Whig History, the NYT 1619 Project, and Conspiracy Theory Deniers

By Lee Cary —— Bio and Archives--August 22, 2019

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Once upon a time in America, the news from magazines and newspapers, then the radio, and ultimately television, was largely uniform in content and widely accepted as true.

So, if you only know one song, that’s the one you hum.

With Al Gore’s invention of the internet {sarc}, news lost uniformity.

If anything will revive critical thinking in America—no longer taught in public schools or universities—it will be the world wide web. But as long as the tech justice warriors of big social media remain free to deploy their censoring logarithms, critical thinking will remain in short supply.

Meanwhile, determined efforts to fuzzy-up reality continue to abound. Consider, for example, the recent statement from the leading Democrat contender for the Presidency, Joe Biden, who said, “We (Democrats) choose truth over facts.”  (Heavy stuff.)

Nearly ninety years ago, an Oxford University don explained the difficulty of learning the truth, particularly about the past.

In 1931, Herbert Butterfield, an Oxford University don, wrote a short book entitled “The Whig Interpretation of History” wherein he claimed that historians who wrote about English history from the 17^th Century forward typically did so with a bias favoring Protestants and Whigs over against Catholics and Tories.  Hence the title of his book.

Butterfield referred to the scholarship of Whig historians as “abridgements,” because they transferred the influence of current politics onto past events. In other words, Whig historians were, he wrote, prone to bend the factual record of history to fit their current political agenda.

Does that journalistic transfer-of-bias sound familiar? If not, consider the recently announced intention of the New York Times’ heralded 1619 Project:

“In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” (emphasis added)

The Times tells us—because they are the nation’s self-appointed, reality therapists, smarter than the rest of us—to stop lying to ourselves about what America is, and who we are as Americans. This from a Dr. Phil “news” source that claimed to traffic in “All the news that’s fit to print,” for over two years as it serially lied to the nation concerning the Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax—on a daily basis.

Back to Whig History and Butterfield’s description of how it worked:

“The Whig historian has the easier path before him and his is the quicker way to heavy and masterly historical judgments; for he is in possession of a principle of exclusion which enables him to leave out the most troublesome element in the complexity. By seizing upon those personages and parties in the past whose ideas seem the more analogous to our own, and by setting all these out in contrast with the rest of the stuff of history, he has his organisation {sic} and abridgement of history ready-made and has a clean path through the complexity. This organization of history will answer all questions more clearly than historical research is ever able to do. It will enable him, even before he has studied anything very deeply, to arrive at what seem to be self-evident judgment concerning historical issues.” (pp. 28-29, 1950 edition, London, G. Bell and Sons, LTD)

Essentially, Butterfield accused Whig historians of engaging in lazy, fake scholarship.

While the Times launches a “project” to awaken America to remember the historical fact that the basis of her founding is slavery, watch how they erase the Jeffrey Epstein saga from the news.

When the veracity of the Epstein suicide conclusion is doubted by skeptical news outlets, watch how the Times ridicules the goofey ruminations of conspiracy theorists from the tinfoil-hat neighborhood that’s replete with smelly, uneducated, Walmart shoppers.

But here’s something the Times editor, and all the denizens of their newsroom don’t get:

It’s only when you start critically questioning potential conspiracies that you begin to realize the importance of accountability.

[hat tip: Steve Bartin, Editor, Newsalert]