Why is Nikole Hannah-Jones still a journalist? Did you notice Chuck Todd have to call out her anti-white anti-founder racial bigotry in the beginning of the interview?

No?

Me either.

With his question (which allowed her to frame everything the way she wanted), she offered a clarification: some of the colonists supported the Civil War in order to maintain slavery.

No big deal, right?

I also didn't notice Todd doing anything alarming.

Pollsters following the Virginia election had polled voters and asked parents--it was just reported as "parents" because they weren't splitting the results by race--about their support for McAuliffe vs Youngkin, and got strong support for Youngkin and a lot of outrage about McAuliffe's statement.

Maybe Todd was making an unconsciously racist remark, or maybe he hadn't finished thinking through the language, because the "parents of color" thing seemed to be a reaction to what Hannah-Jones had just said. Maybe both.

Anyway, he accepted the correction and the interview moved on.

If we can't do that for Todd, I don't see why we should do it for Hannah-Jones.

Personally, I think policing every poor choice of phrasing is profoundly contrary to a functioning democracy or even a functioning society.

I think that the laws against teaching the 1619 project are terrible for exactly the same reason that this attack on Todd is terrible, and an attack on Hannah-Jones for not initially including "some of the" is terrible: we need to be able to hear a diversity of views so that the better ones can gain ground over the worse ones, and people do not feel so deeply identified with their views (or slips of the tongue) that to say anything at all is to risk being held irredeemable.