President Donald Trump said Sunday that the Department of Education has launched an inquiry to find schools that teach the 1619 Project, a rewriting of American history based on the racist ‘critical race theory’.
Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded! https://t.co/dHsw6Y6Y3M
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2020
If the Education Department discovers the New York Times‘s project in classrooms, then educational institutions will be deprived of taxpayer funds, The Epoch Times reported.
Trump’s announcement came on Twitter following an article from the Wall Street Journal editorial board that criticized California’s plan to implement the 1619 Project in classrooms throughout the state.
Urban school districts—such as New York City; Chicago; and Washington, D.C.—are also incorporating the false narrative of history.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., introduced legislation in July that would have stripped funding from schools that teach the 1619 Project curriculum.
Nikole–Hannah Jones, a staff writer at the New York Times, leads the 1619 Project.
The premise of the 1619 Project is that the American Revolution and Founding happened to benefit wealthy cross-Atlantic slave traders, rather than to defend man’s God-given rights: the freedom to worship, to assemble, to speak and to write, to name a few.
Jones claims British colonists fought for their independence to secure the slave trade, but Britain did not outlaw slavery in the empire until decades later.
Northwestern University Professor Leslie Harris said she fact-checked the 1619 Project for Jones “and vigorously disputed” claims that the defense of slavery was a primary motivating factor in American Revolution.
But Jones continued full force with her narrative even after being confronted with the facts.
“Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary
disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies,” Harris wrote in Politico last year.
“Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, a British military strategy designed to unsettle the Southern Colonies by inviting enslaved people to flee to British lines, propelled hundreds of enslaved people off plantations and turned some Southerners to the patriot side,” she continued. “It also led most of the 13 Colonies to arm and employ free and enslaved black people, with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies.”
