The greatest Pulitzer since Duranty: the 1619 Project
Hey, if Arafat could get a Nobel Peace Prize, and Obama could get one for merely existing, and Walter Duranty can get a Pulitzer for dastardly lies, why not give it to the NY Times for its bogus anti-American “history” lesson known as the 1619 Project (I’ve written about the project many times before)?
Why ever not?
The 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary was awarded Monday to Nikole Hannah-Jones for an essay in the New York Times that falsely claimed the American Revolution was fought primarily to protect slavery…
Historians were outraged by Hannah-Jones’s false claim.
Andrew Sullivan tweets:
How many Pulitzer prizes have gone to essays that have had to subsequently publicly correct one of their core claims? Or been challenged by every major historian in the field, right and center and left?
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 4, 2020
I don’t know the answer. I do know that the Times has never given back Duranty’s Pulitzer; they say they don’t have it, and the Pulitzer board “has twice declined to withdraw the award.”
No surprise there.
Nobel peace prizes and Pulitzer prizes increasingly have become awards not for objective accomplishments in their respective fields, but for politically correct (that is, leftist) achievements. The achievement of the 1619 Project is as leftist propaganda, which is now the most basic function of the news. The project has already become accepted as a study guide – one of its goals from the start – in
many public schools, and as such will serve to shape the views of a new generation:
From the moment Fatima Morrell read The New York Times’ 1619 Project last year, the educator embraced the 100-page magazine special issue on slavery and racism as a professional godsend. Morrell, an associate superintendent in the Buffalo, N.Y., school district, where 80% of the 31,200 students are non-white, was inspired by the project’s reframing of American history that put the struggles and contributions of black Americans “at the very center” of the nation’s self-understanding.
“I just think it really becomes a curriculum of emancipation, a pedagogy of liberation, for freeing the minds of young people,” said Morrell, who was involved in the decision to adopt the 1619 Project as part of the district’s curriculum. “Particularly for our black children, it lets them know there actually isn’t something wrong with you. We don’t need to be self-destructive, to hate ourselves. There actually was an institution of enslavement that really put us 400 years behind in terms of where we are with prosperity.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones: The lead writer on the 1619 Project says the United States’ founding ideals of equality and liberty, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, were a “lie” to the founders who birthed them, but ultimately realized by African Americans who embraced and fought for them, largely alone.
Since its publication in August, the 1619 Project has been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states, according to the 2019 annual report of the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project.
That’s the agenda, and its educational purpose was always apparent.
Note also that last sentence I quoted: “the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project.” The Pulitzer Center’s website has a comprehensive study guide to the project that it actively promotes. What is the Pulitzer Center? Here’s the Wiki description, and despite the name, it’s not affiliated with the Pulitzer prizes:
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is an American news media organization established in 2006 that sponsors independent reporting on global issues that other media outlets are less willing or able to undertake on their own. The Center’s goal is to raise the standard of coverage of international systemic crises, and to do so in a way that engages both the broad public and government policy-makers. The organization is based in Washington, D.C.
The Center funds international travel costs associated with reporting projects on topics and regions of global importance.
It’s not immediately apparent – in fact, it’s not apparent at all – how the 1619 Project would fit into that description. Nevertheless, the Center is promoting this curriculum, which says a lot about its methods and its goals. The MSM and entities connected with the press are not content to write propaganda for adult readers only. They want to get the ears of children, and to do that, education is key.
Communism at its finest…
Using awards and social things to change the sphere..
The world of Art was changed much the same way…
Then again… this was covered by Skousen and we were warned…(warned by many others too)
Now what?
Not only have the horses left the barn, but the barn rotted away and the farm has new owners.
lots of discussion, no action…
entertaining waste of time
It was last year, I think, that the NYT won a Pulitzer prize for its “deeply sourced” reporting on the Mueller investigation and the Russia hoax, reporting which was just as fictional as this 1619 essay.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the NYT and the Pulitzer have both shot off their feet with a 155mm howitzer. Oh, how the once-mighty have drunk the poison.
The so- called elites are just a bunch of phony back-scratchers.
Neo should win the prize!
As Kate pointed out, the Times (and the Washington Post) won Pulitzer prizes in 2018 for their reporting on Russia colluding to get Trump elected. That was entirely false: https://www.dailywire.com/news/reminder-wapo-nyt-won-pulitzers-russia-collusion-ashe-schow and now it is even worse: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/michael-flynn-drop-charges-sue-gregg-jarrett and: https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/steele-testifies-he-believes-hillary-clinton-susan-rice
Bloggers should have their own awards.
I think it’s important for those who have not succumbed to this propaganda to recognize that an important element of it is racism. The past decade or so has seen the enshrinement of racism against white people as a central value of much of the left. We can’t stop it but it’s important to keep our heads clear about what’s going on.
Of course it’s been a trend for decades, since the ’60s at least. But it really metastasized in recent years.
Have beliefs become a Class marker? Elites have always been obsessed with Class identification, and according to Rob Henderson they have replaced material things with beliefs as class markers. If you are so well off that your beliefs don’t have to have any connection to reality you can virtue and class signal via your beliefs and feel that great sense of being among those at the top.
https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure-class-a-status-update/
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
There is substantial hard evidence that racial distinctions the 1619 Project is premised on have no empirical foundation. They are social constructs based on superficial appearance.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20010211&slug=race11m
Moreover,
Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
Of course, hard evidence is one thing, enjoying grievance tingles is another.
“Nikole Hannah-Jones: The lead writer on the 1619 Project says the United States’ founding ideals of equality and liberty, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, were a “lie” to the founders who birthed them, but ultimately realized by African Americans who embraced and fought for them, largely alone.”
Largely alone? If it weren’t for white people (abolitionists) we’d still have slavery, or at least Jim Crow.
That’s what the dinner table is for: “The teacher said WHAT?”.
Well, with the USSR dead and gone, where else would Amerika’s finest comrades find educational materials to create their own Young Pioneers, eh? Somebody has to do it, and the New York Times & Pulitzer are there for them! (They’d go with PRC’s “Red Guard” material but at the moment that would be inconvenient.)
Richard Aubrey on May 6, 2020 at 4:14 pm said:
That’s what the dinner table is for: “The teacher said WHAT?”.
* * *
Indeed. But most parents never hear what the teachers are saying, although that could be for lack of asking.
While I acknowledge the hardships caused by closing the schools, it may be the best thing that ever happened to some kids — if their parents are monitoring their online classes and homework.
The NY Post is not a fan of the Pulitzer award this year.
https://nypost.com/2020/05/04/the-only-pulitzer-the-1619-project-deserved-was-for-fiction/