The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around.

A marginal correction, but promising.  The essay is The 1619 Chronicles by Bret Stephens.  Back in August last year, The New York Times published a collection of essays advocating a Critical Race Theory interpretation of American history, emphasizing that the story of America is the story of championing slavery.  

The publication was manifestly cognitive pollution of the worst form.  Its boldest claims were demonstrably wrong and its reasonable claims were boringly mundane.  It was clearly emotional advocacy dressed up as history.  Going all in affirming cognitive pollution, the NYT immediately began attempting to seed the essays into school curricula.  They really can't shake their Walter Duranty syndrome.  Cognitive pollution is in their DNA.  

The author of the core essay was fabulist Nikole Hannah-Jones and historians were soon taking the project apart for its errors of fact and errors of interpretation.  The efforts of a radical activist journalist were inadequate to withstand informed scrutiny.  

Consistent with the reduced standards of the news media, the essays won a Pulitzer Prize but there is now a movement afoot to have it withdrawn lacking, as it does, a foundation in history or in good journalism.  Given that the Pulitzer Prize committee could not find it in itself to revoke Duranty's Pultizer for communist agitprop in 1932, I would presume it unlikely that they will revoke Hannah-Jones' Pulitzer for being similarly inaccurate in trying to defend a radical ideology.

Things began to get pointed in the past month as it became known that the NYT was quietly and without comment, rewriting some of the key claims made by Hannah-Jones, and then denying that they were doing so.  Hannah-Jones added fuel to the fire by making similar, and similarly disprovable claims that no such action was underway.

Now Bret Stephens, one of the NYT's lone moderates, has ventured into the Ypres fields of factual reporting by coming out with the observation that newspapers ought to stick to reporting news and not undertake radical rewritings of history based on ideological convictions.  A not unreasonable position but one that probably won't be sustainable given the nature of his employer.

Some Stephens' observations:

Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.

As fresh concerns make clear, on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

[snip]

Those concerns came to light last month when a longstanding critic of the project, Phillip W. Magness, noted in the online magazine Quillette that references to 1619 as the country’s “true founding” or “moment [America] began” had disappeared from the digital display copy without explanation.

These were not minor points. The deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” 

Stephens on some of the legion of historical errors in Hannah-Jones' original dog's breakfast.  

In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”

Both points are illogical. A “defining contradiction” requires a powerful point of opposition or inconsistency, and in the year 1619 the points of opposition were few and far between. Slavery and the slave trade had been global phenomena for centuries by the early 17th century, involving Europeans and non-Europeans as slave traders and the enslaved. The Africans who arrived in Virginia that August got there only because they had been seized by English privateers from a Portuguese ship headed for the port of Veracruz in Mexico, then a part of the Spanish Empire.

In this sense, and for all of its horror, there was nothing particularly surprising in the fact that slavery made its way to the English colonies on the Eastern Seaboard, as it already had in the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” It’s why, at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, Lincoln would date the country’s founding to “four score and seven years ago.”

As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them. Most of us, at any given point in time, are falling short of some ideal we nonetheless hold to be true or good.

He makes a key point.  Radical ideologists are usually also simpletons.  They distill the messy and complex world into a simplified representation that they can grasp - even if the simplification now bears no relationship to reality.

Monocausality — whether it’s the clash of economic classes, the hidden hand of the market, or white supremacy and its consequences — has always been a seductive way of looking at the world. It has always been a simplistic one, too. The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

This might be the best sentence in Stephens' piece.

None of this should have come as a surprise: The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around. 

And there was never any evidence for the thesis.  It was a hateful cry of ideological anger, not a real argument among reasonable people.

Stephens then touches on a critical issue:

Beyond these political disputes is a metaphysical question that matters. What is a founding? Why have generations of Americans considered 1776 our birth date — as opposed to 1781, when we won our independence militarily at Yorktown; or 1783, when we won it diplomatically through the Treaty of Paris; or 1788, when our system of government came into existence with the ratification of the Constitution?

The answer is that, unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.

Contrary to what the 1619 Project claims, 1776 isn’t just our nation’s “official” founding. It is our symbolic one, too. The metaphor of 1776 is more powerful than that of 1619 because what makes America most itself isn’t four centuries of racist subjugation. It’s 244 years of effort by Americans — sometimes halting, but often heroic — to live up to our greatest ideal. That’s a struggle that has been waged by people of every race and creed. And it’s an ideal that continues to inspire millions of people at home and abroad. 

America's Declaration of Independence was a unique moment in human history.  An argument for the Age of Enlightenment beliefs in human universalism, belief in equal natural rights, belief in freedom, and belief in the capacity to erect a nation on an inviting and tolerant idea rather than based on blood, soil, or church.  

Among the litany of profound failures, the 1619 Project demonstrated a profound ignorance of history.  American Founding Fathers did not birth a nation like Athena, fully armed from Zeus's forehead.  They birthed a set of ideas which over the decades grew into a reality.  We were not a full democracy in the beginning, states restricting the vote based on sex and religion and property ownership and enslavement, etc.  Full democracy and full respect of all people as equal in all rights were alien concepts and that was the radical promise undertaken and eventually fulfilled.

But not without the passage of time and the spillage of blood.  The American Founding was not perfect because it was done by humans, not gods.  But they launched us on a pathways towards the fulfillment of all those Enlightenment promises.  Promises now being threatened by the rejection of human universalism, equal rights, rule of law, tolerance, freedom and due process via their antithesis, Critical Race Theory from which the 1619 Project draws its own blighted inspiration.

Stephens ends with the observation that the NYT is now the very thing it rationally should never wish to be - a newspaper with an ideological commitment to totalitarianism, producing the very fake news about which it it makes claims to abhor.

All the more so as journalists, in the United States and abroad, come under relentless political assault from critics who accuse us of being fake, biased, partisan and an arm of the radical left. Many of these attacks are baseless. Some of them are not. Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times a gift.