In every generation, a handful of people rise to the level of greatness. John Lewis was the embodiment of greatness.
John Lewis was a titan in the fight for civil rights and the equality of races. He never backed down from fighting for what is right, and he always remained peaceful.
As our country mourns John Lewis this week, we should follow his example and continue fighting for justice, equality, and peace.
I led a resolution in the U.S. Senate and spoke on the floor to honor John Lewis' life and legacy. Watch my speech here .
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Has The New York Times gone fascist?
A Steeley Media Silence
A newspaper of record disapproves of you knowing the truth but at least it tells you so.
The New York Times building
Photo: angela weiss/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
When the movie of the Trump-Russia conspiracy is made, I once suggested, it won’t be the 2006 “Casino Royale,” with Daniel Craig as James Bond. It will be the 1967 version with Woody Allen, played for laughs.
One scene will feature top Democrats and Brookings Institution officials who would be flattered if you ended up thinking of them as Steele dossier conspirators as some now wish to portray them. The truth implies rather less competence. These people include Strobe Talbott, a former Clinton official and arms-control expert and until 2017 Brookings’s president, and Fiona Hill, a Russia expert last seen working for the Trump administration; then there’s Victoria Nuland, a senior official in the Obama State Department who has worked at Brookings and is married to one of its scholars.
In the runup to the 2016 election, all were to be seen busily and importantly circulating a dossier of allegations about the Trump campaign drawn up by former British agent Christopher Steele, presumably unaware that Mr. Steele’s source was merely a former analyst in their own shop along with his drinking buddies.
All the above had far more legitimate ties to top Russian leaders and intelligence figures than any they were encouraged to believe had been exploited to wring out gobsmacking revelations about Russia and Donald Trump. Mr. Talbott even phoned Mr. Steele to conspire furtively over the dossier, about which Mr. Talbott’s interest would instantly have vanished had he known its true provenance.
What we’ve learned thanks to popular dissection of a heavily redacted FBI interview with Mr. Steele’s “primary sub-source,” made public by Senate investigators: The source was Igor Danchenko, product of a regional Russian undergraduate legal education. At 16, he was an exchange student in Louisiana, later studying at Louisville and Georgetown. Aside from a three-year period writing legal documents for Russian trading firms, he made his career in the U.S. as an itinerant writer of business and political reports, including at Brookings.
Until now, his claims to fame were second-fiddle authorship of a study exposing Vladimir Putin’s plagiarism of his own dissertation and two arrests in suburban D.C. for public intoxication. He boasts no real connection to any knowledgeable source in Russia. He was aghast, according to his FBI interview, at the use Mr. Steele made of liquid speculations that he and friends ginned up in response to a Steele-dangled fee.
On such a foundation was a global furor built, and largely at the hands (let’s admit) of people like Mr. Talbott, Ms. Nuland, Ms. Hill and many, many others, including many in the press.
As he did with journalists, Mr. Steele played on their willingness to confuse his seeming credibility as a former British agent with credibility for the things he was saying, even though he did not actually vouch for the things he was saying and refused to reveal his source. Often people in authority have little real idea what they are doing. It wouldn’t be the first case of journalists and others lending credence to unsourced, unsupported claims simply because they were written on paper.
The surface scandal here is the FBI’s knowing use of the bogus Steele dossier to spy on an extraordinarily minor Trump campaign associate.
The deeper scandal, of course, is the Obama administration’s promotion of the myth that Mr. Trump was a Kremlin agent.
So how did the New York Times handle the outing of Mr. Danchenko this week? As if somebody definitely did something wrong, and it was whoever brought Mr. Danchenko’s identity to light.
“Trump Allies Help Expose Identity of F.B.I. Informant,” went a headline over a 2,200-word story, exuding disapproval that Congress and members of the public were holding a previous administration to account when the Times had chosen not to.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m about to say. The paper’s coverage of the Danchenko outing is everything a Freudian slip should be—a full-blown Technicolor revelation of neurosis. But that doesn’t mean the newsroom is not full of curious, persistent and hardheaded people who are trying to find out things. You can see it in much of their reporting. But in the perfumed ranks of senior editors, where this story was likely reshaped to meet institutional and political needs, something else prevails: fear. Fear of the loss of status, fear of being thrown to the wolves in the next social-media eruption.
