Oprah, Lionsgate Pick Up Disgraced NYT ‘1619 Project’ for Film, TV
Because of course they are.
![https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xzNyrFhzewhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR_7X0exvh8](https://c2.legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Oprah-Hannah-Jones.jpg)
The “1619 Project” from The New York Times received criticism due to inaccuracies. A fact-checker on the series even knocked on the paper after it ignored her expertise.
Facts don’t matter to Hollywood because Oprah Winfrey and Lionsgate picked up the series to make it into a series of television shows and films.
To make it even more laughable, Nikole Hannah-Jones will work as a creative leader and producer.
Why is it laughable? She won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for it, but, as I said, many found problems with the work.
This made me wonder how they will produce anything based on it. I figured we should revisit the criticism of the 1619 Project and the woman behind the mess.
Legit Criticism of the 1619 Project
Two Pulitzer Prize winners have denounced the project: Gordon Wood, American Revolution historian, and James McPherson, dean of Civil War historians.
Eliot Kaufman addressed their thoughts at the Wall Street Journal in December:
The “1619 Project” was launched in August with a 100-page spread in the Times’s Sunday magazine. It intends to “reframe the country’s history” by crossing out 1776 as America’s founding date and substituting 1619, the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Va. The project has been celebrated up and down the liberal establishment, praised by Sen. Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
A September essay for the World Socialist Web Site called the project a “racialist falsification” of history. That didn’t get much attention, but in November the interviews with the historians went viral. “I wish my books would have this kind of reaction,” Mr. Wood says in an email. “It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support.” He adds that fellow historians have privately expressed their agreement. Mr. McPherson coolly describes the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”
Even, for once, the World Socialist Web Site, run by the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party, spoke the truth:
“Ours is not a patriotic, flag-waving kind of perspective,” says Thomas Mackaman, the World Socialist Web Site’s interviewer and a history professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He simply recognizes that the arrival of 20 slaves in 1619 wasn’t a “world-altering event.” Slavery had existed across the world for millennia, and there were already slaves elsewhere in what would become the U.S. before 1619.
But “even if you want to make slavery the central story of American history,” he says, the Times gets it backward. The American Revolution didn’t found a “slavocracy,” as Ms. Hannah-Jones puts it. Instead, in Mr. Mackaman’s telling, it “brought slavery in for questioning in a way that had never been done before” by “raising universal human equality as a fundamental principle.” Nor was protecting slavery “one of the primary reasons” the colonists declared independence, as Ms. Hannah-Jones claims. It’s no coincidence the abolitionists rapidly won votes to end slavery in five of the original 13 states, along with Vermont and the new states of the Midwest.
Hannah-Jones cannot handle any criticism and never held back her hatred of white people because she shot back at these highly educated men in their history fields. The snobbish attitude blows me away:
The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it “decenters whiteness” and disdains its critics as “old, white male historians.” She tweeted of Mr. McPherson: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” Her own qualifications are an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master’s in journalism. She says the project goes beyond Mr. McPherson’s expertise, the Civil War. “For the most part,” she writes in its lead essay, “black Americans fought back alone” against racism. No wonder she’d rather not talk about the Civil War.
To the Trotskyists, Ms. Hannah-Jones writes: “You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are.” She calls them “white men claiming to be socialists.” Perhaps they’re guilty of being white men, but they’re definitely socialists. Their faction, called the Workers League until 1995, was “one of the most strident and rigid Marxist groups in America” during the Cold War, says Harvey Klehr, a leading historian of American communism.
Kaufman wrote that Hannah-Jones is adamant that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” She does not believe the Founders believed all men are equal, even though abolitionists disagreed and Martin Luther King, Jr. Even Frederick Douglass asked, “’If the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument,’ how could it be that ‘neither slavery, slaveholding nor slave . . . be anywhere found in it?’”
Rich Lowry at The New York Post disputed the slavery in our DNA with other examples: Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Constitution prohibited the slave trade starting in 1808.
Now let’s get to Leslie M. Harris, a history professor at Northwestern University. She helped fact-check the “1619 Project” and explained how the NYT ignored her. Look the opening paragraph in her March 2020 op-ed in Politico:
On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.
An NYT editor asked Harris weeks before that interview with Hannah-Jones to verify if the colonists wanted independence mainly so they could keep slavery.
