until they do, there will always be a Kyle Rittenhouse. His story is the bulk of America's.
Historians have observed that America's founding rests upon two crimes against humanity: The genocide against First Nations peoples and white-on-Black chattel slavery. White freedom was a partner in those crimes against humanity, and was largely defined by them.
America in the 21st century faces an existential struggle for the future of its democracy and society. Matters are becoming so dire that if seems conceivable the country could face a second Civil War. In this struggle for America's future, the neofascists are carrying the banner of white freedom.
On the other side are those Americans who believe in a true "We the People" multiracial democracy. These two forces cannot logically be reconciled. Unfortunately, the Democrats and other Americans who hope to redeem and renew democracy are consistently on the defensive. To defeat white freedom, we can no longer downplay it or deny its existence. We must name it, recognize it and confront it directly, before it devours us all.
https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/texas-history-book/
cdv
In the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney proclaimed that Black people have "no rights that the white man is bound to respect." Today's Jim Crow Republican Party, and the white right more broadly, have taken the spirit of those words and updated them for the 21st century, effectively by arguing that "white people are not bound to respect historical truth or established facts — at least not as they pertain to Black and brown people in America".
As the next step in their war against multiracial democracy, the Republican Party and its allies have launched a moral panic about "critical race theory." Of course, their version of "critical race theory" is a type of racial bogeyman or psychological projection, a function of white racial paranoia about the "browning of America" and the threat of "white genocide."
Facts do not matter in the right-wing echo chamber. It is of no importance that the white right's version of "critical race theory" has nothing to do with the scholarly paradigm of the same name.
As the truism holds, history is written by the victors. To that end, in dozens of states across the country, the white right is engaging in an Orwellian campaign of rewriting school curricula to prevent the teaching of "critical race theory" -- which in practice means stopping any serious engagement with America's real and often uncomfortable history of racism and white supremacy.
For example, in Florida, a law was recently passed mandating a survey of students and faculty in public colleges and universities to determine their political beliefs. Of course, Florida has also banned the teaching of "critical race theory."
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, perhaps the single most influential voice on the white right, recently suggested that cameras should be placed in classrooms to ensure that no teachers will deploy "critical race theory" or other facts and arguments deemed to be "unpatriotic."
The Republican-controlled Texas Senate recently passed a bill eliminating a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement and other human rights struggles be taught in public schools. The bill also removed a condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan from course requirements as well.
As Yahoo News reports, the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Projectand "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."
This Republican legislation has been met with widespread outrage. But that reaction should just be the beginning. The next step involves doing the harder work of understanding why so many other (mostly white) Americans actually believe that "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history should be banned. Understanding these beliefs and motivations is essential to defeating American neofascism and its white supremacist social and political project.
Many Americans have been propagandized by their schools, news media, the internet, churches and other social institutions to believe in a large set of interlocking lies and myths about the country's past and present. To intervene against these lies often causes emotional pain and/or narcissistic injury to those who hold such beliefs.
This dynamic is especially powerful for those who are emotionally, psychologically, financially and politically invested in defending and protecting white privilege and white people's control over almost every aspect of American life. In that context, the personal truly is political: Whiteness, as a concept and a social force, has become linked at an individual level to the maintenance of white power.
How does this right-wing fantasy machine work? The Root has exhaustively documented how some of America's most widely used history textbooks misrepresent the real history of the color line and distort such topics as chattel slavery, the Civil War, the civil rights movement and social injustice more generally, through the use of what sociologist Joe Feagin has called the "white racial frame."
Michael Harriot offers this analysis:
So when Mitch McConnell and 38 Republican senators sent a letter to the secretary of education decrying the ghastly prospect of white students having to learn actual facts about slavery, it was not unexpected. For centuries, this country's schools have perpetuated a whitewashed version of history that either erases or reduces the story of Black America down to a B-plot in the American script. It's why they hate Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project and anything factual — because the white-centric interpretation of our national past is so commonly accepted, white people have convinced themselves that anything that varies from the Caucasian interpretation must be a lie. …
This is why they oppose expanding the historiography of our national story. American schools have never taught a version of history that wasn't racialized. But, apparently, it's perfectly fine if the racial narrative skews toward whiteness. They can't be opposed to learning a different historical perspective because they never learned history; they were spoonfed fiction in bite-sized morsels.
To be fair, it's understandable why they are so adamant about what they believe in.
Imagine you are a white man. Now imagine what it's like going through 12 years of school, four years of college, graduate school and an entire career that made you one of the most powerful people on the planet. Now imagine a group of Black journalists, led by a Black woman, told you that you don't know shit.
To that point, the right-wing echo chamber consistently repeats neo-Confederate "Lost Cause" myths, such as the oft-repeated lie that the Civil War was fought over "states' rights" rather than white-on-Black chattel slavery.
