Tag: 1619 project

Is Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project Grift Drying Up?

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who stated that it would be an “honor” to have the riots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death named after her 1619 Project, and who has earned millions of dollars from taxpayers since then, seems to be angry that the cash cow is giving less and less milk.

Hannah-Jones, who is easily triggered by any challenge to her fabulist narrative about the “slavocracy” that she claims is this country, was further angered after states began passing legislation forbidding the use of curriculum materials based on the 1619 Project (and the Critical Race Theory which “informs” it). Charging Republicans with “whitewashing history,” she tried to get the left “mad enough” to organize by warning them about the “dark and scary times.”

Her rage has only grown since the 2024 election. Hannah-Jones has been accusing President Trump of “erasing black history” — a laughable charge, given that Hannah-Jones knowingly distorts history in The 1619 Project and spin-off products, such as her picture book, where she asserts that “mommies” and “daddies” were “kidnapped” from Africa by white men.

Plus, President Trump has not been good for her (designer) pocketbook. The gigs that funded a lavish lifestyle seem to be fewer in number and flatlining at the fee she was earning back in 2020, the year after The 1619 Project first came out as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine. As I recounted in my book, Debunking The 1619 Project, given that Hannah-Jones was speaking an average of once every two weeks at public universities and earning $25,000 per appearance (often remotely due to Covid), her earnings from taxpayers amounted to about $650,000 in 2020.

Additionally, the Pulitzer Prize-winner was speaking at public libraries, events funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, educational organizations, and commemorations like Juneteenth, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, and the 1921 Tulsa “massacre.” In January 2022, she made $55,000 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is not to mention her salary at The New York Times (a largely no-show job) then also as professor (Knight Chair of Race and Journalism) at Howard University beginning in 2021, and royalties and fees from the 1619 Project hardcover books, films, and other spin-off products.

Her gig as commencement speaker was interrupted this year, however, by “new federal pressures” that prompted Harvard University, and other institutions, to stop funding and providing facilities for “affinity” graduations for groups based on such aspects as race, ethnicity, and disability.

Hannah-Jones was a commencement speaker, but not at her usual center-stage space. She addressed black graduates in a conference room of the Marriot Hotel in Cambridge (the location apparently not revealed publicly until after the May 27 ceremony, which was organized by black Harvard undergraduates and alumni).

According to Harvard Magazine, Hannah-Jones noted that the graduating class had “entered college in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer, during a ‘so-called racial reckoning.’” They had witnessed the reversal of promises to confront “legacies of racism,” including the laying off of “the team behind the Harvard Slavery Remembrance program” (the work outsourced to an outside company) and the renaming of the diversity office to the Office for Community and Campus Life. (We should take note of such strategies.)

Hannah-Jones inspired graduates with the accusation, “The same administration that has been cast as heroic for standing up to Trump over academic freedom caved almost immediately on issues of diversity and inclusion, and in doing so — in not standing up for y’all — it didn’t do one thing to stop Trump’s attacks on this university.”

“They gave you up for cheap,” she charged. “And I hope one day you will make them pay for that.”

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‘1619 Project’ author receives $29K in taxpayer funds from public library for 1-hour speaking event

The Fairfax County Public Library doled out $29,350 in taxpayer funds to “1619 Project” author Nikole Hannah-Jones for an upcoming one-hour speaking event, the New York Post reported.

Hannah-Jones authored the controversial New York Times Magazine series “The 1619 Project,” which aimed to reframe the United States as a system built on racism. Earlier this month, Hulu released a docuseries adaptation of Hannah-Jones’ project.

Northern Virginia residents were enraged that a local public library wrote a $33,350 check to Hannah-Jones, $29,350 of which was covered by taxpayers’ dollars. For the one-hour speaking engagement at McLean Community Center next month, Hannah-Jones will rake in approximately $589 per minute.

Fairfax County Times reported that Hannah-Jones’ contract with the Virginia library also included “non-stop, direct” first-class plane tickets, hotel accommodations, ground transportation, and “$350.00 to cover speaker’s out of pocket expenses.”

Last month, Virginia taxpayers were fuming when they discovered Fairfax County Public Library shelled out $22,500 to another divisive author, Ibram X. Kendi, for a one-hour virtual talk.

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Obama Foundation Event On ‘Disinformation’ Features Serial Spreaders Of Disinformation

The Obama Foundation is hosting a forum Thursday where “disinformation” will be discussed by a group with alleged ties to spreading disinformation and a historian who has been criticized by many in her field.

The “Tackling Disinformation, Protecting Democracy” forum, hosted by former President Barack Obama in connection with Columbia University and the University of Chicago, will be moderated by Renee DiResta, who allegedly helped sway elections through the use of bots and is connected the censorship of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of the panelists for the forum, is the author of the “1619 Project” which claims slavery was the primary cause of the American Revolution, a claim rebuked by historians and a group of college professors in a New York Times article. 