I might even be tempted to say that everyone involved in the paper’s pathologically revealing treatment of the Danchenko story should be frog-marched out of journalism on principle. Except for one thing: At least the Times reported the story, and even confirmed Mr. Danchenko’s identity after it was exposed by diligent volunteers on the web. Other news outlets almost uniformly ignored the latest revelation despite its centrality to the melodrama that engulfed the country for three years. If you think something is wrong with American journalism, you’re right.
The 1619 Project: When ‘History’ Isn’t History
The New York Times’ 1619 Project has a conflicted relationship with history.
According to New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, this symposium of essays could be many things at once. At times, the “goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history” by “placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” But the Project also explores everyday phenomena and “reveals its history.” The Project’s more literary works “bring to life key moments in American history.” But sometimes, those literary works are preceded by a more familiar accounting of historical events “to which the author is responding.” The compendium is simultaneously a contribution to the sum of our historical knowledge and a critique of it.
That would not be a controversial approach if this collection of essays was billed as what it is: “narrative journalism.” But the “1619 Project” fast acquired a reputation as a definitive account of America’s untold origins, and its authors did not protest. Oprah Winfrey and the film distributor Lionsgate are partnering with the architect of the Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, to “develop a multi-media history of slavery and its effects in America for a worldwide audience.” Colleges and museums hosted exhibitions inspired by these essays. Primary school districts across the country are adding the Project’s essays to their K-12 history curriculum.
All this has occurred even as practicing historians expressed skepticism about the relative historical value of the Project. Last December, five historians—Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, and James Oakes—took issue with the 1619 Project’s central and most contentious claim: that the nation’s founding date is not 1776 but a century and a half earlier. “[T]he project asserts the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain’ in order to ensure slavery would continue,’” these scholars wrote, “This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding—yet every statement offered by the Project to validate it is false.” The Times took note and, accordingly, corrected the “original language” to reflect the facts while still defending “the basic point” of the offending essay.
But that was hardly the only source of frustration among academicians. Historians took exception to one essay’s contention that the disaggregation of the black family can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries. They balked at the Project’s exhumation of a demonstrably false assertion that slavery disproportionately contributed to the country’s wealth. Most of all, they objected to the Project’s self-aggrandizing claim that the study of slavery—both its origins and its aftermath—is an underexplored field of study and instruction.
The Pulitzer Prize Committee subversively adjudicated this dispute when it awarded Hannah-Jones the Pulitzer for the category “commentary”—not some more empirical genre like, for example, history. Nevertheless, the Times maintained that the Project’s most controversial essays remain “grounded in the historical record” and are not “driven by ideology rather than historical understanding.”
Apparently, Nikole Hannah-Jones disagrees.
“I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history,” she recently averred. “It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory.” Hannah-Jones continued: “The crazy thing is, the 1619 Project is using history and reporting to make an argument. It never pretended to be a history.” Indeed, when it comes to primary education, “the curriculum is supplementary and cannot and was never intended to supplant U.S. history curriculum.” That is, indeed, quite reasonable. Even if we assume K-12 students are equipped to “interrogate” the “narrative” of America’s Founding, which they are not, such an enterprise amounts to indoctrination if the student has not yet internalized the basics. You cannot “critically deconstruct” a narrative with which you’re unfamiliar.
This was a reasonable concession to the avalanche of good faith criticism the Project received from the scholarly community. Or, at least, it would have been if Hannah-Jones had not so vehemently objected to the efforts by Sen. Tom Cotton to prevent the teaching of this document in public schools as though it were uncontested fact.
Cotton’s initiative, which is more a political statement than legislation, would strip schools of federal funding equivalent to the amount of instructional time dedicated to teaching the 1619 Project. “This bill speaks to the power of journalism more than anything I’ve ever done in my career,” Hannah-Jones wrote while promoting the Pulitzer Center’s “educational resources and curricula” designed to “bring ‘The 1619 Project’ into your classroom.” American education, implied in the series of articles she subsequently promoted, does not adequately teach “the history of American slavery.” And what is objective knowledge anyway? “LOL,” the Pulitzer-recipient wrote when confronted with Civil War historian James MacPherson’s assertion that the project “lacked context and perspective. “Right,” she continued, “because white historians have produced truly objective history.”
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that American primary education fails to explore many aspects of American history—the legacy of slavery being just one of those deficiencies. But instructional time dedicated to history has, along with the study of civics, been subordinated to a dozen other objectives educators are compelled to pursue. It would seem unwise to sacrifice more of that precious classroom time to the examination of tendentious tracts that are, by their own architect’s admission, not history, per se, but rather an argument over narratives. Students should learn the history first and argue over it later.
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