Project 2025 vs. 1619 Project

Racism's Chicken/Egg Problem

Over the holidays, things went kinda sideways in MAGA land.

Elon and Vivek (AKA: the DOGE Bros) got into some hot water with nationalist troll Laura Loomer.

At stake–the relative merits of H-1B1 visas for smart (mostly brown, South Asian) tech workers over lazy (mostly white, Protestant) “Native Americans.”

Neither the dot nor the feather kind, this time.

In this curious instance, “native” means cracker-ass white. As in “nativist.”

And all at once, the not-so-Good Ship MAGA ran aground on the rocks of its own divided allegiances.

That’s always been the problem with Utopian projects.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to make America great again? Sounds fucking awesome.

And long overdue.

Ask anyone if they want to get to Paradise and the answer will almost always be “hell yes!”

But start a little down said road to Paradise, and all those differences of opinion start to add up.

(Just ask Lenin and Trotsky).

Your Eden and my Eden have far less in common the closer we get to it. The tech bros and the OG MAGA crowd are finding that out right now.

***

But really, these strange political bedfellows aren’t new.

For the past half century, the Republican coalition of populist evangelicals and corporate fat cats had an unspoken deal: you could whip up the base with some dog whistle racism in the primaries (see: Pat Buchanan) to get the poor whites onside to “vote against their interests.”

But once in the general election and in office, that backwards claptrap took a backseat to NAFTA/free market open borders and the lobbyists of K Street.

#dixiecratsFTW

Big Ag, Manufacturing, Meat Packing, Hospitality and nearly all businesses that had some desperate need for cheap labor to do hard things relied on desperate immigrants.

Documented or not.

Earn dollars.

Pay pesos (under the table if at all possible).

Unless you wanted to charge customers $8 a head for butter lettuce grown by an Oberlin kid interning on an organic farm , or $200/hr for masonry and landscaping at your McMansion in the burbs…

…You were practically bound to engage in some ethnic arbitrage in your payroll accounting.

#theamericanway

So that’s all we’re seeing now with this MAGA dustup. The inevitable clash of an opportunistic election coalition and the bare knuckles power plays erupting within.

Only this time the nativist tribe like Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller have swapped dog whistles for bullhorns (and podcast mics).

It’s about to get loud.

But before it gets too loud, it’s worthwhile to point some things out about nativism and how it all works, so we don’t forget ourselves in the coming years.

This matters, because as we try to make sense of the very real crises we’re facing, What To Do With The Other isn’t going away.

In fact, it’s about to get exponentially worse. Migrant caravans. Shithole countries. Thugs and rapists. Welfare Queens (Loomer had the memetic genius to reboot this Reagan-era gem and sling it at Elon for profiting off federal subsidies).

But also: Ellis Island Melting pots. Lady Liberty’s Huddled Masses. Our best and brightest. Fairness. Mercy.

We’re in this crisis of migration for the foreseeable future. Unfolding ecological and geopolitical chaos is only gonna make it worse.

Much, much worse.

One study suggested that for every tenth of a degree in temperature rise, 100 Million people would be forced out of their homes.

The World Bank forecasts up to a billion climate refugees by 2050.

It’s already undoing the entire post WWII open border consensus in Europe. It’s ushering in the first far right party coalitions everywhere from Italy to Germany, Austria and France. Sweden’s “open hearts” policy has morphed into closed doors.

#nomeatballs4U

It’s breaking democracy as we speak, and we’re barely getting started.

But before we get lost in the chaos, let’s just put some pins in our humanitarian map. So we don’t lose that fragile and incredibly hard won insight that all humans have a universal right to a fair shot at the good life.

Because once we get comfortable Othering the Others, taking a stand for decency and humanity carries higher and higher risks to the moderate middle.

It’s Schindler List or Vichy France.

Isolated heroism or craven collaboration.

So before the changing of the guard on inauguration day, let’s just talk a few things through.

***

Both the Left and the Right have been getting race really wrong lately.

To be fair, the racist Right always had it wrong, but it was kinda their brand so they’ve stuck with it. The Overton Window of heinous things you can say in public has been cranked wide open lately and they’re having a ball.

The racist Social Justice Left however, had to veer out of their Progressive lane to put it in this particular ditch.

You might remember a spot in the BeforeTimes of 2019 when the NYT published the 1619 Project.

It caused quite a stir, earned a Pulitzer for the main author, Nikole Hannah Jones, and launched her, along with Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi to the forefront of the racial reckoning of the George Floyd era.

The 1619 Project broke with Progressive tradition. The story of America was no longer about shining cities on hills, better angels of our nature, moral arcs of the universe, and the contents of men’s characters over the color of their skins.

