The roots of identity politics can be found in a completely different understanding of human nature and natural rights than the one held by America’s Founders and subsequent generations. Wood said, "It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support. But this is not all. It will raise that question: What does it mean to be an American citizen, and why does that matter? Sign up for email updates on new features, videos, podcasts, and more. And I think it’s a deliberate effort to create a new ideological worldview, assert that that worldview is based on facts, and then from the facts assert that they lead logically to certain policies. And without question their greatest defender—arguably the greatest defender in American, if not U.S. history, of self-government—is Abraham Lincoln. Why are they threatening to—in the words of one former CNN host—“burn this entire f—ing thing down.”. In Part 1 of this special edition of the American Mind podcast, I mean, one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. NEWT GINGRICH: I think the Left in general, and the New York Times in particular, want to convince the next generation of Americans that the central theme in American life is slavery and racism, and that all of us are guilty, and that, therefore, we have to move towards reparations—even if the reparations are for people who weren’t ever slaves, paid for by people who weren’t even here when slavery existed. According to the White House, we’ll learn the nominee’s name Saturday. He believed that free black people were a ‘‘troublesome presence’’ incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. In the end, it affected the fight for women’s rights — everything. Listen as Claremont Institute scholars and our expert guests explain how the 1619 Project is not merely an attempt to correct the historical record on slavery, racism, and race-based discrimination in America. And not knowing that then really does not allow us to grapple with the nation that we really are, and not just the nation that we’re taught in kind of American mythology. And I think Lincoln, or Jefferson, or Oliver Wendell Holmes, who fought in the Civil War before becoming a Supreme Court justice—all of them would have said that a lot of what we do today is madness. The 1619 Project teaches that the Founders were really just white supremacists who invented a whole new country to protect the institution of slavery.