Harris said no. The editor asked for other information as well.
Did the NYT listen? No:
Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay. In addition, the paper’s characterizations of slavery in early America reflected laws and practices more common in the antebellum era than in Colonial times, and did not accurately illustrate the varied experiences of the first generation of enslaved people that arrived in Virginia in 1619.
Both sets of inaccuracies worried me, but the Revolutionary War statement made me especially anxious. Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history. I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking. So far, that’s exactly what has happened.
I encourage people to read Harris’s op-ed because she does not try to appease either side. She wants to make sure everyone has the historical truth. Not a liberal truth. Not a conservative truth. The actual truth.
Hannah-Jones Past
A few weeks ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones pushed a conspiracy theory on Twitter that the government gave fireworks to minority communities. This way, the minorities are used to the noise when the police use their artillery on the town.
Hannah-Jones deleted her tweet but did not apologize right away. She did so a day later after the National Review reached out for comment.
Then Fuzzy blogged about an old letter Hannah-Jones wrote to the editor of the Notre Dame student newspaper:
She alleged that white people “pump drugs and guns into the black community, pack black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our community.”
Hannah-Jones also said in the 1995 letter, which The Federalist published on Thursday, that “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world,” and described Christopher Columbus as “no different than Hitler:”
The NYT and Hannah-Jones do not care about facts because, in June, she published in the paper that it is time for the reparations. She wrote that “the country must finally take seriously what it owes black Americans.”
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Comments
They speak truth to facts. It’s a Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic religious thing.
There is precedent. Feminists spoke truth to facts in an effort to establish rape-rape culture that would socially justify the Planned Parenthood (PP) protocol (“wicked solution”), including reproductive rites and clinical cannibalism. Diversity (i.e. denial of individual dignity, denial of individual conscience) under the Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic religion, is a progressive condition (PC).
WTF is wrong with Oprah? She’s been oppressed?
Same thing that’s always been wrong with Oprah.
Evidently all those years attending Wright Chicago Church………
Remember the Sermon on Mount Rushmore!!!!!!!
Why Left Is Lying And Spinning Trump Speech And Where They’re Trying To Take Us
https://youtu.be/64GgCVqRLzU
“She wrote that “the country must finally take seriously what it owes black Americans.”
She better start praying that we do not give these grifters what they deserve.
We owe them the freedom and opportunity to succeed delineated in the Constitution…and not one damn thing more.
A black billionaire is gonna produce a series on how systematically racist this country is.
You’re a racist for saying that. Oprah should be an octillionaire. This country is holding her down.
OK, yes, yes. I get it.
“and described Christopher Columbus as “no different than Hitler”
No way. Hitler had so many catchy tunes. Who of us doesn’t join a song fest of the Horst Wessel Lied every April 20th?
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2tpj3g
La la la….
It’s springtime for Oprah and Germany….
Oprah has always been just like Hillary in every way in my opinion – she was just more successful in giving away OTHER people’s money.
It was not blacks who made Oprah rich. Blacks despise her.
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1939460_1939452_1939416,00.html
Top 10 Oprah Controversies
The pioneering media mogul has weathered her fair share of conflict. TIME takes a look at 10 heated controversies
Scandal in South Africa
APTN / AP
“When the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls opened in Johannesburg in 2007, Nelson Mandela, Tina Turner, Sydney Poitier, Spike Lee and Oprah herself attended a lavish ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the landmark boarding school, founded with $40 million of Oprah’s money. But less than a year later, six of the 152 students who had been PERSONALLY selected by Oprah to attend the institution came forward to accuse dorm matron Virginia Tiny Makgobo of sexual and physical abuse….
You know every body that shows up on that “list”…
I don’t know if it’s true or not…..
Not much gratefulness from many minorities for living in such a great country of opportunity. Surprised that this 1619 nonsense wasn’t thought of sooner. Reminds me:
“It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.” – Eric Hoffer
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
– unabridged Declaration of Independence
in the presence and under the steady eye of the honored and trusted President of the United States, with the members of his wise and patriotic Cabinet, we, the colored people, newly emancipated and rejoicing in our blood-bought freedom, near the close of the first century in the life of this Republic, have now and here unveiled, set apart, and dedicated a monument of enduring granite and bronze
– ORATION IN MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, delivered at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876
For an unprecedented reconciliation through sacrifice of blood and treasure, and for “our Posterity” that has stood, when they could kneel, in the face of progressive diversity, and adversity, we owe Americans, our forefather and foremothers, our sons and daughter, a debt of gratitude and resolve.