According to Hannah-Jones, America was racist to its 400 year-old core. From the beginning. It was an Original Sin that tainted the Founding Fathers, Abe Lincoln and everyone ever since.

Naturally, this threw newly minted Fragile Whites (h/t DiAngelo) into conniptions. And provided fodder for the #defundthepolice and #burnitalldown crowd to go full Antifa.

If AmeriKKKa was rotten to its original core, then revolution was the only logical response.

Reformation seemed hopelessly, dangerously bourgeois.

(if we couldn’t actually defund police, at least we could tone police).

But the biggest problem with the 1619 Project was that it’s bad history.

(see here for a viral letter from OG Princeton historians Sean Wilenz and Gordon Wood pointing out some of the key details)

Like any ideologically driven scholarship, it worked backwards from a present conviction –i.e. “America is currently racist” to arrive at a foregone conclusion–”and it’s been this way since the beginning.”

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

(“after this, therefore before it”)

Which put us in a tight spot.

As any guilty Catholic knows too well, you can’t ever expunge Original Sin. It’s baked in, like the Apple News app on your phone. You can’t uninstall that fucker even if you wanted to. (and believe me, I’ve wanted to)

from the 1619 Project intro

Equality has never been truly achieved for black Americans — not in 1776, not in 1865, not in 1964, not in 2008 and not today. The very premise of The 1619 Project, in fact, is that many of the inequalities that continue to afflict the nation are a direct result of the unhealed wound created by 250 years of slavery and an additional century of second-class citizenship and white-supremacist terrorism inflicted on black people

These inequalities were the starting point of our project

Which kinda guts us on finding the common ground to repair and rebuild. If you’re instruments are broken, nothing you construct with them will ever be plumb, square or level.

Better to tear that old building down and start from bare-assed scratch.

But if you go back a little further than 1619 to the beginning beginnings of Jamestown in 1607, you see the faintest traces of a different story. And it’s that story that we need to dust off and remember before it’s too late.

Before chattel slavery of West Africans had ginned up in earnest, those earlier settlements were diseased, violent death traps, to be sure. But they were also devoid of any of the structural racism of later centuries.

In fact, free Blacks from the Caribbean and other places could sue white settlers in court, own land, inter-marry, own guns, start businesses, sign contracts and a slew of other positively empowering things.

It wasn’t until later in the 17th century when the initial slug of British indentured servants started running low, and cheap, easy, “free” farmlands weren’t available (the Powhatan tribe had some definite thoughts on upriver expansion), that we see the calcification and weaponization of race relations.

That’s when Nathanael Bacon led a rebellion to force the issue of upward mobility for white folk. When faced with near annihilation from angry white settlers, the white government made a savvy decision.

Yale historian, Edmund Morgan wrote in his classic American Slavery, American Freedom

"But for those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in as time went on."

Post Bacon’s Rebellion, the governor quickly realized “Ah, far better to persuade poor whites that race is more important than class, than to allow them to find common cause with their red and brown comrades!”

The United States was only able to conduct the fragile democratic experiment that all men might be created equal, if it, paradoxically, identified some sub-population to be unequal at first.

Same with the only other two civilizations to try this wild idea, the Greeks and the Romans. Morgan argued that slavery, rather than being a bug in the code of primitive democracy, was a tragic but co-arising feature.

What’s crucial to understand here is that racism did not arise out of the swamps of Jamestown. It emerged from the minds and laws of men.

After the fact (of initial chaotic egalitarianism). Not before it.

Causation vs correlation matters.

If it was baked in from the get-go, we can’t ever get that damned spot out. But if we put it in ourselves for reasons of power and politics, then we can scrub it out again by the same means.

Power and profit precedes prejudice.

And that’s kind of where we’re finding ourselves now. Seeing a rise in racism that is a smokescreen to justify political agendas.

It’s not any more flattering. It certainly doesn’t let us off the hook for the legacy of conquest of genocide and slavery. But it does give us more agency and awareness going forwards.

If the 1619 Project had it backwards, confusing correlation with causation, they’re not alone.

On the other side of the political divide, the Project 2025 crew (now tapped for several key positions in the upcoming Trump admin) have been planning a white, ethno-nationalist, Christian theocracy. Based on the notion that the country’s under threat from those that don’t look, speak and worship like “us.”

And as we saw with Loomer and Bannon’s comments in the last couple of weeks around the H-1B1 visa debate, they’re saying all the quiet parts out loud.

Apparently taken by the spirit of the holiday season, Loomer had this to tweet on Christmas Eve

“Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world invaders from India. You know, it was white Europeans who created the American Dream, and we didn’t create it so that it could be exploited by pro open border techies like you. PS: why are people in India still sh*tting in the water they bathe and drink from?”

