Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Monday labeled the New York Times Magazine's extensive 1619 project cover story, which says the arrival of the first slave ship in America defined the nation's entire future, as a "lie" and said its claims play into a propaganda narrative on President Donald Trump and racism.
"The whole project is a lie," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox & Friends."
"This is a tragic decline of the 'New York Times' into a propaganda paper worthy of Pravda or Izvestia in the Soviet Union," he concluded.
He said the piece was printed because the newspaper's attempt to prove Russian collusion failed, so now it will focus on Trump and racism.
"Look, I think slavery is a terrible thing," Gingrich said. "I think putting slavery in context is important. We still have slavery in places around the world today so, we recognize this is an ongoing story."
The project's description says it shows "truthfully" that no aspect of the country has been untouched by its years with slavery, but Gingrich disagreed with that.
To African-Americans, "slavery is at the center of what you see as the American experience," Gingrich said, but for most Americans "there were a lot of other things going on. There were several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves."
Gingrich also slammed a claim in the story that says the American Revolution was caused in part to defend slavery as "such historically factually false nonsense that it's embarrassing."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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