“[Nikole Hannah-Jones] erroneously claims that slavery was a primary cause of the American Revolution. She bases this claim on the Dunmore proclamation, where the British governor of Virginia offered freedom to slaves who fought for the royalist cause. She claims at one point that Dunmore’s proclamation induced George Washington to join the rebellion,” Phillip Magness, who authored a critique of the “1619 Project,” told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“This is false though. Dunmore issued his proclamation in November 1775. But George Washington had already been named the commander-in-chief of the Continental army the previous June,” Magness continued.

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Author of the 1619 Project charged public library $40k for a  speech, causing it to go over-budget

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a former New York Times journalist, was paid $40,000 for a 45-minute speech at a high school in Arlington, Va., which is just a few miles from Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she is a tenured professor.

Her speech was part of a three-hour program held by the Arlington Public Library, and it provided her an opportunity to promote her new book, “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” according to The Daily Wire.

The fee paid to Hannah-Jones created some tension between the Friends of the Library, which raises money to fund events such as this, and the library itself. It caused the library to exceed its budget by $7,500. She also added a clause to the agreement that there would be no recording of her speech, with a $100,000 penalty if that were to be violated.

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Debunking the 1619 Project: Africans Were Not The First Slaves of Virginia

To countermand the insistence that America is solely responsible for slavery according to the 1619 Project, here are the facts which prove their blatant falsehood of research.

One must understand how, when Christianity became widespread throughout Europe, there was a distinction pertaining to the enslaving of Christians that endured through to the latter part of the 17th century, a baptized Christian could not be sold as a lifetime slave. This held true when the first black “slaves” were traded for food from a Dutch slave ship in August of 1619. The eyewitness, John Rolfe wrote in his diary, “About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty negars. They were needed for the booming tobacco crop, but had been baptized, so as Christians they could not be enslaved for life, but only indentured, just like many of the English colonists, for 5-7 years.”1

As an interesting point to consider is how historians refute Rolfe’s statement, stating it was in fact a Portuguese slave trader San Juan Bautista which had been captured by the British privateers by The White Lion and The Treasurer in the Gulf of Mexico. The San Juan Bautista was bound for Mexico to sell its ‘cargo’.2 While this can perhaps be accepted, what cannot be is the demand that African slaves began at this point in our history and what becomes more dangerous, is the omission and absence of the rest of Rolfe’s diary entry regarding their status as Christians. This in and of itself marks of shoddy scholarship, for this was the basis for decades.

The other point that is not explored is the fact that England was unable to break into the African Slave Trade, as it was under the monopoly of African tribal leaders, the Middle East, the Portuguese and later the Dutch; (The White Lion was flying the Dutch flag.) The difficulty at the time for England, was that her economy was somewhat spent in maintaining their fledging colony of Virginia and with France occupying the vast territory to the north and Spain occupying the vast territory to the south, England had little inclination at the time to invoke either country in war.

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Misinformation, disinformation, and the 1619 Project

Earlier this year, Joe Biden asked social media companies to engage in more censorship in an effort to divert attention from the wholesale failure of his administration to “shut down the virus.” In a televised speech, he said “I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows. It has to stop.”

More recently, CNN denounced “misinformation” that blamed high gas prices and inflation on the Biden administration. Media outlets have accused Joe Rogan of “spreading disinformation” about Covid-19 and the vaccine because… he dared to ask scientific experts questions on these topics. Other examples of ideas that the legacy media has alternately labelled as “misinformation” and “disinformation” include assertions that Covid-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China; the idea that there was some orchestrated manipulation of procedures to favor Biden in the 2020 election; that Hunter Biden’s laptop offered evidence that the Biden family had been enriched by various forms of international corruption; and that powerful NGOs and world governments are leveraging the pandemic to facilitate a “Great Reset” of the global economy. The campaign to ban these claims – most which are demonstrably true – indicates not a dangerous spread of “disinformation,” but a dangerous weaponization of the concept of disinformation in order to insulate the institutional left from criticism and opposition.

It is no accident that virtually every claim that is consistently labelled as disinformation is one that threatens the policy agenda of the Democratic party (or parts of their agenda that they are too embarrassed to state publicly). “Disinformation” is no longer a concept used to separate truth from falsehood. In the past few years, it has been rhetorically intensified to circumvent the question of truth entirely. It is a means to annex the public’s role in assessing the validity of reporting, placing this authority solely in the hands of “experts” who have the exclusive right to say what is “true.” Understanding the differences between “misinformation” and “disinformation” and observing the ways these concepts are arbitrarily applied is crucial to grasping how our media and other institutions undermine genuine public deliberation—a prerequisite for any functioning democracy.

