The 1776 Report: Ignorance and Lies — Or the Antidote to 1619?

The 1776 Report was a direct response to the 1619 Project. One places slavery and racism at the center of the American founding; the other emphasizes the principles of individual freedom and self-government. It is no coincidence that the most ardent critics of the 1776 Report are among the staunchest defenders of the 1619 Project.

James Grossman, Executive Director of the American Historical Association, called the 1776 Report “a hack job. It’s not a work of history. It’s a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars.” Ironically, many readers would agree with the sentiment—yet sharply disagree about which of the two projects that statement best describes.

What is certain is that a culture war has been deliberately stoked to divide and undermine America as a constitutional republic. Revisionist history is widespread, and the 1619 Project stands as a prominent example.

In December 2019, five distinguished historians—Sean Wilentz, Gordon S. Wood, Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, and James Oakes—wrote a letter to the New York Times expressing both praise and serious concern. They applauded the project’s effort to highlight the centrality of slavery but objected to significant factual errors and its ideological framing. [As the authors requested it be shared by the Times in it’s entirety, I am sharing it in full with you]

“We write as historians to express our strong reservations about important aspects of the New York Times's 1619 Project. The project is intended to offer a new version of American history in which slavery and white supremacy become the dominant organizing themes. The Times has announced ambitious plans to make the project available to schools in the form of curricula and related instructional material.

We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history. Some of us have devoted our entire professional lives to those efforts, and all of us have worked hard to advance them. Raising profound, unsettling questions about slavery and the nation’s origins, as the 1619 Project does, is a praiseworthy and urgent public service. Nevertheless, we are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.

These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds— that they are only the objections of “white historians” — has affirmed that displacement.

On the American Revolution, for example - pivotal to any account of our history -- the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding -- yet every statement offered to validate it is false. Some of the other material in the project is distorted, including the claim that “for the most part,” black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “alone.”

Still other material is misleading. The project criticizes Abraham Lincoln's views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, including blacks as well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him. The project also ignores Lincoln’s agreement with Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was, in Douglass’s words “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” Instead, the project asserts that the United States was founded on racial slavery, an argument invented in the 1830s by proslavery champions like John C. Calhoun, and later picked up by a minority of the abolitionists.

The 1619 Project has not been presented as the views of individual writers -- views that in some cases, as on the supposed direct connections between slavery and modern corporate practices, have as yet failed to establish any empirical veracity or reliability and have been seriously challenged by other historians. Instead, the project is offered as an authoritative historical account that bears the imprimatur and credibility of the New York Times. Those connected with the project have assured the public that its materials were shaped by a panel of historians and have been scrupulously fact checked. Yet the process remains opaque. The names of only some of the historians involved have been released, and the extent of their involvement as “consultants” and fact-checkers remains vague. The selective transparency deepens our concern.

‘We ask that the Times, according to its own high standards of accuracy and truth, issue prominent corrections of all of the errors and distortions presented in the 1619 Project. We also ask for the removal of these mistakes from any materials destined for use in schools as well as in all further publications, including books bearing the name of the New York Times. We ask finally that the Times reveal fully the process whereby the historical materials were and continue to be assembled, checked, and authenticated.

The New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, rejected the request for corrections. He defended the project as journalism rather than formal academic history and argued that its central claims were grounded in scholarship. However, in 2020 the Times quietly added a clarification to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, changing “one of the primary reasons” the colonists declared independence to “one of the primary reasons some of the colonists…” [the full response is hidden by a paywall]

For material promoted as history and destined for school curricula, was that single edit sufficient? Does this represent the future of historical education—where journalists insert ideological framing and present it as settled fact?

The implications extend beyond scholarship. AOC has echoed 1619-style narratives, claiming that “Black Americans really created democracy in this country” and asserting, “The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time.” Such revisionism casts the Founding Fathers as proletarian revolutionaries fighting a caste system rather than a tyrannical monarchy. In reality, many Founders were among the wealthiest colonists, and they revolted against British imperial overreach, not to preserve racial hierarchy. These interpretations align with a broader push by self-described democratic socialists that many view as advocating Marxist-style transformation.

This effort is not limited to American progressives. On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly—led by Ghana and supported by the African Union and CARICOM—passed a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade and racialized chattel slavery “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations. The United States, Israel, and Argentina were the only three countries to vote against it.

In explaining the U.S. vote, Ambassador Dan Negrea stated that while America condemns the historic wrongs of the slave trade, it does not recognize a legal right to reparations for acts that were not illegal under international law at the time. The U.S. also objected to ranking atrocities hierarchically and to what it called the “cynical usage of historical wrongs” to redistribute modern resources.

Ironically, Ghana’s own Criminal Code 1960 (Act 29), Section 314 — titled “Slave-Dealing” — makes it a serious crime (second-degree felony) to buy, sell, barter, transfer, or take any person as a slave. In other words, the very act of selling human beings that Ghanaian kingdoms and merchants engaged in during the transatlantic slave trade is explicitly illegal under modern Ghanaian law.

