The director and creator of the New York Times’s factually challenged 1619 Project is happy to take credit for the largely indiscriminate sacking of monuments throughout the United States.
If this surprises you, it should not. When Nikole Hannah-Jones is not advancing conspiracy theories or trying to one-up victims of the Trail of Tears, she can be found cheering the destruction of American institutions and icons.
The New York Post this weekend published an opinion article titled “Call them the 1619 riots” that explored America’s current love affair with iconoclasm.
“America is burning,” the op-ed reads. “Rioters set fire to police stations and restaurants. Looters have ravaged shops from coast to coast. And now they’re coming for the statues — not just of Confederate generals, but the republic’s Founders, including George Washington, whose statue was torn down in Portland, Ore.”
It adds, “Call them the 1619 riots.”
“1619” is a reference to the New York Times’s package of essays by the same name, which attempted, over the objections of reputable historians and one of the project’s own fact-checkers, to argue that America’s legal and cultural foundations and history are defined by chattel slavery.
“It would be an honor,” Hannah-Jones said in response to the New York Post headline. “Thank you.”
She added, “Also, America isn’t burning.”
Again, none of this should come as a surprise. As rioters ripped through major cities, burning down shops and businesses, Hannah-Jones pooh-poohed the mayhem, saying that arson and property destruction are not “violence.”
“Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things, I think, is really not moral to do that,” she told CBS News.
The New York Times staffer continued, explaining that the word “violence” should be reserved exclusively for discussing things such as the wrongful death of George Floyd.
“Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body,” she told CBS News. “Any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property, but these are not reasonable times.”
Hannah-Jones then moved on from downplaying the violence to excusing it.
“These are people who have protested against police violence again and again and again, year after year after year — and still, we can have videos of law enforcement with witnesses taking the life of a man for the alleged crime of passing a fake $20 bill,” she said, referring to the incident that led to Floyd’s death.
Hannah-Jones added, “The law is not respecting them. You can’t say regular citizens should play by the rules when agents of the state are not.”
So, you heard it here first. America is not burning — not that there is anything wrong with burning it or anything like that.