The right obsessively depicts the Democrats as "the party of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and slavery". This is a deliberate distortion of history because the pro-slavery, pro-segregation faction of the Democratic Party became solid Republicans after the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Right-wing propagandists also love to claim that Martin Luther King Jr. was a "Republican," or at least espoused Republican values. This is a ludicrous allegation: In contemporary terms King was a democratic socialist or progressive who opposed racism, poverty, military adventurism and injustice of all kinds. King would have viewed the modern-day conservative movement as a great force for evil in American society and the world.
Black conservative propagandists play an important role in the right-wing echo chamber, validating racist fantasies that slavery was a "gift" to Black people because it brought them to America. In this twisted perception of history, chattel slavery is understood as a "necessary evil" because it gave Black people Christianity and taught them the value of "hard work".
These same Black conservatives love to repeat the vicious lie that the Democratic Party is a type of "plantation." In reality, the plantations of the antebellum South were prison camps, charnel houses and places of torture, rape, suffering and death. Black conservative propagandists frequently announce that they are special and uniquely capable of "thinking for themselves," as compared to the vast majority of Black people who support the Democratic Party and are therefore deemed to be ignorant or uninformed.
The campaign against "critical race theory" — and against teaching America's real history — must be understood as part of a larger fascist strategy of attacking public schools and other institutions of learning with the aim of creating compliant followers and a public that is not equipped to participate in democracy — or to defend it.
This plan involves placing white supremacists, QAnon conspiracists, Trump supporters and other right-wing extremists — to the degree those categories of people can be separated — on local school boards and library advisory councils, banning "controversial" books, and the surveillance or intimidation of teachers deemed too "liberal" or suspected of "politicizing" the classroom, i.e., by refusing to teach right-wing dogma and other lies.
The fascist assault on education and critical thinking also involves think tanks, right-wing activists and advocacy groups, along with a network of wealthy funders committed to remaking American society to fit their racist, theocratic and plutocratic vision.
The Texas Republicans' attempt to literally whitewash the Ku Klux Klan out of American history is so ridiculous that it approaches parody. That doesn't make such historical erasure and distortion any less dangerous. Those dangers are further amplified by the crisis of democracy caused by the Jim Crow Republicans and ascendant neofascist movement.
As historian Timothy Snyder warned in a recent essay in the New York Times:
Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is infantilizing: We should not have to feel any negative emotions; difficult subjects should be kept from us. Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws' portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so.
We start by saying we are not racists. Yes, that felt nice. And now we should make sure that no one says anything that might upset us. The fight against racism becomes the search for a language that makes white people feel good. The laws themselves model the desired rhetoric. We are just trying to be fair. We behave neutrally. We are innocent.
When viewed in the aggregate, these attacks on "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history echo some of the worst aspects of the country's past. In his book "Trouble in Mind", historian Leon Litwack details how history was taught during the Jim Crow reign of terror:
The history to which Black children were exposed in the classroom and the primers made a virtual gospel of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon institutions and ways of thinking and acting…. What little they learned of their own history consisted often of disparaging caricatures of Black people as the least civilized of the races — irresponsible, thoughtless, foolish, childlike people, satisfied with their lowly place in American life, incapable of self-control and self-direction. The history of Black people was a history of submission gladly endured and of services faithfully rendered. Transported from the darkness of heathen Africa to the civilized and Christian New World, grateful slaves found contentment and happiness…. The treatment of emancipation depicted Blacks passively waiting for Massa' Lincoln to strike off their shackles. And Reconstruction saw the enthronement of Black ignorance and inexperience, with the Ku Klux Klan in some account redeeming Anglo-Saxon civilization from alien rule. The history lessons taught in public schools were calculated to produce patriotic citizens, albeit with a distinctive southern bias.
The Jim Crow Republicans and the white right view this approach to American history as admirable, something to be resuscitated from the dustbin of the country's past.
In the self-serving stories told by the Ku Klux Klan, that terrorist organization had noble origins, represented "Christian values," did charity work and helped the poor, served the community by dealing with drunks and other miscreants, and protected "white families" as well as the "good Blacks". This is the fake history that the Jim Crow Republicans want to see taught to America's young people.
The neofascist movement understands that if it wins the battle over the teaching of the past, it can in turn control the future. In total, the right wing's moral panic over "critical race theory" resembles the kind of hearts-and-minds indoctrination favored by the great villains of history. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and Goebbels would be proud to see their legacy continued.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
- Harvard historian explains why Trump's Jan. 6 insurrection was a ... ›
- Texas Senate passes bill aimed at banning critical race theory ... ›
- Top Texas elected official accused of 'punishing dissidents' after ... ›
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
- The 12 Books Every Texan Needs To Read | KERA News ›
- Lone Star: A History Of Texas And The Texans: Fehrenbach, T. R. ... ›
- Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories.:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{ - The New York ... ›
tx long req alamo praise?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/greg-abbott-2653567926/
note biden bills popular so gotta go wedge:
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/mitch-mcconnell/?rs=182
no lnx pix vid
'Behind us': Mitch McConnell giggles as he shares his extremely whitewashed version of US history
Walter Einenkel and Daily Kos June 03, 2021
The New York Times' 1619 Project was created in order to refocus American history on its story of race and economics. The 1619 date is a reminder of the first enslaved Africans brought by ship to the early European settlements in North and South America. This is history that has long been available to people to discover, but has also been ignored and frequently hidden or suppressed in our country's official retellings of our collective story. Conservatives across the country, bereft of any ideas since feudalism, are recasting the 1619 Project and other critical race theory educational initiatives as an attack on our country. In their estimation, only white males like themselves are allowed to feel persecuted, and any discussion of race and the moral anchor that systemic racism has moored our country's progress forward is an assault on their monopoly on power. They are right about the latter.