Yet Ghana has been one of the leading African nations demanding reparations from the United States and European countries — the buyers in that historical transaction — while largely ignoring or downplaying the active role African kingdoms played on the supply side. A full and honest historical accounting must include African agency, tribal warfare, and the profitable sale of captives by African elites, not merely European and American demand. This inconvenient part of the story is too often omitted from contemporary discourse.

Historian Sean Wilentz criticized the 1619 Project for sacrificing accuracy for ideology and warned against the dangers of identity politics in history. He also described the 1776 Report as “the flip side” of the 1619 Project—essentially a political document. Yale historian David W. Blight went further, calling the 1776 Report “fascist and authoritarian propaganda,” “viciously right wing,” and comparable to “sixth-grade history from the 1950s.” Some might argue that a return to that earlier standard of American history education would be an improvement over much of what students receive today.

Critics of the 1776 Report, including statements from the American Historical Association and numerous historians, have identified several areas where the document has been seen as selective or inaccurate. For instance, they argue that it downplays the Founders’ personal and political complicity in slavery, citing the report’s claim that George Washington “by the end of his life… freed all the slaves in his family estate.” In reality, Washington’s will freed only his personally owned slaves (after his wife Martha’s death), while many enslaved people at Mount Vernon were dower slaves belonging to Martha’s heirs and were not immediately freed. Critics also contend that the report portrays the founding era primarily as setting the stage for abolition while minimizing constitutional provisions that protected slavery, such as the Three-Fifths Clause and fugitive slave clauses, and that it understates the economic importance of slavery and the domestic slave trade to the early republic. The report’s explanation of the Three-Fifths Clause has been particularly disputed: it describes the clause as intended “to prevent the South from counting their slaves as whole persons,” whereas historians note it was a compromise that actually increased Southern representation in Congress by counting enslaved individuals as three-fifths for apportionment and taxation without granting them rights.

Additional criticisms focus on the report’s treatment of later American history. It praises the early Martin Luther King Jr. while suggesting subsequent civil rights efforts shifted toward “group rights” and identity politics at odds with founding principles; it links modern identity politics with historical evils such as slavery, fascism, and communism; and it characterizes John C. Calhoun as a forerunner of identity politics. Historians have also called the report’s equation of early-twentieth-century Progressivism with fascism, slavery, and communism hyperbolic, noting its criticism of reforms such as child labor laws and food safety regulations. Finally, the report has been faulted for limited coverage of Native Americans, women, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, its relatively passive treatment of the Civil War, limited engagement with post-1950s scholarship, and instances where sections appear to recycle earlier writings by commission members without attribution. These points have been raised as examples of a unifying narrative that, while aspirational, prioritizes certain themes over a more comprehensive historical account.

While these criticisms reflect the prevailing views of many academic historians, they often overstate selective emphases as outright falsehoods and apply anachronistic standards to the Founding era. On Washington, the Report accurately notes his evolution against slavery and the unprecedented step in his will of freeing the 123 slaves he personally owned (the only Founding Father to do so), even as it acknowledges the practical limits imposed by dower slaves and Virginia law—facts the Report does not deny. The Three-Fifths Clause was indeed a compromise proposed by anti-slavery delegates to limit Southern power relative to full counting demands, preventing even greater Southern dominance in Congress while setting the stage for future debates over representation. Critics’ charges of “downplaying” complicity or economic realities overlook the Report’s explicit framing of slavery as a profound contradiction to founding principles—one the Union ultimately resolved through immense cost in the Civil War—while prioritizing the revolutionary ideals that made abolition possible, unlike most societies throughout history. Claims about identity politics, Progressivism’s overreach into centralized expert rule (echoing early fascist tendencies toward state management), and omissions of nuance reflect interpretive differences rather than errors: the Report consciously offers a unifying, principle-centered narrative against fragmented grievance histories, not a comprehensive textbook. Its rapid production and reuse of prior conservative scholarship do not invalidate its core defense of natural rights and self-government as the true American story.

On his first day in office, President Biden abolished the 1776 Commission while signing an executive order on racial equity. He declared:

“Look, in the weeks ahead, I’ll be reaffirming the federal government’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and accessibility, building on the work we started in the Obama-Biden administration. That’s why I rescinded the previous administration’s harmful ban on diversity and sensitivity training, and abolished the offensive, counter-factual 1776 Commission. Unity and healing must begin with understanding and truth, not ignorance and lies.”

The 1776 Report, released just two days earlier on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 18, 2021), sought to counter the 1619 Project by reaffirming the principles of the Declaration of Independence and promoting patriotic education. It received little sustained attention and was quickly sidelined.

Now it is presented here for you to listen to and judge for yourself. Is this document worthy of consideration by American citizens? Can Americans still unite under the self-evident principles declared by the Founding Fathers? Do the founding ideals, imperfectly realized, still offer the strongest framework for national unity? Or is the report, as its critics claim, merely ignorance and lies?

Listen to the full 1776 Report on YouTube or read The 1776 Report here.