The New York Times steps up the battle for the minds of students

And now for the expanded version

In case the use of the late communist Howard Zinn’s as the standard high school American history text is insufficient to the task, the NYT is stepping in with its own curriculum guide for K-12 to add to the poison pool.

I’m lifting as much of this as I dare under copyright law, because Hinderaker leaves nothing to improve on.

“POSTED ON AUGUST 17, 2019 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS, LEFTISM, LIBERALS

THE NEW YORK TIMES REWRITES AMERICAN HISTORY

“Byron York describes a New York Times project of which I [Hinderaker] was unaware, but by which I am not surprised:

In the Times’ view — which it hopes to make the view of millions of Americans — the country was actually founded in 1619, when the first Africans were brought to North America, to Virginia, to be sold as slaves.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of that event, and the Times has created something called The 1619 Project. This is what the paper hopes the project will accomplish: “It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

The basic thrust of The 1619 project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It begins with an overview of race in America — “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make the true.” — written by Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones….

[Hinderaker] “The idea that “everything in American history is explained by slavery and race” has become conventional wisdom on the Left. Basically, nothing good has ever happened here, at least not until recently. The Left now includes the public schools, so that one of my kids came home from second grade with the understanding that Martin Luther King had freed the slaves.”

The essays go on to cover the economy (“If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”)…

[Hinderaker]: “This is profoundly stupid. The South had a relatively primitive economy; the North was the home of capitalism, which is why the North had the economic strength to win the Civil War. There was a time when everyone understood this, but the Times has regressed.”

…the food we eat (“The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery.”); the nation’s physical health (Why doesn’t the United States have universal health care? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War.”); politics (“America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.”); daily life (“What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot.”) and much more.

[A] project with the aim of reframing U.S. history has to be more than a bunch of articles and podcasts. A major goal of The 1619 Project is to take the reframing message to schools. The Times has joined an organization called The Pulitzer Center — which, it should be noted, is not the organization that hands out the Pulitzer Prize — to create a 1619 Project curriculum. “Here you will find reading guides, activities, and other resources to bring The 1619 Project into your classroom,” the Center says in a message to teachers.

[Hinderaker][: “As noted above, the Times might be surprised to learn how far gone in leftist idiocy our public schools already are. The Times’s anti-American message will be welcomed by the far-left National Education Association and the other teachers’ unions, which control public education.

Hinderaker blames this latest effort by the Democrats and its house organ, the Times, on a desperate desire to incite race hatred and defeat Donald Trump in 2020. I don’t disagree, but I think it goes deeper than that. “Conspiracy” is possibly too strong a term, but a determined effort by the Left to divide and destroy the country is not.