Taibbi Exposes New York Times Launching ‘1619 Project’ To Exorcise 2016 Election, U.S. History

July 6, 2020 (EIRNS)—“Year Zero: On America’s Birthday, Celebrating the Corporate-Sponsored Revolution,” the latest post in “Reporting by Matt Taibbi,” is an extraordinary exposé of New York Times actions not new, but already forgotten by many, by which the Times called for the current attempt to destroy the history of the American Republic, in order to undo the election of Donald Trump. “Year Zero” refers to the Jacobins’ attempt to start history over again with no past. The Times began this, Taibbi recalls, with the infamous summer 2019 meeting of editor Dean Baquet and Times staff, after Robert Mueller’s flameout effectively ended “Russiagate impeachment.” Slate published a leaked transcript.

Baquet consoled the staff: “This week [we] will publish the 1619 Project, the most ambitious examination of the legacy of slavery ever undertaken in [inaudible] newspaper, to try to understand the forces that led to the election of Donald Trump.” The “1619 Project” was a drive, using many media for coverage of it, to cause Americans to forget the devout, republican congregationalist Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620 to colonize the interior; and remember only the royal- chartered merchant adventurers who landed with slaves at Jamestown in 1619, looking for gold.

Taibbi fills in that Jake Silverstein, the editor for Nikole Hannah-Jones who wrote the “1619” series, explained that literally everything “exceptional” about America grew out of slavery, which he called “the country’s very origin.” And that Hannah-Jones claimed, in Taibbi’s words: “the American Revolution was not a project to oppose a despotic king and install a durable system of democratic government. Instead, Jefferson and all of those slave-owning revolutionaries only broke off from England because ‘independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.’ ”

As Taibbi reports, the New York Times Magazine, on July 5 published this: “Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long [sic] caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.”

He continues: “It is impossible to disentangle this profoundly negativistic portrait of the American experiment from the admitted context of the 1619 Project: an effort by the nation’s leading elite media organ to explain the Democratic Party’s loss to Trump. Would this have been published if Hillary Clinton had won the White House?” The Hillary Clinton who defended Wall Street from Bernie Sanders thus: “If we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that end racism?”