Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created The New York Times’ “1619 Project” that rewrites history to claim America has always been racist, briefly deactivated her Twitter account on Sunday following a string of tweets that caused an outrage.
The final tweet in Hannah-Jones’ thread of controversial statements said “Read this” and linked to a thread from another user that speculated fireworks were being set off in Brooklyn as “part of a coordinated attack on Black and Brown communities by government forces; an attack meant to disorient and destabilize the Black Lives Matter movement.” The person claimed these “government forced” wanted to deprive these communities of sleep and desensitize them to the sounds of explosives, among other things.
The person who made the thread shared by Hannah-Jones provided no evidence of any kind to justify their allegations, yet Hannah-Jones shared the thread to her massive audience. She then briefly disabled her account after a backlash.
As The Daily Wire’s James Barrett reported, Hannah-Jones previously during the weekend made some controversial comments regarding racism in America. In one tweet, Hannah-Jones tweeted “It would be an honor” if people started calling the violent protests that have broken out across the country the “1619 Riots,” since “1619” was written on a statue of President Ulysses S. Grant when it was torn down. Charles Kesler wrote an op-ed in the New York Post making the suggestion. Kesler’s op-ed began by claiming “America is burning.” Hannah-Jones followed up her “honor” tweet by stating plainly, “Also, America isn’t burning.”
Later on Saturday, Hannah-Jones wrote: “Did you know Native people brought the enslaved black people they owned on the Trail of Tears?”
That tweet was deleted. Hannah-Jones then wrote of toppling Grant’s statue: “I think maybe Grant’s is not a statue worth toppling. But I also understand after decades of shrugs when people spoke of the hurt of having been demeaned by public tributes, of entering buildings, of walking past art that celebrated white supremacists, how overzealousness occurs.”
Grant fought the Ku Klux Klan and led the Union to defeat the Confederacy, freeing slaves in America.
As Barrett wrote, the “1619 Project” was widely criticized by historians for its false assertions.
“Seven months [after publishing], the ‘1619 Project,’ which has been promoted massively by The New York Times and which may be incorporated into some educational programs, was forced to issue a significant correction to one of its most foundational claims after multiple prominent historians dismantled it: Hannah-Jones’ false assertion that ‘one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.’”
“Though her ‘1619 Project’ has been described by James McPherson, one of the foremost historians on the Civil War, as a ‘very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery,’ Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer in May for her lead-in essay, the very essay that included the ‘vigorously disputed’ foundational claim,” Barrett continued.
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