There’s a funny thing that’s been happening more and more lately whenever a prominent radical leftist enters the public spotlight. Their past invariably includes some extremist viewpoint that they wish they could erase. Thankfully, the internet has a long memory and America-hating Neo-Marxists are being exposed regularly.
Case-in-point: 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones. A recently unearthed article from 2008 shows her affection for the Cuban communist revolution. Yes, it’s the same revolution that led to the deaths or persecution of millions of Cubans, the same revolution that prompted hundreds of thousands to risk their lives just to escape the oppressive regime. Thirteen years ago, right around the time that the truth about Communist Cuban atrocities were being fully exposed, Hannah-Jones announced her adoration for it all. According to the article:
Cubans — most of whom have some African ancestry — feel a kinship with communities of color in the United States and around the globe. Across Havana, exquisite monuments honor Latin American and Caribbean patriots Simon Bolivar and Antonio Maceo. Marble planks at a Havana park named for Martin Luther King Jr. commemorate King, Malcolm X, and the slave insurrection leaders Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner.
Black Cubans especially are wary of outsiders wishing to overthrow the Castro regime. They admit the revolution has been imperfect, but it also led to the end of codified racism and brought universal education and access to jobs to black Cubans. Without the revolution, they wonder, where would they be?
We journalists had a great deal of freedom to travel through Havana — no handlers, no monitors. We could see that Cuba is not the great evil we are led to believe. Still, life is difficult for many Cubans.
Too often we saw beautiful young girls on the arms of much older, male European tourists. The government subsidizes Cubans’ incomes with rent programs, food staples and other commodities. But imported items, such as soap and toothpaste, are too expensive for many Cubans to afford if they don’t supplement their income in some other way.
It was an odd article loaded with contradictions. She presented a distorted history and skewed current perspective of Cuba. Sometimes she would downplay the atrocities that prompted some Cubans to try to paddle on wooden planks to the shores of Florida just to get away from their communist masters. Other times she highlighted all of the wonderful things the communist revolution brought to the people; they may not be able to afford soap, but at least the government gave them breadline vouchers occasionally.
This is the type of idyllic lifestyle her 1619 Project wants to bring to America. If we just accept that most of the population is racist, capitalism is evil, and equity of results supersedes opportunity, we can also experience the joys of coveting our rich neighbor’s toothpaste.
According to Natalie Winters at The National Pulse:
The New York Times writer visited Cuba in 2008 on a reporting fellowship, penning a piece entitled “The Cuba We Don’t Know” upon her return. Published in The Oregonian, the article sets out to dismantle the narrative about the Communist country that “come from the U.S. government”: “Cuba is poor. Cuba is communist. Cuba violates human rights and represses dissent.”
The objective is similar to that of the ahistorical 1619 Project metastasizing through U.S. classrooms: challenging the narrative that the U.S. was founded in 1776 and insisting the country’s motives for revolution evolved solely out of a desire to protect slavery.
“Education is the cornerstone of the revolution,” Jones asserts before offering praise for the communist country’s education and health care system, alleging many see the latter as a “world model.”
“It manifests in what Cuba has accomplished, through socialism and despite poverty, that the United States hasn’t,” she writes before quoting a professor who insists “The U.S. cannot forgive us for having this revolution. All 50 years of the revolution have not been for nothing.”
Her 1619 project has been surging in the news lately, as has Hannah-Jones. Of particularly dangerous interest is her hard push to get the Neo-Marxist teachings of her project included in public school curriculums. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote a letter to the Department of Education objecting to the inclusion. Here’s an excerpt from McConnell’s letter, via the New York Post:
Dear Secretary Cardona:
We write to express grave concern with the Department’s effort to reorient the bipartisan American History and Civics Education programs, including the Presidential and Congressional Academies for American History and Civics and the National Activities programs, away from their intended purposes toward a politicized and divisive agenda…
This is a time to strengthen the teaching of civics and American history in our schools. Instead, your Proposed Priorities double down on divisive, radical, and historically-dubious buzzwords and propaganda…
Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil. If your Administration had proposed actual legislation instead of trying to do this quietly through the Federal Register, that legislation would not pass Congress.
As Legal Insurrection reported, the response from Hannah-Jones is ridiculous. She claims that this is a free speech issue. It is not. If I write a book claiming that Germany and Japan won World War II, my free speech rights are not being infringed if schools decline to rewrite history on my behalf.
Of course, CNN gave Hannah-Jones an unchallenged opportunity to make her case.
https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1389208068387446784
Despite protests by Republican lawmakers and conservative activists, Hannah-Jones continues to receive praise and accolades from the left. They adore her push to institutionalize racism by driving a wedge between Black and White Americans. UNC her as “Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.”
A post yesterday from WND is worth a read. In it, Jerry Newcombe breaks down the lunacy of the 1619 Project.
Teaching kids that America is hopelessly racist
If there are riots now in America, what will it be like 20 years from now if the New York Times gets its way?
The New York Times sponsored the 1619 Project, which postulates that America’s real beginnings as a nation are when the first African slaves were brought over … to Jamestown in 1619.
Many historians note that this is a distortion of our nation’s roots. Worse, it makes young people turn against this country. Despite our flawed history and their own personal sins, the founders created the framework by which evils like slavery could one day be uprooted. And it has been.
This battle over history and what is to be taught in our schools (when they reopen) has reached the highest echelons of power these days.
