Hulu’s 'The 1619 Project': A racist crockumentary
Streaming platforms are desperate for content. They’ve got to feed their customer base something. Quality is hard. Garbage is easy. Hence, "The 1619 Project" crockumentary on (mostly) Disney-owned Hulu is available for consumption.
And it’s awful. I wanted to find something redeeming in it, but its toxicity choked out the life of anything positive. The 1619 Project is, allegedly, a “journalistic endeavor” by Nikole Hannah-Jones to tell the “truth” about American history. The overhyped New York Times staff activist contends that basically everything we know about America is false. And she wants to set the record straight, no matter how much division and deceit she employs. I’m all about teaching accurate American history. That’s not the goal of critical race theorists and propagandists. They want to hold the narrative hostage and use “racism” as a shield to deflect their outrageous claims and massive historical omissions.
I feel that it’s important to highlight that I’m of mixed lineage (white/black), like Ms. Hannah-Jones, with a black biological father and white biological mother. Nowhere in the first episode does she ever mention her white mother. I guess in order to amplify her “black” credentials, she must deny half of who she is. She focuses solely on her black father and the misery of growing up in Waterloo, Iowa. Blacks are perpetually oppressed. Whites are the perpetual oppressors. The 1619 Project narrative is clear. It’s an “us versus them” storyline. It’s the toxic thread woven throughout the crockumentary.
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Everything in the 1619 Project is rooted in blackness and the vile institution of slavery. There’s never any reference to any white abolitionists or civil rights advocates. The fight for equality was, apparently, a solo mission carried out by black resistance. How demeaning of those who risked and gave their lives for freedom in this country. Hannah-Jones’ world is so color-blinded by blackness, she refuses to see the beauty in our nation’s historic brotherhood and sisterhood that transcended the destructive construct of race. “Because it was by virtue of our bondage, we became the most American of all,” she strangely proclaims. So, now our Americanness is measured by color? Isn’t that racism?
Her proclamation fails on many levels. She praised W.E.B. Dubois in the project. He was the co-founder of the NAACP and one of America’s most influential civil rights activists. He was also of mixed lineage. Sadly, the prolific writer’s worldview was so poisonous, the NAACP forced him out because he supported segregation. Dubois ended up joining the Communist Party, renounced his American citizenship, and moved to Ghana. He also celebrated Mao Zedong’s brutal regime and wrote a sycophantic obituary praising Stalin, the murderous dictator responsible for tens of millions of deaths. That’s so American.
But that’s not the accurate history Hannah-Jones and her fellow CRT evangelists want to preach in our schools, churches, and online platforms.
The slopumentary continues in a desperate attempt to ignore all black conservatives, demonize all white people, and focus on our leader (please sense my sarcasm): former President Donald Trump. The series deliberately juxtaposes Civil Rights Era photos of appalling voter suppression with modern-day Trump supporters and January 6th. Again, creating a fantasy version of history, Hannah-Jones tries to portray the Democratic Party as the Party of Lincoln and the Party of Voting Rights. It’s easy to do that when the storyteller conveniently never identifies Democrats or Republicans throughout the “history” lesson. The Democratic Party’s allegiance to slavery, racism, and segregation is historically irrefutable.
The (undeserving) Pulitzer Prize-winning writer claims that only “conservative politicians attacked her” for her historically-challenged 1619 Project fiction. She never mentions non-partisan historians who called out her fiction. Producer Oprah Winfrey (another elitist who suffers from “white supremacy”) and Hannah-Jones have to colorize the narrative: white men against a black woman. They even include images of Loudoun County Public School board meetings — the very ones where I spoke out against the school’s reckless push for racism and gender radicalism — in an effort to bolster their 21st-century white supremacy tale.
What about black people who challenge her? Do we exist? What about Dr. Carol Swain, former tenured professor at Vanderbilt University and Princeton University? What about civil rights champion Bob Woodson, who once headed up the National Urban League Department of Criminal Justice? His 1776 Project directly challenges the many falsehoods conveyed in Hannah-Jones’ leftist invective. He calls the 1619 Project the “culmination of race grievance.”
When she makes the false claim that “public school history doesn’t include black American history or contributions” who should take her seriously? I went to a majority-white rural school decades ago, and I learned a lot about black American history. It’s how I became enamored with Benjamin Banneker, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass (just to name a few).
The Hulu crockumentary continues with its hallmark of racial division and deceit. They invoke Lincoln’s initial separatist views on “race” but never address his evolution on it. It’s almost as if Frederick Douglass never existed. They flash an image of the first black Congressmen — all Republicans of course — but never identify them by Party. They refer to Democrat lawmakers who “implemented poll taxes and literacy tests” as only “white offficials.” They discuss the 1898 Wilmington Coup, but somehow miss the fact that it was the North Carolina Democratic Party that led the race riot that resulted in an estimated 60 black lives massacred.
They conjure up present-day voter suppression as they accuse recent voter integrity laws of preventing black people from voting. It’s a lie of course, but it’s the false fear factor they need to stoke. Never mind nearly every news account reported voting surges across the country (here, here, and here), especially among minorities, in the last few elections. Also, strangely missing from The 1619 Project crockumentary: the KKK. The creation of Democrats was the terrorist campaign of voter suppression that killed both White and Black Americans.
Can’t let history get in the way of heavily-funded, racist, woke propaganda.
Ryan Bomberger is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of The Radiance Foundation. He is happily married to his best friend, Bethany, who is the Executive Director of Radiance. They are adoptive parents with four awesome kiddos. Ryan is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, factivist, international public speaker and author of NOT EQUAL: CIVIL RIGHTS GONE WRONG. He loves illuminating that every human life has purpose.