On Wednesday, Sen. McConnell took time away from never passing any legislation that wasn't voter suppression-related or a tax break for the richest amongst us, to speak at a press conference in the Citizens Union Bank in Shelbyville, Kentucky. McConnell's fellow Kentuckian Republican Rep. Joseph Fischer recently filed Bill Request 60, for the upcoming 2022 state legislature session that would limit how race and the history of racism in our country is taught.Here's an elementary school level bit of math for you: Kentucky + Republican Rep. + bill about the teaching of race and racism = X* Here's another equation for you math nerds: Mitch McConnell + statement about race and education + microphone = X**
*Answer: Imaginably racist.
**Answer: Very imaginably racist.
On Wednesday,McConnell told the press that the fact the world participated in slavery and the slave trade during the 17th century means that in America historians marking the first enslaved Africans brought to the Americas isn't important history. That's what he argued.
"Behind us?"
Man, turtles live a long time.
McConnell's answer came out of a question from The Courier Journal concerning his support or opposition to the kinds of constraints his fellow Republicans are trying to put on public school teachers and educators. He went on to say that the federal government shouldn't tell schools what to teach, and he also didn't seem to knock the fact that Republicans across the country are the only political group telling schools what they should teach.
Mitch McConnell has previously described the focus on the 1619 date in American history as an "exotic notion." He has also categorized any push for education curriculums to include more comprehensive teaching on systemic racism, "activist indoctrination." McConnell's intellectually dishonest angle on the 1619 date is that by calling attention to our country's founding dependence on cheap labor and the evolution of our nation's racism, we "denigrate and downgrade" other, more positive and less uncomfortable, achievements that our country has made.
It's a garbage argument as pointing out our country's systemic racism, and very specifically highlighting 1619 as a date, is clearly an important part of our nation's story. Millions of Americans of all races, cultures, and creeds have been directly affected, and continue to be affected, by those decisions. The Civil War that McConnell says put this sin "behind us," is only fought because of that date, and to deny it and the existence of its reach is incongruous with even the words coming out of the Kentucky senator's disingenuous yap.
McConnell's attempt at speaking out of both sides of his mouth included this statement: "I think trying to completely denigrate and downgrade American historical moments like 1776, 1787,1965—critical moments—is a mistake." If you want to know what truly denigrates and downgrades our country's history, and specifically what those dates mark, all you need to see are McConnell's own actions in orchestrating a filibuster of a commission into the events of Jan. 6—something that had the bipartisan support of his own constituents. As for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Republican Party is in the middle of generating hundreds of voter suppression laws throughout the country.
Here's McConnell telling people that systemic racism and our country's use of slavery and racism as a controlling economic foundation is "exotic."
UofL VP of diversity and equity calls McConnell 1619 comments 'troubling'
The Senate Minority Leader said he disagreed with The New York Times' '1619 project.'
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
'What's going on?' Mitch McConnell refuses to explain to voters why ... ›
Mitch McConnell slammed for repeatedly sabotaging stimulus ... ›
A Senate insider has a dark warning about Mitch McConnell ... ›
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
McConnell turns Senate Republicans against Jan. 6 commission ... ›
Mitch McConnell warns GOP off Electoral College brawl in Congress ›
Mitch McConnell Said to be Pleased About Trump Impeachment ... ›
==
https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/newt-gingrich-trump/
ah
In 1994, when President Bill Clinton was serving his first term, then-House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich unveiled his Contract With America — a hard-right Republican legislative agenda that Gingrich's critics slammed as the Contract On America. Republicans recaptured the House in the 1994 midterms, and Gingrich became House speaker in January 1995.Now, in the Biden era, Gingrich is a major ally of former President Donald Trump — and according to Politico reporter Meridith McGraw, Gingrich and Trump are joining forces for a new version of the Contract With America for the 2022 midterms. But the 2022 version, McGraw reports, will have a much more Trumpian focus.
"With an eye toward winning back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections, former President Donald Trump has begun crafting a policy agenda outlining a MAGA doctrine for the party," McGraw reports. "His template is the 1994 'Contract With America,' a legislative agenda released ahead of the midterm elections in the middle of President Bill Clinton's first term. And as a cherry on top, he's teaming up with its main architect — Gingrich — to do it."
