CITIZENS NEWS

Woke academics are destroying American history with left-wing bias, new study finds

By jdheyes // 2022-08-29

For years, woke academics have been working to memory hole the great and wonderful things our founders and their immediate descendants did in founding and developing the United States. Everything from our constitutional system to our country's history have been attacked as inherently racist, colonizing, and corrupt as though nothing good has come from the existence of America. Only now, however, are some academicians becoming concerned enough to speak out -- and even those who do are virulently assailed. In a column published at the American Institute for Economic Research, Phillip W. Magness writes of "a bizarre string of events" that is currently taking place "at the American Historical Association." He noted further: Last week, AHA president James H. Sweet published a column in the organization’s magazine on the problem of “presentism” in academic historical writing. According to Sweet, an unsettling number of academic historians have allowed their political views in the present to shape and distort their interpretations of the past. Sweet offered a gentle criticism of the New York Times’s 1619 Project as evidence of this pattern. Many historians embraced the 1619 Project for its political messages despite substantive flaws of fact and interpretation in its content. Sweet thus asked: “As journalism, the project is powerful and effective, but is it history?” Within moments of his column appearing online, all hell broke loose on Twitter. Many users, several from verified accounts, were angry at even the tamest hint that too many historical accounts written by today's academics are tainted with left-wing woke bias, even though it's blatantly obvious. To prove that point, many who responded to Sweet's gentle criticism demanded he be canceled because that is how the left operates: Rather than refute critics on the merits of arguments, data and evidence, they simply want to shout down opponents and relegate them to silence because it is effective. "Cate Denial, a professor of history at Knox College, led the charge with a widely-retweeted thread calling on colleagues to bombard the AHA’s Executive Board with emails protesting Sweet’s column. 'We cannot let this fizzle,' she declared before posting a list of about 20 email addresses," Magness wrote. He noted that other activists posing as 'historians' chimed in as well, with many posting profanity-laced tirades attacking Sweet's gender and race (a white male) and calling for his firing or resignation. Why does being a white male matter? Well, according to Sweet's University of Wisconsin-Madison profile, "he is a historian of Africa and the African diaspora, with a particular focus on the cultures and politics of enslaved Africans in the Americas." In other words, he's an expert on those topics, to include slavery, so regardless of his skin tone, he is exactly the person who can speak with authority on subjects like the documented historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project. But since the left cannot tolerate any dissent or critique, its ideological adherents respond immediately by attacking the messenger rather than debate the message. "The responses were almost universally devoid of any substance. None challenged Sweet’s argument in any meaningful way. It was sufficient enough for him to have harbored the 'wrong' thoughts – to have questioned the scholarly rigor of activism-infused historical writing, and to have criticized the 1619 Project in even the mildest terms," Magness noted. "Any argument that does not advance a narrow band of far-left political activism is not only unfit for sharing – it must be suppressed." But again, the tactic is effective, since the academic world is literally dominated by left-wing activists. A day after his 'offending' column, Sweet issued what appeared to be a forced apology, cringingly offering a mea culpa for offending delicate leftist sensibilities. And this, Magness notes, is how real history has been memory-holed and distorted: Any questioning of politicized versions of our history are swatted down by activists, leaving the incorrect and politicized versions to stand as genuine. Magness adds: "In this branch of academia, it does not matter whether the 1619 Project was truthful or factually accurate. The only concerns are whether its narrative can be weaponized for a political cause or used to deflect scrutiny of the same. As is often the case in the pseudo-moralizing political crusades of academia, the loudest demands against Sweet also came from the least-productive academics – historians with thin CVs and little in the way of original scholarly research to their names, although they do maintain 24/7 Twitter feeds of progressive political commentary." Our culture is terminally ill, and our society is in a death spiral thanks to the insanity of anti-Western left-wing ideology. There is no recovery at this point. Sources include: AIER.org Historians.org

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