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‘1619 Project’ Founder Doesn’t Know When The Civil War Happened

The creator of the revisionist ‘1619 Project,’ Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has long argued that pretty much all complex modern issues – from obesity and traffic jams to capitalism itself – is the result of racism being at America’s core, apparently has yet to grasp the simple dates for the Civil War. With the recent release of the much anticipated book formed out of her popular essay series, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, academics and educators have hailed it as laying the groundwork for upending and transforming the way the United States’ foundational story of its beginnings as a nation is told, even down to impacting how elementary school teachers present America’s founders to school children.

The book assures us that “the inheritance of 1619” – that is slavery, racism and social injustice – “reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.” Given her outsized influence as a New York Times writer, and now that she’s being held up in mainstream media and even establishment academia as an ‘expert’ on American history, it’s not too comforting to know that she doesn’t know the basic dates for the Civil War.

“…until 1865, when the North was reluctantly drawn into a war that ultimately ended slavery.” The woefully misinformed and ignorant of basic facts response which claimed the Civil War began in 1865 came during a Monday Twitter spat with William Hogeland, who himself is a widely published author of United States history.

A number of commenters were quick to point out in the wake of Hannah-Jones getting a basic fact which is taught to school children across the country wrong that the error is inexcusable. “Why would we expect you to know the correct year,” one quipped sarcastically.

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‘1619 Project’ Creator: ‘I Don’t Really Understand This Idea That Parents Should Decide’ What’s ‘Taught’ In Schools

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the far-left “1619 Project” – which has been widely criticized by historians – said during a segment on Sunday that she did not understand why parents should get a say in what their children learn in school.

Jones made the remarks during a panel on NBC News’ “Meet The Press,” when pressed on how parent’s involvement in education shaped the governor’s race in Virginia.

“Well, I would say the governor’s race in Virginia was decided based on the success of a right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents that they needed to fight against their children being indoctrinated as race – as being called racists. But that was a propaganda campaign,” she claimed without providing any evidence.

“And I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” she later added. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have an expertise in the subject area. And that is not my job. When the, when the governor or the candidate said that he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that. But that’s just the fact. This is why we send our children to school and don’t homeschool, because these are the professional educators who have the expertise to teach social studies, to teach history, to teach science, to teach literature. And I think we should leave that to the educators.”

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Nikole Hannah-Jones Admits Her ‘1619 Project’ Is A Useful Political ‘Narrative’

On Oct. 13, the Roosevelt Institute awarded The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones the Freedom of Speech Award, one of their Four Freedoms Awards. In her acceptance speech, Hannah-Jones unknowingly revealed the truth about her ahistorical 1619 Project, as well as the Orwellian nature of the award she received.

Hannah-Jones has a way of letting slip her true goals. The 1619 Project was published in New York Times Magazine to commemorate the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown, where it “reframed” American history by replacing 1776 with the year 1619, when our real Founding — as a “slavocracy” — really began.

In her Oct. 13 remarks, she confirmed this project is actually advocacy journalism. She gave the game away when calling the project a “narrative.” She also noted “the narrative allows for policy.” The policy she was referring to was reparations.

The bestowal of the Roosevelt Institute award came only weeks after Hannah-Jones gave the annual Kops Freedom of the Press lecture at Cornell University and served as featured speaker at “Banned Books Week” events. The stream of accolades is astounding. But they have much to do with the image of persecuted speaker of truths Hannah-Jones has cultivated through social media and television appearances.

The performative ritual was put on display at the Oct.13 ceremony as Dorian Warren, president of the nonprofit Community Change and cohost of a Nation magazine podcast, interviewed Hannah-Jones in the fawning manner to which she has become accustomed. He marveled at her “resilience.” How are you “holding up?” he asked.

Hannah-Jones acted as if she were being hounded by the U.S. attorney general and the FBI — like the parents voicing objections at school board meetings to the kind of curricula she supports. It depends “on the day,” she sighed. She took the hostile reactions as a “testament” to the power of journalism.

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‘It was only under democracy that black people had leadership roles.’ Cuban exile leader says 1619 Project founder ‘needs to read some Cuban history’ after she the claimed communist country has the ‘least racial inequality’ in the world

The leader of a US Cuban exile group has slammed 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones after she claimed Cuba had the ‘least inequality between black and white people’ thanks to its socialist government.

Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat spoke out against the New York Times journalist Tuesday after a 2019 podcast where she called the communist country one of the most ‘equal’ in the world, resurfaced online.

The Havana-born scholar, who is based in Miami, said Hannah-Jones’s remarks do not ‘reflect the reality of Cuban history’, noting there has actually been a lack of black leadership on the island since the 1959 revolution – which saw dictator Fidel Castro ascend to power.

‘There is a very simple comparison you can make that shows how wrong this statement by Nikole Hannah-Jones is,’ Gutierrez-Boronat told DailyMail.com. 

‘Look at the central committee of the Communist Party for the past 62 years and tell me how many prominent black Cubans have been in that central committee.

‘And then look at the republic that existed between 1902 and 1959. You couldn’t write the history of the republic without mentioning all the prominent black Cubans who were there. 

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