McGraw adds that according to a Politico source, Trump recently met with Gingrich, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida to "begin crafting the document." twt]
"The group is still just beginning to hammer out the details of what a Trumpified Contract might look like," McGraw explains. "But it is likely to take an 'America first' policy approach on everything from trade to immigration. The source described it as 'a policy priority for 2022 and beyond.' Its construction has been teased and talked about for weeks, but the fact that the principals are beginning to put it together underscores Trump's continued interest in trying to shape the Republican Party."
The 77-year-old Gingrich, however, told Politico that he doesn't expect the 2022 plan to be finalized "anytime soon." When Politico asked him to outline some policy priorities that it may include, the former House speaker responded, "It should be positive. School choice, teaching American history for real, abolishing the '1619 Project,' eliminating critical race theory and what the Texas legislature is doing. We should say, 'Bring it on.'"
Like Barack Obama, Clinton went down in history as a president who was decisively reelected but suffered a major setback at the midterms. 1996 was a great year for Clinton, who was reelected with 379 electoral votes compared to only 159 for Republican nominee Bob Dole. But Democrats suffered a major pounding in the 1994 midterms.
"The original 'Contract with America' was credited with helping Republicans gain their first majority in four decades after the party picked up 52 seats in 1994 in the House and nine seats in the Senate," McGraw recalls. "Republicans have used it as a template in elections since."
The Politico reporter continues, "In 2010, the so-called Republican 'Young Guns,' led by Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, introduced a much longer version of Gingrich's contract with a 224-page publication outlining policy goals ahead of the midterm elections. And Graham, who was one of the Contract's signatories when he first ran for a House seat in 1994, has frequently advocated for Republicans to adopt Contract-style declarations to unify the party during election years."
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
- Mike Pence gets skewered as Trump's 'chief bootlicker' and ... ›
- Noam Chomsky weighs in on impeachment, 2020 election and Syria ... ›
- Pence and Pompeo headline launch of think tank founded by ... ›
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
- How Newt Gingrich Destroyed American Politics - The Atlantic ›
- Newt Gingrich warns making Trump a martyr will divide America ... ›
- Trump is the 'most effective uprooter of liberalism': Newt Gingrich ... ›
Texas’ divisive bill restricting how students learn about current events, history, and racism passed by Senate
May 22, 2021
After hours of passionate debate about how Texas teachers can instruct school children about America's history of subjugating people of color, the state Senate early Saturday morning advanced a new version of a
think piece
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/gop-history/
...A few minutes later, President and First Lady Biden arrived at the rotunda to pay their respects. MSNBC and CNN were there. OnFox, Laura Ingraham briefly acknowledged the Bidens' presencebut spent most of her airtime not honoring the slain policeman but trashing Dr. Anthony Fauci and beginning a story about homicides in Chicago with the phrase, "The BLM-fueled crime wave…" Black Lives Matter, you see, is just one more manifestation of the imaginary socialist plot to take over America. No wonder their viewers think the world's aflame, a cynical awful place where progressives plotting evil lurk at every corner pizzeria.
By the way, Officer Sicknick, a 12-year veteran of the force, was a Trump voter in 2016, although *The Washington Post* reports, "Those who encountered Sicknick said his political views did not align neatly with one political party." He was against impeachment but supported gun control.
There hasn't been an official explanation yet as to exactly how Sicknick died but he was attacked and killed while resisting the crazed crowd brainwashed by Trump
...Meanwhile, the rest of us are supposed to buy into the GOP's big con because, you know, unity. Every time truths are spoken that Republicans don't like, they claim that it's for sure dividing the country further.
So brazen are the attempts at manipulation of truth whether present or past, that in the last months of his term, President Trump and his sycophantic crew appointed a Presidential Advisory 1776 Committee, charged with creating "a definitive chronicle of the American founding." The report partly was a response to The New York Times' award-winning 1619 Project, charting the history of slavery in the United States and our continuing record of racial discrimination.
With little regard for the facts and not a single professional historian on the panel (but with plenty of conservative activists and educators), and with time quickly running out for the Trump White House, it was decided to release their findings on the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, months before the report was supposed to be completed and just two days before the Biden inauguration—timing that was either a stroke of haste, pure ignorance or malign spite—you make the call.
In any case, much of what the commission had to say was lost in the shuffle of last-minute Trump pardons and inauguration news but as per Sarah Ruiz-Grossman at The Huffington Post:
The 45-page report reads in places like a right-wing manifesto: It makes excuses for slavery and the Three-fifths Compromise that declared slaves counted as less than full humans. It decries socialism and "identity politics," celebrates the right to bear arms and calls the anti-abortion movement one of the nation's "great reforms…"
"The Trump commission's report also rails against socialism as leading people down a "dangerous path" of wealth redistribution and cites '"anti-Communism" and "the Pro-Life Movement"— or anti-abortion movement — as some of the "great reforms" of the country's history."
The report compares progressivism to fascism, seeking to "centralize power under the management of so-called experts." There are twice as many references to Christianity as of racism, no footnotes or citations, and not a single mention of Indigenous people, especially not the notion that upon our arrival, ninety percent of them quickly were wiped out by disease, murder, forced relocation, and other assorted territorial encroachments.