I’m so sick of all the race stuff.
So in 1619 slaveowning Africans decided that a Oprah’s family were garbage unworthy of Africa
So that’s how north Africa got the Sahara barren of all vegetable life…..
Blacks need to pay reparations to other blacks. LOL.
In 1621 a black man by the name of Anthony Johnson arrived from Africa to Virginia to be an indentured servant, not a slave. He was captured by Arab traders in his native Angola and sold as a slave. By 1635 he had completed his service contract, and by the late 1640’s he had acquired 250 acres of land. As a land owner he started using indentured servants himself, acquiring five. In 1654 one of his servants, a black man by the name of John Casor was due for release from his service. Johnson decided to extend his service and Casor left to work for Robert Parker who was a free white man. That year Johnson sued Parker in Northampton Court, and in 1655 the court ruled that Johnson could hold Cason indefinitely. The court gave sanction for blacks to hold slaves of their own race.
There were lots of black slave owners in the South.
It makes sense. They could buy family and friends and besides it was a Status thing since about 99% of white crackers could not afford them. Sort of like the $200 Nike shoes of their day…..
Oprah pushed harmful medical quackery on her TV show, so it’s not surprising that she would peddle harmful political garbage, too.
Perhaps vile Oprah can do a TV special focusing on her appalling and contemptible act of falsely accusing/slandering a hapless clerk in a European handbag, alleging that the clerk refused to show her an expensive handbag. Everyone recall this episode? One of the wealthiest and most powerful women in the world still sought to cast herself as an alleged “victim,” by slinging a contrived and baseless accusation against a woman far less powerful than she.
The loathsome Michelle Obama pulled the same stunt a few years later, during her ridiculous photo-op stunt trip to a Target store, playing for laughs on late-night TV an encounter with an old (white) woman shopper who had asked her for help in reaching an item on a high shelf. A few months later, Obama had the brazen gall to cast the same incident in an allegedly nefarious light, implying that the woman was a racist because she had recognized her (she hadn’t), and, had treated her like hired help in daring to request assistance from her.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/oprah-winfrey-racism-story-is-604351
A fat woman, who lectures people on how to lose weight. A hopelessly single woman who lectures people on relationships.
The thing about Oprah Winfrey is that she’s kind of pathological: she just goes which way the wind blows, no matter what the harm.
Remember the Oprah Winfrey movie “The Color Purple”, in which the oppressor of black women was the character played by psycho Danny Glover?
How she conveniently forgets.
I don’t remember “A Wrinkle In Time” and thankfully, I never will!
Just a minute observation (of probably only passing significance, or maybe not), the King’s College (Wilkes Barre, PA) historian, Thomas Mackaman, when he downplays 1619’s stress on Jamestown’s importation of 20 slaves, he does so at a college that, among several others, is governed by the Catholic Order, C S C (Congregatio a Sancta Cruce or Congregation of the Holy Cross).
The flagship (and very richly endowed, powerhouse-) school of the collegiate consortium is none other than the 1619 Project’s controversial author’s alma mater, The University of Notre Dame.
With 1619 critic-historian Mackaman’s King’s College and Notre Dame being allied in spirit, and likely, too, in cause, I can’t help but speculate — with, granted, only the flimsiest of associative evidence, if it’s even that at all — on whether, with Notre Dame’s tacit or other blessing, the Indiana Irish are kinda distancing themselves, or something else, from their undergraduate in history and African-American studies alumna’s increasingly recognized — most recently and notably, as author Mary Chastain points out, by Northwestern’s eminently fair and truth-seeking, multiple history award-winning (vs journalism’s Pulitzer, won by Harris-Jones) scholar, Leslie Harris — historiographic faux pas.
Just an idle thought, mind you. Anyway, I find the pseudo-historian, and hate-and-sensation-dependent Nikole Hannah-Jones a pretty nasty-spirited soul, maybe incorrigibly so. I pity her apparently deeply ingrained, irreversibly hurt and endlessly hurting spirit, along with all her ilk.
