August 19, 2019

This morning Newt Gingrich tweeted nonsense and got a perfect response.

Here's the background: this weekend The New York Times published "The 1619 Project," which by all accounts (outside the White Nationalism bubble that is today's Republican Party) adds tremendously to the American History narrative by chronicling the long history of slavery and its contradiction to the American ideals of freedom and justice. Nicole Belle wrote about it here yesterday.

Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich had a cow.

But of course, he did. That's his schtick: to blame liberals and cover-up for conservatives.

I uncovered his ability to constantly get a seat on TV by blaming liberals for every headline, back in October of last year.

And now that the New York Times is making headlines for remembering the history of slavery, it's "the historian" Newt's job to calm the hurt fee fee's of white Fox News viewers and deny that racism stemming from America's slave-holding history has anything to do with them. Transcript via Media Matters:

GRIFF JENKINS (FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT): Newt, I want to ask you about The New York Times Magazine, I know you read it as much as you can, launching a new crusade to reframe America as defined by slavery and racism. Here's the headline, I want to show it to you. The 1619 Project, and the quote inside says, "It aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the story tell we tell ourselves about who we are." You are a historian. Your reaction?

NEWT GINGRICH (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Yeah, the whole project is a lie. Look, I think slavery is a terrible thing. I think putting slavery in context is important. We still have slavery in places around the world today, so we recognize this is an ongoing story. I think certainly if you are an African American, slavery is at the center of what you see as the American experience. But, for most Americans, most of the time, there were a lot of other things going on. There were several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves. The fact is that I saw one reference that The New York Times claims that the American Revolution was caused in part to defend slavery. That is such historically factually false nonsense that it's embarrassing that The New York Times is doing this. But, if you saw the recent leaked interview, town hall meeting with The New York Times' editor, he basically said, look, we blew it on Russian collusion, didn't work. Now we're going to go to racism, that's our new model. The next two years will be Trump and racism. This is a tragic decline of The New York Times into a propaganda paper worthy of Pravda or Izvestia in the Soviet Union.

STEVE DOOCY (FOX & FRIENDS CO-HOST): Read all about it in the New York Times Magazine. Alright, Newt, thank you very much for joining us.

Twitter also remembers the dissertation that got Newt his "degree" in "history."

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