Many wondered what President Biden would do with the report. It didn't take long to find out. Within minutes of his swearing-in, an executive order wiped out the 1776 Committee. And shortly after, all evidence of its existence, including the panel's preposterous report, was removed from the White House website.
Via his Department of Education, the new president should lead an effort figuring out how to restore civics classes and revive the history curriculum that once taught young Americans how to be thoughtful, participating citizens by learning their past. This also should help them develop the kind of critical thinking that, when presented with the facts, responds with skepticism and debate but not in the belief of every crackpot version of reality that beckons to them from their televisions, radios and laptops. As we've seen, such an alternative truth—the real fake news as it were—can only lead to the violent end of American democracy.
For a party that used to preach responsibility and reason, the Republicans have devolved into an asylum for the proponents and hangers on of screwball revisionism fraudulent theories and the vicious overthrow of government. Don't know much about history but I do know that if the GOP have their way there will be little room for rational solutions that can help us...
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/historian-push-back-with-a-brutal-takedown-of-1776-commission-report/
After the Trump administration released its report on the "1776 Commission," historians wasted no time firing back with brutal criticism of the 45-page document, purported to be authored by "some of America's most distinguished scholars and historians." But one historian, Torsten Kathke is noting that the committee responsible for developing the report consisted of mostly conservatives and Trump loyalists.
"Many others are already parsing the report of the 1776 Commission," Kathke tweeted. "This much here: It's a propagandist hack job. What interested me were the people involved with it. (They're pretty much who you would expect them to be.)"
Many others are already parsing the report of the 1776 Commission. This much here: It's a propagandist hack job. W… https://t.co/lYcZIjnkQG
— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)1611013264.0
Kathke noted that the top three individuals listed on the committee list are not even historians. He tweeted, "The three above-the-line people leading the commission. Not one who is primarily a historian. Considering the commission states "the facts of our founding are not partisan. They are a matter of history" it feels not out of bounds to ask: Why not let a historian chair it?"
The three above-the-line people leading the commission. Not one who is primarily a historian. Considering the co… https://t.co/QXurPAuKvh
— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)1611013271.0
He went on to highlight the problem with former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) being part of the commission. Although Bryant supported replacing the state flag (which paid homage to the Confederate flag), he had previously insisted on honoring the legacy of the Confederacy.
A few more names: Phil Bryant. MA in Political Science. Former Mississippi Governor. Came out in favor of replac… https://t.co/YNZ3UA2gCh
— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)1611013969.0
Kathke went on to highlight issues with other members of the committee:
Charles Kesler. Political scientist whom @politico called "the intellectual avatar of Trumpism."… https://t.co/s1JaNp76gm
— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)1611018897.0
Victor Davis Hanson. Ph.D. in classics. That qualifies him, I suppose, as the first historian on the list. Though*n… https://t.co/Gisi450mr3*
— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)1611018552.0
Mike Gonzalez. MBA. Journalist and speechwriter. https://t.co/eUflFV361f https://t.co/6YOTsqdH04
— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)1611017459.0
John Gibbs. Master of Public Administration. Who "has a history of making inflammatory remarks and spreading false… https://t.co/idnFX4igKT
— Torsten Kathke (@Torsten Kathke)1611016820.0
Kathke's criticism came shortly after the Trump administration released the "1776 Commission Report" on Martin Luther King Day. According toThe New York Times, the report "denounces the charge that the American founders were hypocrites who preached equality even as they codified slavery in the Constitution and held slaves themselves."
The report, created by an 18-member commission chaired by Trump ally and conservative Larry Arnn, reads, "this charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric."
The "1776 Commission Report" also argues that the "'distorted histories' of the country "labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil.'" It also presented a defense of slavery insisting that it should "be seen in a much broader perspective" as it noted the "unfortunate fact" that slavery "has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history."
According to the Trump White House, the civil rights movement became a case of "identity politics" which "teaches that America itself is to blame for oppression."
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
- Loving your country is not the same as loving Trump: How the right ... ›
- How conservative demands for 'patriotic' history education echo the ... ›
- Trump's 'patriotic education' commission is yet another battle over ... ›
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
- Trump's 1776 commission is proof America is spiraling toward fascism ›
- Trump's 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided ... ›
- Trump 1776 Commission slams 'destructive scholarship' in reprot ›
Aha: this is an extension of pinko prof brainwashing and campus conserv student silencing b/c of PC cancel culture; gin up hype in front of election (TP kirk bloody revenge coming for your kids?! also reaction to BLM for end of systemic racism.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/loving-your-country-is-not-the-same-as-loving-trump-how-the-right-makes-a-mockery-of-us-patriotism
on September 17, in a speech delivered at the National Archives Museum, President Trump announced he was signing an executive order establishing the 1776 Commission, aimed at promoting what he called a “patriotic” and “pro-America” education. The announcement was a direct attack on the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that explores the legacy of slavery in the United States. For Trump, teaching critical race studies is akin to committing child abuse “in the truest sense of those words.”
“Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and souls,” Trump announced. He accused the left of destroying children’s love of their country by teaching the facts of its history — facts, he claimed, wrongly “rewrite” American history as founded on oppression rather than freedom. He’s demanded that schools “teach American exceptionalism” and said that schools are teaching students to “hate their own country.”
This was just the latest show of Trump’s blatant conflation of racism with patriotism and it served as yet another example of how Trump has turned patriotism into a self-serving performance free of any connection to facts. From the start, Trump has attempted to define patriotism not as loving the country, but rather as loving Trump. All we need to do is remember that the same man who dodged military service spent over $2.5 million on a Fourth of July military parade designed to be primarily a celebration of himself.
Before analyzing the damage Trump has done to U.S. patriotism, let me be blunt: “loving” your country is stupid. Patriotism, when it is nothing more than blind adoration of a country, is idiotic at best and fascist at worst. Countries don’t need to be loved; they need to be built, critiqued, developed and improved. They need to be held to the highest ideals and they need to face their shortcomings so that they can strive to be better. The relationship citizens have to their nations may always include some affect, but real support for a nation thrives when citizens emote less and reflect and engage more. So, when patriotism is synonymous with loving your country, it is always, already a bad idea. but setting aside the question of whether it even makes sense to debate who does or doesn’t love their country, there seems little doubt that the time has come to push back on the way that the right has conflated loving the United States with loving Trump.
It may have been the case that in the early days of Trump his supporters could rationalize backing a man with an absent moral compass, a profound disrespect for our public institutions, and a deeply and openly narcissistic personality. But the moment when a Trump supporter could hold him up as a welcome alternative to the traditional political establishment has long gone. Any hope that Trump signaled anything positive for this country has now been eclipsed by the avalanche of proof that he holds all of the core values we associate with our nation — whether from the left or the right — in profound disdain.
Take, for example, the information that has poured in just over the last month.
We learned that Trump was aware of reports of financial incentives given to Taliban fighters by officials linked to the Russian government to target and kill American troops in Afghanistan, and he did nothing about it.
We have had multiple confirmations of Trump’s inability to appreciate the value of military service, to respect veterans, and to understand the sacrifices those in the military make for their country. And that wasn’t all. Trump went after military leadership, claiming that they wage wars in order to boost the profits of defense manufacturing companies, somehow forgetting that, as President, he is Commander-in-Chief of the military.
Trump didn’t just attack the military; he attacked our electoral system as well. We have read reports of his concerted efforts to derail the electoral process and suppress voter turnout by criticizing mail-in voting and encouraging voters to vote twice. He has also repeated an expectation that election results could be delayed by months, stoking fears over a peaceful transition.
Then we also learned via Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage” that Trump only cares about himself and that he is willing to lie and deceive the American public when it suits him. Woodward reports that Trump knew well that COVID-19 posed a serious health threat, yet he deliberately downplayed it, saying he did so to avoid stoking public “panic.”
Yet, he is more than happy to foster public panic if it can help him win re-election. He has specifically suggested that if he isn’t elected in November, citizens will be in grave danger.
These more recent developments simply build on years of examples of his profoundly selfish desire to put himself before his office and above the national interest. Only last week we had further confirmation of his self-aggrandizing, unpatriotic behavior when we learned that he manipulated the Department of Homeland Security to downplay the threat of Russian election interference and minimize the threat of white supremacists.
This is a man who hasn’t protected our citizens, our health care workers, our military, our national security, or our elections. This is a man who has openly sown social division and purposefully put the future of the nation at risk.Without question, Donald Trump is the least patriotic man to have ever held the office of President. And, what’s more, he is entirely transparent about it.
How, then, to explain the fact that he still enjoys such an astonishing level of support by Republicans? Sure, there are dissenters, but the**latest Gallup poll numbersstill show Trump earning support of 90 percent of Republicans.
So, supporting Trump when he is obviously doesn’t care a wit about the United States means you can no longer claim to “love” your country.
By every metric that matters, Republicans’ ongoing support for Donald Trump officially ends any claim they have to anything resembling patriotism. Supporting Trump in the wake of these revelations suggests that your patriotism has turned into nothing more than blind fanaticism for a demagogue. There isn’t any other way to explain it.
For many, the idea that Trump and his supporters have ruined U.S. patriotism may not matter much given the fact that for many of us patriotism is too closely aligned with an uncritical American exceptionalism. The notion, though, that the rise of Trump signals the demise of Republican patriotism is a big deal for the simple fact that the Republican party has equated itself with U.S. patriotism for decades. In fact, the mere suggestion that they might not be the patriots they claim to be is likely to seem shocking even to those who are not in the party.