CNN reported (May 3): “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is asking schools to stop using the 1619 Project, a curriculum aimed at reframing U.S. history around the date of August 1619, when the first slave ship arrived to what would become the U.S.”
McConnell and other Republican senators said, “Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it. … Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil.”
In my humble opinion, Mitch is right to do this. If this curriculum continues to spread, all children will learn is a distorted view of our past.
In his classic book “1984,” George Orwell said, “Whoever controls the past controls the future.” And he added, “Whoever controls the present controls the past.”
There is indeed a battle over the history of America. Much of the rioting in the streets of the last year has constituted a war on America as founded. Statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and many others have been torn down by the mobs. Even Abraham Lincoln has not escaped the wrath of rioters.
Although some historians support the 1619 Project, many historians vehemently disagree. A few months ago, the DailyWire reported that a group of scholars demanded that the Pulitzer Board revoke the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones for her introduction to the 1619 Project.
Bob Woodson, an African American scholar who has worked for decades on behalf of urban renewal, organized a number of scholars to oppose the 1619 Project.
In an interview I did with Woodson for D. James Kennedy Ministries, he told our viewers, “We at the Woodson Center organized 23-plus scholars and activists to confront this 1619 Project. We call ourselves 1776 Unites.” These scholars include some prominent blacks, like Dr. Carol Swain, retired professor at Vanderbilt Law School.
Already the Woodson Center has seen some changes: “As a result of our essays that we wrote … Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was the author of the 1619 Project, actually revised it. … We forced them to back away from, and change, the reasons for the Revolutionary War.”
Initially, the 1619 Project held that America’s War for Independence was held for the purpose of protecting slavery.
That is an astounding claim, in light of the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, whereby George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other members of the Virginia House of Burgesses tried to abolish the slave trade into Virginia. King George III put the kibosh on their efforts. (This was before MP William Wilberforce’s successful crusade, motivated by his Christian faith, to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout the British Empire.)
Woodson adds this about the 1619 Project: “They are trying to define America by its birth defect of slavery and Jim Crow, and our counter is that no individual or nation should be judged by the worst of what they used to be. America is a country of redemption. America is a country of second chances, and so we at 1776 Unites believe that America is defined by its promise. And the Constitution is a mechanism for us to be self-correcting, and America is the only nation on the face of the earth that fought a civil war to end slavery.” [Emphasis added.]
The above-mentioned Dr. Carol Swain argues that the 1619 Project sends a “very crippling message to our children” by conveying the idea that racism is in our national DNA. It basically says that no matter how hard you try, you will always be a victim of hopelessly racist America.
What is this all about? Dr. Richard Land, the president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, observes, “If you want to remake America, you’ve got to tear down belief in the country we have now. You have to make the country we have now and the Founding Fathers and our institutions illegitimate – that’s what the 1619 Project is about.”
There is a battle over history, and it is a battle we must win if we are to continue as a free nation.
Many Americans are enamored by the slick tongue of Nikole Hannah-Jones. But attempts to fight “systemic racism” by promoting real racism are devious and, frankly, evil. Do the 1619 Project folks know this? Is it part of their plan?
YouTube, Spotify, and other Big Tech platforms are taking Freedom First Network down
It’s no secret we speak our minds and bring on guests who do the same. That’s one of the biggest reasons we put together the Freedom First Network in the first place. There are far too many news outlets, including so-called “conservative” media companies, who are so beholden to Big Tech that they temper their perspectives at best and outright coverup the truth at worst. Many, as you all know, will blatantly lie in order to maintain the narrative that supports the radical agenda taking over much of the United States.
We have had our YouTube channel taken down. Many of our shows have been suppressed or removed by Facebook and Twitter. Spotify banned one of our shows completely from their platform. Google hates us. We’ve even been censored by some of the smaller players like Medium, Transistor, and Captivate. But we stand behind our reporting and perspectives and we refuse to bow down to Big Tech tyranny for the sake of pageviews or video plays.
This isn’t the easiest road to travel, especially for a media company that is so new. We launched Freedom First Network in 2020 to fight against the very censorship that we’re seeing so widespread today. We have found great homes for our content on freer speech platforms like Rumble and we’re putting our best efforts forward into building our presence on Locals. Nevertheless, we cannot do it alone. We need help.
One of the things cofounders Jeff Dornik and JD Rucker agreed to from the start was to never be the pawns of companies that do not embrace our worldview. Finding advertisers and affiliates is easy; we receive requests by companies wanting to be pushed on our shows every day. But it’s important to us that we’re promoting companies, services, and products that are beneficial to maintaining a Freedom First stance in America. As a result, we do not take on sponsors easily. We would rather rely on our own products like Freedom First Coffee and the support of our wonderful viewers, listeners, and readers.
Those who want to support us and help keep the fight for America’s future moving forward can do so by donating through our Locals page. There, you can donate monthly or one-time. Some have told us to use Patreon or GoFundMe, but both of those platforms have demonstrated a hatred for free speech. Locals does not. They embrace it. We encourage everyone to join us on Locals, but donations are greatly appreciated as well. We do not have day jobs. Our fight for freedom is a full-time gig.
Please feel free to reach out to us through our contact form. It goes directly to our founders, so if you’re interested in getting involved, investing, sponsoring, or even bringing a show to our network, let us know. May God Bless the United States of America!
