Debunking the 1619 Project Quotes

“The 1619 Project is a mortal danger to the American experiment in self-government. If we want to keep the republic, then the task at hand—for those Americans who still share that hope, and that gratitude—is to face and defeat the threat. We must understand The 1619 Project: its divisive aims and its dishonest methods, its sweeping historical misjudgments and its blatant errors of fact. And we must drive its lies and its poisonous race-baiting out of our public institutions, beginning with the official curricula of our schools. It is in furtherance of that endeavor that this book is offered to the American public.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

“But the real problem with The 1619 Project is not that it is in conflict with “our cherished mythologies.” It’s that, as this book will lay out in detail, The Project is in conflict with the historical facts and the actual truth about America—which, yes, we do cherish, if we have any gratitude for our lives of unexampled freedom and prosperity, and any hope to see those blessings continue into the future. Such concerns would seem to be far from the minds of The 1619 Project’s creators and promoters, judging by their continuing willingness to foment shame and hatred for America, racial division and hostility, and even violence—as copious evidence, beginning with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s unapologetic celebration of the “1619 riots,” amply demonstrates.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

“The title of Pittman’s article—“Trump Taps Ex-Gov. Bryant for ‘1776’ Effort to Keep History Friendly to White ‘Heroes’ ”—accurately describes his race-baiting attack on Trump: Pittman takes care to blame Trump for celebrating white heroes while studiously ignoring the fact that Trump had also mentioned many black heroes.41”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

“Would anyone give a hearing to the late, great scholar of slavery, Eugene Genovese, who told the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1993, “The slaveholders, however great their crimes against black people, mounted the first and only serious native-born critique of the totalitarian tendencies that have run wild in our century”?”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

“It turned American history upside down and replaced America’s origin date, and, with it, the American identity.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

“We must understand The 1619 Project: its divisive aims and its dishonest methods, its sweeping historical misjudgments and its blatant errors of fact. And we must drive its lies and its poisonous race-baiting out of our public institutions, beginning with the official curricula of our schools. It is in furtherance of that endeavor that this book is offered to the American public.”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

“The 1619 Project helped inspire the hatred that fueled the riots that would rage throughout 2020. Rioters, in a Taliban-like fury, tore down and defaced any and all traditional representations of American history. Indeed, Charles Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, dubbed that mob violence “the 1619 riots.”11 And Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter “from whose mind the project sprang,” agreed.12 In a tweet, Hannah-Jones proudly embraced the “1619 riots” label as an “honor.”13 In a public radio interview she explained, “I think [The 1619 Project] has allowed many Americans, particularly white Americans, to connect the dots they weren’t connecting before,” namely between “police violence and inequality.”14 And, as she insisted in a CBSN interview, the destruction of property is not really violence. “Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body,” she said, referring to the death of George Floyd.15 Hannah-Jones had nothing to say about the twenty-five or more individuals, black and white, who had been killed in the riots.16”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

“The special August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine was called “The 1619 Project.”8 It was a “Project,” indeed. It took a bold step beyond where even the most “woke” historians and educators had gone. It turned American history upside down and replaced America’s origin date, and, with it, the American identity. As the original online version at the New York Times website said, the year 1619 was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British [sic]9 colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin. Out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.… The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s true founding.10”
― Mary Grabar, Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America