But that’s the thing. The left has generally allowed the Republicans to be the party of those who “love” their country because, for the left, the idea of loving your country uncritically rather than trying to make it better is ignorant and narrow-minded. If being patriotic means you can’t ask questions about the flaws in the system, interrogate injustices past and present, account for the facts of history, and point out deep hypocrisies in the national narrative, then who wants to be patriotic? So, if patriotism means loving your country, then it’s no wonder that the left gave free rein to Republicans to have at it.
And that’s exactly what they did. The story of how Republicans came to dominate the notion of U.S. patriotism is long and complex, but, as Geoffrey Nunberg points out in “Talking Right,” the key to understanding conservative control of U.S. patriotism lies in the deliberate ways that their party worked to merge conservative values with national ones.
According to Nunberg, conservatives exercised a methodical plan to co-opt terms like values, freedom, and patriotismso that these words were uniquely associated with the right — a plan that allowed them to increasingly paint the left as being unpatriotic, against freedom, and morally bankrupt.
This story is key to understanding the twisted patriotism of Trump supporters today, because it wasn’t just that the left let the right merge conservative values with patriotism; it was also that the left let the right suggest that anyone sharing a progressive platform hated their country. This was how it came to be that protesting the Iraq War or demanding accountability for systemic racism or claiming that health care in Canada was better than it is here meant you hated your country.
The love-hate patriotic drama that the right was allowed to develop meant that all thoughtful conversations about what it means to support the United States were absent, replaced, instead, by the right’s increasingly hysterical claims that they were the only ones who even knew what our nation’s values were. For decades the left avoided claims about their country being great, offering, instead, visions for hope and change and a better future.
The distinction makes sense: the right loves their country in a narrow minded and fanatical way while the left strives to take the best of America’s ideals and make them reality.The problem, though, as Nunberg explains in his book, was that the left forgot that they also needed to fight for their critical approach to nationalism to be understood as offering a set of patriotic values too. Absent that, the right was free to own the idea and mold it to their desires.
It is thanks to these developments that Trump was able to claim Ronald Reagan’s slogan and suggest that he was going to make America great again. Everyone was already used to seeing these sorts of claims from the right.
The problem, though, is that Trump has not ever wanted to make America great in any way at all. He has wanted to make it his to do with as he wishes. He has openly idolized despots and dictators. He has bemoaned that he is limited by our democratic process and commented glibly that he should be able to stay in office beyond eight years. And none of that unpatriotic, un-American behavior has caused his supporters to waver.
Because Trump’s base has spent decades forgetting what it actually means to uphold national values, they’ve been easily swayed into associating a selfish, self-aggrandizing, unethical and morally repugnant human with a patriot.Content to equate flag waving, eating hot dogs, going to football games and buying guns while wearing a red hat with being patriotic, Trump’s base has lost sight of what it means to uphold national values. For them, to love their country means loving Trump.
It’s time to push back on this love affair and call out Trump supporters for their anti-American values. No one should be able to claim that they love their country and still support him. We might disagree on whether schools should focus on teaching students the symbolism of 1619 and we might disagree on whether or not we should idolize the association of 1776 with freedom, but it’s time to agree that our nation deserves better than Trump.
==
an 920
trump’s ‘patriotic education’ commission is yet another battle over the meaning of words
History News NetworkSeptember 21, 2020
On Thursday, President Trump announced that he would be creating a “patriotic education” initiative called the “1776 Commission” that will develop a “pro-American curriculum” for the nation’s schools. Attacking the New York Times’…
==
zinn makes kids ashamed /child abuse
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/heres-why-trump-and-his-supporters-are-so-threatened-by-critical-race-theory/
==
==
920
no lnx twt
thehill
Trump on Sunday threatened to withhold funding from California schools incorporating The New York Times’ 1619 Project in their classrooms.
"Department of Education is looking at this," Trump tweeted in response to an anonymous post claiming the Times’ series had been “implemented… into the public schools” in California.
"If so, they will not be funded!" he added.
The president’s allies have frequently targeted the Pulitzer-winning Times series, which emphasizes the legacy of slavery in American history.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in July introduced legislation that would make any schools using 1619 Project materials ineligible for federal professional-development grants. Cotton called the series “a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union.”
Pelosi: Trump 'engaged in fright and fear' in efforts to 'discredit'...
DeWine: Trump 'extremely respectful' of military, says report has...
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last week ordered federal agencies to end workplace sensitivity training that teaches the U.S. “is an inherently racist or evil country” or "that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil."
It is unclear to what extent, if at all, such programs are in place at the agencies, with the OMB citing “press reports.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/tom-cotton-actually-called-slavery-a-necessary-evil-in-push-to-ban-schools-from-teaching-the-1619-project/
no lnx
Laura Clawson / Daily Kos July 27, 2020
The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones continues to live rent-free in Republican heads, with Sen. Tom Cotton pushing Senate legislation to penalize schools for using a curriculum based on the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones spearheaded the project, which “seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution,” as the project was described when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her essay.
