By CHRISTOPHER MANION
This past August 14, The New York Times launched its “1619 Project.” That was when the United States was really founded, trumpeted the Times — when the first African slaves arrived in Virginia.
The “Project” is designed both to perpetuate the left’s attack on our constitutional republic and to hijack the expansive narrative of American history and replace it with the tiresome flat-world Marxist myth of class warfare. A wave of the usual media suspects picked up the theme, breathing new life into racism as both a campaign issue and a fundamental template for future “reporting.”
It is curious that the launch occurred only one day after a tumultuous meeting of the editorial staff of the Times, a transcript of which was leaked and printed online two days later in Slate. The meeting focused on the advisability of the use of the term “racist.” It shouldn’t be used all the time, Executive Editor Dean Baquet explained.
Instead, he told the assembled staffers, “the best way to capture a remark, like the kinds of remarks the president makes, is to use them, to lay it out in perspective,” he said. “That is much more powerful than the use of a word.”
What remark of the president in particular did Baquet have in mind? “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism,” read the headline in a Times story of August 6. Well, the headline was true — and that’s what irked the sensibilities of an anonymous staffer, who, speaking for the majority of his colleagues, complained that the headline “amplifies without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country.”
Translated, the staffer was outraged that The New York Times would print a balanced sentence. So were lots of Times readers, who had flooded the paper with similar complaints. “Why, we expect the ‘Newspaper of Record’ to lambaste Trump 24-7,” they implied. “What the blazes are you doing telling the truth?”
Baquet dithered. He shared his innermost doubts and feelings with the staff, exposing his private fears and uncertainties in an intimate, even vulnerable fashion.
OK, I admit it, that last sentence is rancid Snowflake-Speak. Translated, it means, “Yeah, we’ve gotta get the SOB, so what are we going to do now?”
“How do we cover America,” Baquet blathered, “that’s become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time. . . . I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.”
OK, let’s translate that too. “Look, TRUMP is the racist, period! That’s our best shot between now and the elections!”
And why is that?
The Biggest “Little Tiny Bit” Flop In History
Baquet did his best to stumble on. “Chapter one of the story of Donald Trump . . . was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice?…the day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand…we [were caught] a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?
“That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that,” he continued. “We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story.”
Yes, it was really hard because the Times had “set itself up” to peddle a pack of lies. And the Pulitzer? It was as bogus as Obama’s “Peace” prize. Let’s not forget, the Times had once won another Pulitzer for its Russia reporting. “There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be,” wrote Times Kremlin correspondent Walter Duranty on November 15, 1931. “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” his page-one article proclaimed on August 23, 1933.
The souls of some eight million of intentionally starved Ukrainians would undoubtedly beg to disagree.
“As one of the best-known correspondents in the world for one of the best-known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty’s denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel,” wrote Robert Conquest in a work later cited in 2003 by the brilliant Arnold Beichman. “Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of The New York Times but, because of the newspaper’s one-time prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.”
Yet the Times refused to return the Pulitzer in 2003 — seventy years later. The issue had finally erupted when the Pulitzer Committee finally agreed to examine Duranty’s work. It “falls seriously short,” the committee reported after months of deliberation, but “there was no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”
So Duranty was simply too stupid to notice? That’s what the Times’ own consultant, Columbia University history professor Mark von Hagen, concluded when he advised that the Times should return the prize. Duranty’s work was merely a “dull and largely uncritical recitation of Soviet sources,” he wrote.
The spineless Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. then lamely lamented that, since the newspaper did not have Mr. Duranty’s prize, it thus could not “return” it.
Yes, the Gray Lady lied before, and it has lied again. Will we ever hear of “clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in its Trump-Russia reporting? Only time will tell.
Copycats Pile On
When Brandt Jean embraced the woman convicted of murdering his brother Botham in Dallas, Bishop Edward J. Burns praised Jean’s “incredible example of Christian love and forgiveness.” After speaking to the court during the sentencing hearing, “Brandt forgave Amber Guyger, encouraged her to turn her life over to Christ and gave her a hug. He said it is what Botham would’ve wanted. I pray we can all follow the example of this outstanding young man. Let us pray for peace in our community and around the world,” Bishop Burns wrote.
Sorry, Your Excellency, the 1619 “Racism uber Alles” media crowd couldn’t stand it. After all, Botham Brandt was black, and his murderer is white.
Black journalist Issac Bailey was deeply offended. “Black people, no matter the circumstances, aren’t generally forgiven for killing white people,” he wrote. “We are put to death, figuratively and too often literally. That’s why it’s been grating to so many black people to watch the reaction of so many white people to Brandt Jean’s powerful words, because we wonder why they hardly ever do the same for us.”
Some saw Brandt Jean’s Christian charity “as a moment of amazing grace and redemption,” wrote Errin Haines for the Associated Press. “Many black Americans, though, saw something all too familiar and were offended. Some saw the rush to forgive as a rush to forget racial violence.
Haines, a black journalism professor at Princeton, seems to be perpetuating the “racism of whites” that Michelle Obama wrote about in her senior thesis there.
“At Princeton . . . I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong,” she wrote. “Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”
Remember, you don’t have to be black to accuse most whites of being racists — the USCCB has done it for years. Our shepherds quickly add that most of us are unaware of our racism, of course. Are they unwittingly adding fuel to the hatred that the 1619 hucksters are fomenting?
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