Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton introduced a bill Thursday to deny federal funding to any school that teaches the infamous New York Times’ “1619 Project.
Cotton’s legislation, the Saving American History Act of 2020, establishes that America’s founding is July 4, 1776, the self-evident truths set forth by the Declaration of Independence are the fundamental principles of the American founding, and the federal government must promote an accurate account of American history to form patriotic citizens.
The 1619 Project was written by New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones whose goal is to reframe U.S. history by “marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date”. The 1619 Project also claims that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery instead of achieving independence from Britain. The project won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize award in commentary.
In a statement, Sen. Cotton said, “[The 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.”
“Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage,” Cotton added.
In an interview with Fox News, Cotton responded to accusations that he claimed slavery was a “necessary evil” to which he responded by saying the claims were “fake news”.
“Many founders believed that only with the union and the Constitution could we put slavery on the path to its ultimate extinction,” Sen. Cotton said, adding that Lincoln echoed the same sentiment during the Civil War.
Cotton also said that historians James McPherson and Gordon Wood have debunked the historical accuracy of the 1619 project.
“The history of America is the long and oftentimes difficult struggle to live up to that principle,” Cotton said, referring to the fundamental moral principle in the Declaration of Independence that says all men are created equal.
“That’s a history we ought to be proud of, not the historical revisionism of the ‘1619 Project’ which wants to indoctrinate America’s kids and teach them to hate America, to believe that America was founded not on human freedom, but, on racism, to think that slavery was not an aberration but the true heart of Amerca,” Cotton concluded.