”The 1619 Project is left-wing propaganda. It’s revisionist history at its worst,” Cotton toldthe Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Cotton’s view? “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”
So … it’s left-wing propaganda for Hannah-Jones to put slavery and its legacy at the center of U.S. history, but the Founding Fathers saw slavery as “the necessary evil upon which the union was built.” If it was a necessary evil according to the people who defined the basis of the nation, then yeah, it’s necessary to put slavery at the center of our history.
Cotton said he rejects, “root and branch,” the idea “that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable.” But again, he really took that “necessary evil” thing and ran with it.
Hannah-Jones challenged Cotton, asking “Were the Founders right or wrong, @TomCottonAR, when they called slavery a ‘necessary evil upon which the Union was built’? Because either you agree with their assessment of slavery as necessary or you admit they were lying and it was just an evil and dishonorable choice. Which?”
Cotton’s is an attempt to counter a status quo history curriculum that has its own politics.
“The way that history is taught in American schools is highly politicized and it really has a nationalistic agenda,” Hannah-Jones recently told WBUR. “What that has meant is that it has necessarily downplayed the role of slavery.”
School districts including Chicago, Washington, and Buffalo are adopting the 1619 Project curriculum, and Cotton sees this as his chance to elevate himself in the Trumpian culture wars, sending a strong message that he intends to continue sidelining Black people in U.S. history—and, onlookers can infer, in other ways.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/why-conservatives-are-so-upset-about-the-new-york-times-1619-project/
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/why-the-conservative-mindset-is-so-threatened-by-the-truth-about-slavery/
no lnx
Why the conservative mindset is so threatened by the truth about slavery
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 22, 2019
It has been fascinating to observe the reaction from conservatives to the 1619 Project recently launched by the New York Times. As a reminder, here is how it opens.
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. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.
A common theme in the reaction of conservatives to this project is to assume that telling our story truthfully is somehow an attack on Donald Trump. For example, Dinesh D’Souza, the man who has spent the last few years blaming Democrats for the oppression of African Americans and claiming that it is the Republican Party that has always fought for freedom, said that the 1619 Project was a “political hit to discredit Trump and his base.” It is always interesting to watch Trump’s enablers assume that any honest conversation about racism in America reflects badly on the president, even when he’s not mentioned.
But there is another reaction to the 1619 Project that is even more revealing about the mindset that is at the heart of conservatism today. Newt Gingrich called the project propaganda worthy of Pravda, Cal Thomas referred to it as an “attempt to shape history to fit its own biases,” and Jeffrey Lord told Sean Hannity that “what the New York Times is engaged in is the Stalinizing of American history…The left wanted to do a total rewrite of American history and remake the story that we’re founded in racism. It’s all about race.”
In one sense, these conservatives are right. The New York Times described this project as an attempt to “reframe the country’s history.” That is because, following the Civil War, the remnants of the Confederacy attempted to “whitewash” our history. In an article titled, “Lee Surrendered, But His Lieutenants Kept Fighting,” Elizabeth Varon quoted this poem “by the black poet Charles R. Dinkins, in which Lee addresses his defeated army with the following charge.”
When fails the sword, the better way
Becomes the soldier’s part to play;
The south will whip the north some day
With ink and pen.
These competing versions of our country’s history reminded me of a speech I read recently by Walter Brueggmann. He is a Christian theologian, so his observations are couched in the context of the Bible, but they capture exactly what we are witnessing today. He talked about something called “ideological totalism,” that “intends to contain all thinkable, imaginable, doable social possibilities. That totalism always wants to monopolize imagination, and it wants to monopolize technology, so that there are no serious alternatives that seem on offer.”
Brueggman finds that kind of totalism in the biblical stories about the monarchy of Solomon and suggests that it was the Old Testament prophets who challenged the system.
So what you have in the Old Testament, when you read the royal history, is the managers of extraction who tend to operate with unambiguous memo. And disrupting that are these poetic voices that are dangerous and subversive and oppressive, because they are voices that come from outside the totalism and that refuse to accept the totalization as normative.
The prophetic task, as Brueggman sees it, is to first of all, identify the totalism. The second task is “to identify the contradictions that put us on the route to death, because one can see that we now live in a society that is engaged in its self-destruction.” Here is how he described that back in June of 2018, long before the New York Times initiated the 1619 Project.
[W]e might pay attention to the book by a Christian Baptist, The Half of It Has Never Been Told, which makes the compelling argument that the wealth of the United States basically is grounded in slavery. So if you think about the things that go around cheap labor and slavery, what you come up with is regressive taxation, high interest rates, stacked mortgage rates, and debt — so you can imagine the way we are helping college students get into insufferable debt, which assures that they will be willing workers in the extraction system for all of their working life. Plus, the fact that we have to recognize that this system is committed to the deregulation of banks and all sorts of deregulation, that lets creation be exploited. Deregulation really means the unleashing of predatory forces against the vulnerable.
The reason so many conservatives are threatened by the 1619 Project is that the story the authors tell is prophetic. It challenges the totalism on which their entire world view has been constructed. It is their mindset, which monopolizes imagination and stifles alternatives, that lays the groundwork for authoritarianism.
==