MIKE GONZALEZ: Street vendor Nikole Hannah-Jones turns white guilt into green dollars in the new 1619 Project

mike gonzalez is a Senior Fellow at the Ángeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum at The Heritage Foundation and author of, ‘BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution’

Hardcore awakening leftists think that if they can alter America’s perception of the past, they can control the present, own the future… and make lots of money in the process.

Just pay close attention to Nikole Hannah-Jones.

It’s pretty hard not to, in fact.

His 1619 Project is now on Hulu, so you can’t help but see ads when looking for reruns of Frasier after a long day.

Or, the ubiquitous Hannah-Jones may come to a library near you, one that you pay for with your taxes.

Just ask the folks in Fairfax, a leafy Virginia county 20 miles west of the US capital, whose public library has agreed to pay Hannah-Jones $29,350 for a one-hour talk on February 19.

That apparently wasn’t enough to pay Hannah-Jones, so the nearby McLean Community Center, also supported through a real estate surcharge, shelled out an additional $6,000. That equates to $589 per minute, paid for by all local contributors, whether they believe in their mission or not.

Not bad for a woman whose job it is to make Americans feel really ashamed of their home, their lives, their country, and everything else, because some people they never knew, 200 years ago, benefited from a system they recognize as abominable. : slavery.

Don’t just take my word for it. By her own admission, Hannah-Jones plays on white guilt.

“I don’t write to convert Trump supporters. I write to try to get white liberals to do what they say they believe. I am presenting a moral argument,” he said at the University of Chicago in October 2019. “My method is guilt.”

The 1619 Project is dedicated to the idea that 1619 is the year of the actual founding of America, not 1776, when the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence amid some disagreements with the Motherland.

Why 1619? Because in August of that year a pirate ship brought 20 Angolans who were sold near the port of Point Comfort in Jamestown, in the English colony of Virginia. That event started the United States, says Hannah-Jones and her advocates, because four centuries later, everything about the United States is still about slavery.

Never mind that, as with all the key claims of the 1619 Project, the story of the 20 Africans has been debunked. Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars and a man who, unlike Hannah-Jones, has a doctorate in anthropology, says that “Africans were treated like servants and were soon set free.”

Hannah-Jones, writes Wood, “portrays that slavery began in Jamestown in 1619 and spread from there to become the foundation of American society. That is a false story, a myth.

His Hulu series also makes exaggerated claims that support his larger narrative that America is an oppressive and racist society.

In the first episode of the series, Hannah-Jones reverts to her earlier claim that the American colonists decided to free themselves because they feared that Britain was about to free the slaves.

When the claim was first made in the opening salvo of the 1619 Project in 2019, when the New York Times devoted an entire issue of its weekly magazine to the effort, historians howled so loudly that the newspaper issued what was not quite a statement. correction, but a clarification.’

“We recognize that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all settlers,” the newspaper said in March 2020. “The passage has been modified to make it clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the settlers.

“Some” is such a vague word that it makes it perfect for Hannah-Jones’s purpose. Note that they did not opt ​​for the most descriptive phrase, ‘most of’.

Why not? Could it, I gasp, not be true?

With her Hulu series, the obviously unscrupulous Hannah-Jones returns to take another bite of the apple, clinging to a different, tenuous piece of flimsy evidence for her slanderous claim.

This is important to her because it obviously makes her see that the nation’s founding fathers were not paragons of virtue seeking to create a nation dedicated to liberty, but greedy and scheming slaveholders trying to maintain their ‘white privilege’.

Hannah-Jones cannot give up on this central hoax because without it her ‘Project 1619’ brand collapses.

He enlists the help of a revisionist history professor at the University of South Carolina, Woody Holton. He dramatically tells Hannah-Jones on camera that the Virginia colonists only decided to take up arms because the colony’s Perthshire-born governor, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, promised to free the slaves who fought on the British side.

Once again, real historians are baffled. “The scene is an authoritative pronouncement with impressive cinematography, but it’s also a false story”; writes Phillip Magness, who earned his Ph.D. in public policy from George Mason University in Virginia.

Dunmore’s drive to free the slaves could not have convinced the Virginia colonists to join the revolution, because they had largely already made up their minds.

Dunmore’s ‘proclamation’ was not issued from his governor’s mansion, but from aboard HMS William. He fled there five months earlier because his rebellious subjects threatened to descend on his house.

His call to free the slaves was not the work of a great humanitarian. He himself was a slave owner. It was the plan of a desperate royalist fanning chaos.

Unsurprisingly, none of this story gets even a brief mention on the Hannah-Jones show.

‘There’s no way we were going to walk away from [Lord Dunmore’s significance]’ Hannah-Jones told an admittedly friendly reporter at the Washington Post, ‘because it’s right.’

But even his ally at the Post couldn’t help but include a warning to bend backwards to the point of breaking.

He dutifully noted that Princeton historian Sean Wilentz called this description of Dunmore “highly misleading.”

So why embark on this deceitful mission to sully the history of your country and its entire raison d’être?

All these things have a purpose; in fact, the old purpose of the left, which is the massive transfer of wealth.

Like Phineas Taylor Barnum (the celebrated 19th century American showman/salesman known to his friends and to history as PT), Hannah-Jones obviously thinks that every minute a fool is born.

His goal, as he told the University of Chicago audience, is “reparations” that non-blacks will pay black Americans.

This is a point he repeated in a massive 8,500-word essay for the New York Times.

Readers who made it to the end would have read these words: ‘If we are to be redeemed, if we are to live up to the magnificent ideals on which we were founded, we must do what is right. It is time for this country to pay its debt. The time for repairs has come.

Hannah-Jones is in the ‘white guilt business’ and business is good, damn the truth.