Conservative rebuttal to the 1619 Project is the vapid grievance-peddling we’ve come to expect – By Hunter (Daily Kos) / January 19 2021
Once upon a time, hard-right conservatives got very very mad about “The 1619 Project,” a New York Times Magazine attempt to “reframe” American history to better tell the story of slavery and ongoing suppression, and because when the running-for-reelection Donald Trump saw his allies melting down on Fox News over the injustice of it all, he promised that he would commission a better report, one with blackjack and hookers and owning the libs on every page.
The result of that conservative rebuttal to history itself, unimaginatively called “The 1776 Report” because all modern conservative thought consists of rebuttals to specific non-conservative things they didn’t like, was released on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, because of course it was. It consists of a thin 20-page book report compiled by an assembly of whoever Trump’s team could round up, none of whom are historians, and is mostly a collection of the usual conservative grievances stapled together in the usual way and leavened with the usual dishonesties. It’s not even worth reading for mockery purposes, so save the 15 minutes and do something else.
There has been significant hullabaloo on the internet over portions of it being plagiarized: This is not quite true, however. It contains bucketloads of uncited quotes, and one of the report’s authors simply lifts an entire bit complaining about the nation’s colleges from one of his prior works.
Here’s a summary: According to the assembled best minds of the Team Trump era, “Progressivism” stands as a “challenge to America’s principles” alongside slavery and fascism, and is “based on” a “false understanding of rights.” Racism and “identity politics” are seen as equal dangers; certainly, racism was bad but in its place we have “moved toward a system of explicit group privilege” seeking “social justice,” which is also bad.
