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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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I'd argue that you are cherrypicking here (perhaps unintentionally) to make your point. The 1619 project as I understand it was largely driven by media, not historians, in particular Nikole Hannah-Jones (a journalist). Now did it make a splash and influence the public sphere? Sure, but as NYT propaganda. I don't doubt some hacks took it into their history classes to further an agenda, but that's a corruption/subversion of actual historical academia. That's putting an agenda in a class, "People's History" style, not critical thinking. Or so I would argue. Even Beaulieu (an anthropologist) had her ground-penetrating radar comments taken by the media and misrepresented into the blowup about Kamloops. This reminds me of the Ebonics controversy of the 90s--linguists simply pointed out that AAEV/BEV had a noticeable grammar and set of consistent internal rules, that it was not a completely lawless, wild and woolly way of massacring standard English. This was contorted by media outlets into the notion that "linguists say we should teach Black English in schools." My point is that your issues (at least the ones you're listing) seem to be with the larger media contortions than academics.

I am not, again, suggesting that academia as we now know it is unbiased. I am suggesting the Nuke and Pave was way too strong, at least to my own sensibilities.