The Big Lie: 1619

I understand the Nicole Hannah Jones's of the world. They got a hustle. The sickness is with the people who won't call it what is. In other words, many of us.

It required no advanced knowledge of American history to understand the perversity of The 1619 Project’s lead essay’s treatment of the Revolution. If it were a high school history paper, that discussion alone would have been grounds for failure. It’s rare, after all, to read a student get every single stated fact perfectly wrong, in support of a proposition for which there is no other evidence cited, on two of the most important topics in all of U.S. history, indeed, all of modern history, the causes of the American Revolution and the origins of antislavery. But this wasn’t a high school paper, it was the New York Times Magazine, and the author was, according to her contributor’s biography, a highly acclaimed journalist. The essay may have been historically fallacious, but it was also inflammatory and attention-getting.

It's a gigantic, deliberate lie. In a real society, NHJ would be an unemployable laughing stock who hangs at Starbucks all day to use the bathrooms. Instead, she's a leading intellectual in our fractured joke of a society.