Mary Grabar - Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America

Mary Grabar

Debunking The 1619 Project

Exposing the Plan to Divide America

Mary Grabar has done America a great service in her vitally important new book. She exposes the malicious fiction and nefarious motives behind the New York Times 1619 Project. In doing so, she tells the unvarnished truth about a fundamentally decent country, the United States of America.

Dennis Prager, nationally syndicated radio talk show host, founder of PragerU, and author of ten books, most recently The Rational Bible: Deuteronomy, the third volume of his commentary on the Bible

Mary Grabar, who dissected the Howard Zinn charade, takes her sharpened scalpel to The 1619 Project. This is a book that should be read by every parent and every student concerned about the future of our nation.

Donald T. Critchlow, Katzin Family Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University

The 1619 Project rightly is criticized for distorting history to suit an ideological agenda. It claims that slaverynot freedomdefines American history. By examining the history of slavery in America, Mary Grabar illuminates the tragedy of slavery against the opposition it encountered from the principles and ideals that inspire the nation. Americans both black and white have revered these principles from colonial times to now. Debunking The 1619 Project is a fine and learned book and should be read by all.

Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College

With The 1619 Project, the New York Times unleashed a feverous malady of ingratitude and self-loathing upon the American body politic. Mary Grabars Debunking The 1619 Project is just the shot of historical truth the doctor ordered. The 1619 Projects purpose is to reframe American history, making slavery a uniquely American institution, denying that the American founding was hostile to slavery, insisting that historic American heroes such as Thomas Jefferson were hypocritical or deluded, and concluding that America itself has been morally corrupt from the beginning. Mary Grabars Debunking The 1619 Project examines every significant contention of The 1619 Project and shows that they are all mistaken, egregiously mistaken. This is the book America needs now.

Kevin R. C. Gutzman, author of Thomas JeffersonRevolutionary and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution

Mary Grabars Debunking The 1619 Project is a vital read in a nation where the pseudohistory of The 1619 Project is granted Pulitzers. True history requires coming to grips with ugly facts, but it also requires acknowledging Americas unique greatness. Grabars defense of true history is indispensable.

Ben Shapiro, host of The Ben Shapiro Show and founding editor of The Daily Wire

For Eugene D. Genovese (19302012), in gratitude for all you left us

B y the summer of 2020, concerns about racism had reached a level of hysteria. While the vast majority of Americans believe in equal rights under the law and are opposed to racial discrimination, academics and activists often inappropriately obsess about race. In the summer of 2020, that obsession had gone far beyond the classroom or academic conference. It had entered Americans everyday lives, and seemingly 24/7. No longer could Americans be assured that they would be able to enjoy a meal at a restaurant without a mobs screaming Black Lives Matter!or even get there without encountering a roadblock of protesters. Americans bought books in an effort to learn How to Be an Antiracist, as the title of Ibram X. Kendis book promised to teach. For those in denial that they needed to be taught not to be a racist, there was White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Both books sales soared.

America was terrible, and white Americansall of themwere responsible. That was the prevailing new sentiment. White Americans themselves were accepting it as creed that racism was in their DNA, that all were guilty of the original sin of slavery, and that its effects were still all around, in everyday life, in the way innocent black men were hunted down by police in modern-day versions of slave patrols, in medical science that still used African Americans as guinea pigs, in polluted and unsafe minority neighborhoods, in African Americans over-consumption of sugar, and so on.

These injustices went back to the nations founding, it was charged. Furthermore, that very founding was a sham. America was not really founded in 1776, with our Declaration of Independence, but in 1619. That was our nations true founding,

The year 1619 had jumped into American consciousness the previous summer. Before then most Americans would not have been able to name, much less recognize, its significance.

That had changed in August 2019. From that point, vandals began adding 1619 to the graffiti being sprayed on statues.

What had caused the shift? A special issue of the New York Times Magazine commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of what many take to be the beginning of slavery in the colonies and then the United States. But it was much more than a commemoration. Commemorations of the event appearing in other outlets attracted very little notice.

The special August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine was called The 1619 Project. 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 Americas 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] 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 countrys original sin, but it is more than that: It is the countrys very origin.

Out of slaveryand the anti-black racism it requiredgrew 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 nations true founding.

It inspired a raging debate that continues to this day and shows no sign of abatingand that is dividing Americans more by the day.

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.

The presentation of distorted American history is bound to have an impact. The vilification of our country erupted into riots in the summer of 2020, ostensibly in reaction to the deaths of African Americans at the hands of white police.

The 2020 protests differed from the BLM-instigated riots over the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. In 2020, the destruction went beyond businesses to icons of American history, including Thomas Jefferson. The targetsunlike those of earlier years, notably in 2017 in Charlottesvillewere not just Confederates, but slave owners and nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures deemed to be racists, including Abraham Lincoln, Union officers, and Ronald Reagan. In their rage, rioters even attacked monuments to black Union soldiers and abolitionists, as well as a saint, the Virgin Mary, a pioneer mother, and an elk.