President Trump on Monday doubled down on threats to defund public school systems that implement a thoroughly debunked New York Times series called “The 1619 Project” into their curriculums.
On Sunday, Trump suggested California schools may lose funding if they teach “the 1619 Project,” which he said is a form of “revisionist history,” according to Breitbart News. When asked by a reporter Monday at a press conference why he was so openly hostile toward the Times’ reporting, he responded, “I want everybody to know everything they can about our history.”
“I’m not a believer in cancel culture. The good and the bad. If you don’t study the bad, it could happen again,” the president said.
The 1619 Project is a series of reporting from The New York Times Magazine that argues America’s true founding was 1619, not 1776, because that was the year the first slaves arrived from Africa. It also falsely claims the American Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery.
In 1619, about two dozen Africans arrived in the Chesapeake Bay region as indentured servants, not slaves, and at the time were little more than an oddity. They joined over 200,000 white indentured servants who were already living and working in the area, according to author Colin Woodard and countless other academics and historians.
“We grew up with a certain history, and now they’re trying to change our history, revisionist history,” Trump said.
New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones falsely claimed in the series the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery, a concept that was immediately challenged by historians. The project won a Pulitzer prize anyway.
The president continued to slam the attack on national monuments and statues from far-left activists, including proposed plans to rename federal monuments in Washington, D.C., including some named after George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
“This is the big stuff, and they want to rename it, they want to re-designate it, they want to take stuff down,” Trump said. “No, we don’t do that. Not going to happen with me, I guarantee you that.”
The 1619 project has been praised by liberals and left-wing activists, including Sen. Kamala Harris and former Democrat presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Yet Pulitzer prize-winning historians such as Gordon Wood and James McPherson have slammed the 100-page spread published last August as “so wrong in so many ways” and an “unbalanced, one-sided account” that “left most of the history out,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
“It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support,” Wood wrote in an email to the Journal last year.
Hannah-Jones, the revisionist who authored the 1619 Project, has said she is proud her story “decenters whiteness” and blasts critics as “old, white male historians.” She tweeted of Mr. McPherson: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” Hannah-Jones’s own qualifications only include an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master’s in journalism, reports the Journal.
Trump’s threats come on the heels of the president ordering a purge of teaching “critical race theory” in federal agencies. According to Red State, that announcement last week from Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, came with little attention from the media. Vought released a memo reading, “All agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”