In this particular visa spat, Elon is stumping for smart and hard working immigrants to help expedite our AI overlords. But just a couple of months ago, he was earnestly stumping the Great Replacement Theory. (wherein white folks get “replaced” by Lefty immigrants)

In retweets and podcasts, he amplified the message that the Democratic party was bussing and flying undocumented immigrants into battleground states to steal the election. He even posted an unsourced graphic from his own PAC claiming to reflect Dept. of Homeland Security statistics to support these crazy numbers.

“If we don’t stop this, it will literally be the last election we have in this country,” he told a suitably chastened Joe Rogan.

Which, you know, might’ve inspired a few arm chair patriots to vote.

If democracy itself really was under threat from the brown menace.

Except it wasn’t.

Like, at all.

For starters, if you actually went to the .gov website and looked at the real (not photoshopped) stats, the influx of immigrants to the top battleground states was mixed—up in a few, flat in a few, down in the rest.

No sinister pattern to behold.

Same with the flimsy assumption that brown folks are definitely gonna vote for Marxists once they sneak in. Turned out that nearly a coin toss split (46% of Hispanic men) voted for a white strongman, not a bratty brown woman.

Same with those terrifying “Migrant Caravans” that were all the rage on Fox a couple years back–they miraculously dropped from coverage the day after the mid-terms. They’d served the purpose of getting Grandpa off the couch and to the voting booth.

Same with the hysterical mutterings about a Chinese Communist Party invasion across our southern border.

One increasingly unreliable “heterodox” thinker explained on Tucker Carlson’s show about traveling down to the Panama Canal and sussing out entire staging camps of “military age, all Chinese males who did not want to talk to us.”

Who, by innuendo and implication, were preparing to storm the ramparts of the ol’ US of A.

And to be fair, if you go back to those same government data bases, 2023 did see a more than 300% spike in Chinese activity at the border.

But so did Canada. And Australia. And almost every country in Western Europe.

So what at first glance seemed like a sleeper invasion of Manchurian Candidates, at even a quick second glance turns out to be something far more banal.

Post COVID lockdowns and economic crisis in China, many Chinese are looking to get the hell out. And they are sending the most mobile and expendable members of their families (young men) to try and establish footholds elsewhere.

If you really want to get a far better informed journalistic perspective on what’s happening in the Darien Gap of Columbia and all the way up to the southern border, check out this heart wrenching bit of reporting on the human cost. It’s not as simplistic, or as morally self-satisfied. It’s complex, conflicted and utterly human.

But also, humanizing.

We know that most people in most places would rather stay home if they possibly could. Amongst their people, customs, language, music, foods and favorite places.

We know that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than natives. We know they’re often better informed on US history and civics (imagine this: free tickets to any MAGA rally, but you have to pass a current citizenship test to get in!).

#biggestcrowdnever

Migration’s a bitch.

But it’s getting worse, and not likely to resolve for the rest of this century.

(check this recent WSJ article on the mushrooming of conflicts across Africa, and how as Europe and the US go broke, they’re withdrawing critical humanitarian aid to the places that need it most)

And after this little historical refresher, we know that racism is a blunt instrument of power that we use to justify our worst instincts.

But it’s not cast in stone.

So why bother going back into the 1619 Project and Project 2025 right now?

Simply so we don’t forget the key lessons of the last five years, and of the last five hundred years.

Because while MAGA briefly moved on from the Great Replacement Theory and the “stolen elections” trope after it won, the seeds of that strange fruit remain.

This week, the focus is on South Asians stealing the engineering jobs that our online influencer kids don’t even want. And few are actually qualified for.

But tomorrow?

Tomorrow we’ll be cheering when they lock up children and mothers in detention camps to send them “back where they came from.”

If we’re not careful.

If we forget the past.

And what does that past tell us?

Racism is a convenient and potent tool. But it shows up most often after we have something at stake. After we need to justify dehumanizing someone to get what we want.

And let’s face it. Open democracies are simply not built for this shit.

We’ve never had so many homeless folks roaming the Earth. We’ve never had to assimilate and integrate so many diverse people carrying so much pain and suffering.

And even if we had the will, we’re running out of time and money.

If there’s not enough to go around in the century ahead, how will we share what’s left?

So can we take Edmund Morgan’s insight on the nature of racism in the United States and apply it to our current moment of political rebellion?

"But for those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in as time went on."

While those colonists in Jamestown may not have grasped it at the time, the citizens of America have a chance today.

Race divides us and obscures the abuses of power that affect us all.

Can we resist dehumanizing those uprooted from their homes now knocking on our doors?

Can we help those who don’t look like us, talk like us and worship like us, because we share a humanity common to all of us?

And can we address how fucking hard this is, and how much harder it’s going to get, without falling back into the tribal tropes that diminish us all?