Washington Post columnist George Will understandably is not most Republicans’ cup of tea considering his abandonment of the party, which started well before his hatred for Donald Trump became a thing.
But he wrote a column last week that deliciously ripped apart the “1619 Project” and the New York Times’ amplification of it, in the process enraging “woke” leftists who didn’t appreciate the inconvenient truths he told about the project’s creator Nikole Hannah-Jones’ flagrant rewriting of history.
In it, Will examined the central component of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ deeply flawed argument: That the basis for the American Revolution was to preserve slavery. That claim and many others she made have been discredited by scholars and historians alike, but because the New York Times published it and because she received so many seemingly prestigious accolades from the usual corners (including a Pulitizer prize) as a result, the “hate America” contingent of the Democratic party latched on to it as “further proof” that America was “systemically racist” from the start.
Because this myth persists, and because tenets of it in concert with CRT are being taught as subject matter on college campuses and in some public school classrooms as part of a larger plan by so-called progressives to radically transform America into something it’s not, Will decided to tackle the claim as well:
[Claim:] The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775 British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 19 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.Writing history is not like doing physics. But event A cannot have caused event B if B began before A.
Will also referenced comments by Gordon S. Wood, who he described as “today’s foremost scholar of America’s Founding.” At a recent speaking engagement, Wood suggested that “the New York Times has the history completely backwards,” pointing out that when the war started, Britain “was not threatening to abolish slavery in its empire” and that colonists in the north were forming abolition movements in 1776:
“It was the American colonists who were interested in abolitionism in 1776. … Not only were the northern states the first slaveholding governments in the world to abolish slavery, but the United States became the first nation in the world to begin actively suppressing the despicable international slave trade. The New York Times has the history completely backwards.”
Will concluded his piece by noting that the New York Times’ claim that American exceptionalism stems in large part from slavery and racism proves that “the 1619 Project’s historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance.” At its core, Will correctly concluded that the purpose behind the project was to “service … progressivism’s agenda,” not to correct any alleged historical inaccuracies.
It did not take long for the Usual Suspects to start trotting out the race cards and related words like “white supremacy” in an attempt to deflect from his argument (perhaps because they couldn’t refute it):
Melanie Sill, who was the executive editor of the Raleigh News and Observer at the time the Duke lacrosse rape allegations were made, also went after Will, claiming his column was “as intellectually dishonest as anything I’ve ever read,” saying “it’s a reminder that those who cannot be curious and reconsider beliefs should not be journalists”:
It was an especially laughable attack when one considers her and her former paper’s very central roles in perpetuating the rape hoax with daily unsubstantiated “reporting” that they later admitted relied too heavily on statements made by disgraced former District Attorney Mike Nifong.
This Twitter user summed up Will’s column and the leftist outrage on it perfectly:
But even the biggest lies can be exposed, which is exactly what has happened with the continued pushback from critics of Hannah-Jones, the NY Times, and their project. And no matter where the debunking comes from, whether it’s from distinguished commentators and educators conservatives like or anti-Trump columnists they don’t, it’s something that needs to keep happening because radical leftists should not be allowed to get away with such a contemptuous attempt at rewriting American history and in the process completely (and deliberately) undoing its foundations.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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