Sen. Tom Cotton Launches Bill Banning Federal Funds for Teaching America Founded on Slavery

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) introduced a bill Thursday that would ban federal funds for teaching the New York Times’s revisionist “1619 Project,” which claims America was founded on slavery.

The Saving American History Act of 2020 asserts America was founded on July 4, 1776, when its fundamental principles were set forth in the Declaration of Independence. The bill continues:

• An activist movement is now gaining momentum to deny or obfuscate this history by claiming that America was not founded on the ideals of the Declaration but rather on slavery and oppression.

• This distortion of American history is being taught to children in public school classrooms via the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which claims that ‘‘nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional’’ grew “out of slavery.”

“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded,” said Cotton in a press statement. “Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage.”

The senator’s office notes that, while the 1619 Project has received widespread criticism, some schools, including those in Chicago, Newark, NJ; Buffalo, NY; and Washington, DC, have already incorporated the project into their curricula.

The principal author of the 1619 Project is Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who wrote in June, “If true justice and equality are ever to be achieved in the United States, the country must finally take seriously what it owes black Americans.”

In her “project,” Hannah-Jones has attempted to revise American history by changing its start from 1776 to 1619, the year the first slaves arrived in what was then the colonies. In her mind, therefore, anything that happened in America after that date relates to slavery.

The Washington Times editorial board wrote about her distortion:

Mrs. Hannah-Jones applies her argument to Revolution, claiming that the colonists fought for independence on the grounds that an America untethered from Britain would allow the institution of slavery to flourish. This assertion is so wrong, so factually inaccurate, that leading historians (Mrs. Hannah-Jones is a journalist) of both conservative and liberal persuasions, systematically went through her research and found no evidence supporting her contention. (They did, however, find a trove of historical inaccuracies and distortions.)

The editors continued with a warning, based on what has already been experienced in America’s public schools for decades:

Neither party cares that the dissemination of their distortion of America’s story will lead, like the teachings of the Marxists of yesteryear, to the weakening of our shared social fabric. Neither party cares that elites telling mistruths about the trials African-Americans endured does this community a tremendous injustice. And neither party cares, ultimately, about the status of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, in the world.

“But we should,” the editorial board asserted.

The Times also announced Thursday it is releasing a new podcast series titled Nice White Parents, apparently about how white parents are preventing black and brown children from succeeding in public schools.