MIKE GONZALEZ: Huckster Nikole Hannah-Jones turns white guilt into green bucks ... trends now
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and author of, 'BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution'
Hardcore woke leftists think that if they can alter America's perception of the past, they can control the present, own the future… and make a whole lot of money in the process.
Just pay close attention to Nikole Hannah-Jones.
It is pretty hard not to, in fact.
Her 1619 Project is now on Hulu, so you can't avoid seeing advertisements for it when you are looking for reruns of Frasier after a long day.
Or, the ubiquitous Hannah-Jones may be coming to a library near you, one you pay for with your taxes.
Just ask the folks in Fairfax, a leafy Virginia county 20 miles west of America's capital, whose public library has agreed to pay Hannah-Jones $29,350 for a one-hour talk this February 19.
That apparently wasn't enough to afford Hannah-Jones, so the nearby McLean Community Center, also supported through a real estate surcharge, shelled out an additional $6,000. That comes out to $589 per minute—paid by all local taxpayers, whether they believe in her mission or not.
Not bad for a woman whose job it is to make Americans feel really, really shameful about their house, their life, their country, and everything else, because some people they never met, 200 years ago, benefited from a system they recognize as abhorrent: slavery.
Don't just take my word for it. By her own admission, Hannah-Jones plays on white people's sense of guilt.
'I'm not writing to convert Trump supporters. I write to try to get liberal white people to do what they say they believe in. I'm making a moral argument,' she said at the University of Chicago in October 2019. 'My method is guilt.'
Hardcore woke leftists think that if they can alter America's perception of the past, they can control the present, own the future… and make a whole lot of money in the process. Just pay close attention to Nikole Hannah-Jones (above, center)
The 1619 Project is devoted to the idea that 1619 is the year of America's real founding, not 1776, when the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence in the middle of some unpleasantness with the Mother Country.
Why 1619? Because in August of that year a pirate ship brought 20 Angolans who were sold near the Jamestown port of Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. That event started the United States, says Hannah-Jones and her defenders, because four centuries on, everything about America still has to do with slavery.
Never mind that, as with all the key claims of the 1619 Project, the story of the 20 Africans has been debunked. Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars and a man who, unlike Hannah-Jones, has a PhD, in anthropology, says that 'The Africans were treated as indentured servants and soon released.'
Hannah-Jones, writes Wood, 'portrays slavery as starting in Jamestown in 1619 and spreading from there to become the bedrock of American society. That's a false history, a myth.'
Her Hulu series likewise makes exaggerated claims that support her larger narrative that America is an oppressive, racist society.
In the series' first episode, Hannah-Jones goes back to her earlier assertion that the American colonists decided to break free because they feared that Britain was about to liberate the slaves.
When the claim was first made in the opening salvo of the 1619 Project in 2019, when the New York Times devoted an entire issue of its weekly magazine to the effort, historians howled
