The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory in North Carolina

In 2019 The New York Times Magazine published "The 1619 Project" edited by Nicole Hannah-Jones, which was an attempt to retell American history from the perceptive of slavery and the African American experience. It considered 1619, the year that the first slave ship arrived in Virginia, rather than 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, as the birth date of the nation. The report was criticized by several distinguished historians who said that the report was "ideological" and contained several historical errors, most notably that Founding Fathers fought the American Revolution to defend the institution of slavery. Rather than correcting the error, The New York Times issued a "clarification" that some of the Founding Fathers fought the Revolution in order to defend slavery. The problem developed when Hannah-Jones sought to develop a curriculum in the public schools based on the 1619 Project.
In 2021 Hannah-Jones was offered a five year professorship at the Housman School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina with the possibility of tenure. When she found out that previous holders of that professorship had been offered tenure and that a major benefactor of the school had opposed her tenure, she sued the university and students and professors began a protest that gained national attention. Finally, the Board of Governors offered her tenure, but she turned them down in favor of a position at Howard University, citing racism at the university.
However, another way of seeing the controversy was in terms of the fact that in 1987 President Ronald Reagan repealed the so-called Fairness Doctrine of the Federal Communication Commission, which led to the rise of conspiracy "fact news" on the part of Right-wing cable television networks such as Fox News. The controversy gained new life, when Conservatives began criticizing the rise of Critical Race Theory being taught in the schools. In North Carolina the Republic dominated legislature replaced the two-year course in American History with one year in order to make way for a Financial Literacy course. The revised 2021 North Carolina Social Studies Standards replaced chronological history with social studies topics based on current events that included some of the language from Critical Race Theory.
In 2024 the UNC Board of Governors created a new School of Civil Life and Leadership and appointed Jed Akins, a scholar of Classics at Duke University to lead it. The school seems to be based on the right-wing Claremont Institute in Claremont, California. I have some personal experience with this thinking as a graduate student in American Studies at Claremont Graduate School in which I took a seminar on the Federalist Papers. It was taught by Douglas Adair, a colonial historian, and Martin Diamond, a political scientist who studied under Leo Strauss, the father of neo-Conservatism at the University of Chicago. Strauss's thinking was the basis for the original intent doctrine dominant today on the Republican dominated U.S. Supreme Court today.