So Oprah’s looking to cash in. Okay, fine for capitalism, but lousy for Philadelphia (brotherly love) and all other major metropolitan centers, and agape.
Maybe or maybe not incidentally, it’s worth noting that Eagles’ WR DeSean Jackson might have found Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project — along with Minister Louis Farrakhan’s cockroach-like-driven, any-more-than-none-is-too-many antisemitic sermons — inspiring, something to include in what DeSean might pronounce, puppet-like and with full BLM, intersectionality push, as “My Truth”.
A lot of visual-psychic distortion and distress can be experienced when viewing the world through the lens of a Hannah-Jones explanation of America’s reason for being.
That said, if Desean is as sincere in recanting his foolish take on “Hitler’s own words” and about his apology for too causally accepting and repeating the grave conspiracy theory’s false and highly damaging quote, it would help us few-to-many remaining skeptics re this part of his truth-loving repertoire to find him joining one of the NFL’s Jewish players, Patriots WR Julian Edelman, for a day trip or more, at Edelman’s conciliatory urging, for he and DeSean to visit and take in the sights and vapors of both the US Holocaust Museum and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/ny-julian-edelman-desean-jackson-20200709-ult6sssudvay3j3m5qi64up4wy-story.html
Chiefs lineman and fellow-Jew and pro athlete Mitchell Schwartz also chimed in on the Jackson affair with his own statement.
https://twitter.com/MitchSchwartz71/status/1281033564432355329/photo/1
Very cool move, guys.
Jackson’s comments have already caused and have a huge potential for causing additional emotional, sub-cultural, and intra-cultural harm. To the extent Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project’s awfully tortured, bigoted, fundamentally flawed, sensationalist screed has already affected such undisciplined and impressionable, albeit maybe well-meaning minds, such as DeSean Jackson’s and countless others in these highly troubled times, is not palliative and helpful by any means, but, to be sure, an intra-American-cultural bane. Hopefully, it’s merely transitory and not long-lasting.
Much more salutary, actual inter-racial work, well beyond Edelman’s proposed trips and Schwartz’s public statement, will have to be done to reverse the harm likely to come from this now-notorious, shameless, profit-pursuing and deplorable journalistic misadventure. Judged in this civil vein, Hannah-Jones should be held fully responsible and financially liable for any and all harm that ensues directly from her social misdeed. It’s uncivil to add truth-minimizing insult to historic, culture-absorbed injury.
Alas, what could have been, in Professor Harris’s view, a vitally needed historical corrective to an incomplete and distorted, largely unbalanced picture of what was from its inception the long but self-limiting enterprise of American slavery turned out to be, in Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, an invitation for overweening, picayunely harsh, and intellectually less-than-honest historians and other commentators to overlook in 1619 the true centerpiece-ideas and -events of America’s divisive and most injurious sin with slavery.
Finally, can you imagine — from whatever serpentine and cryptic, indirect source, yes, for sure, her finder’s fee — for the ultimate goal and success of the 1619 Project, achieving the federal enactment for reparations, a healing balm for black lives only?
(And nothing at all, in this spirit of reconciliation, for all the damage, property and so much otherwise, suffered by Native-Americans? and Asian-Americans during the 19th century? and Mexicans from Texas to California during America’s westward expansion? . . . and in relation to the Colonial Dutch purchase of Manhattan from the Canarsee tribe (and no other) of the Lenape Nation, the price differential above $24? and . . . ?)
At some point, it seems to my lay way of thinking, there’s a common legal beginning after the nation, both sides during the Civil War, suffered tremendous loss of life, wounding, and a weakened to canceled treasury — which led to the necessary and fortuitous events of, among others, the Constitution’s post-war revisions, known as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. I say, let us count from there and from the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s.
All now, since the Civil War and the more recent enactments, are rightfully equal in the same, American race, let’s keep going and forget this reparations nonsense. We have a whole, entire country to keep strengthening, according to the ongoing social hypothesis, still not disproved, E PLURIBUS UNUM. Our enemies are rattling their sabers.
Correction, inserted after “quote”:
That said, if DeSean is as sincere in recanting his foolish take on “Hitler’s own words,” and about his apology for too causally accepting and repeating the grave conspiracy theory’s false and highly damaging quote, as some seem to think, it would help us few-to-many remaining skeptics . . .
They’ll do anything to make money.