Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, is often seen sporting a necklace displaying the slogan “Black Girl Magic” in glitter. Her magic, however, seems to be fading. Although Hannah-Jones enjoyed a brief star turn promoting her historical heresy, her largely discredited project has fallen into disfavor and these days she is getting fewer and fewer $30,000 speaking gigs.

Never one to miss an opportunity, however, she briefly projected herself into the limelight again following the death of Charlie Kirk—an occasion she exploited by penning a New York Times essay, in which she proceeded to distort the words of late Turning Point USA founder.

According to Hannah-Jones, Kirk’s greatest political sin was that he did not believe that black girls are uniquely endowed with any special “Magic.” That is, there is nothing inherent in them that makes them uncommonly suited to being Supreme Court justices, first ladies, political analysts, or members of Congress—neither are they uniquely qualified to be brain surgeons or rocket scientists.

Kirk, of course, was merely making the commonsense argument that affirmative action often propels individuals into positions for which they are not qualified, as is the case with Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, Joy Reid, and Sheila Jackson Lee. But Hannah-Jones took the specific criticisms of these individuals as evidence of Kirk’s supposed belief in the inferiority of all black women.

To illustrate her outrage, Hannah-Jones began with the example of an Oklahoma father, Dominic Durant, whose 11-year-old daughter told him that she and her friends at school were “sad” about Kirk’s death. In a “difficult and heart-rending conversation,” the father told his daughter that it was “natural to be sad.” But, he explained, “that the gentleman who just got shot was under the impression that you, as a young Black woman, don’t have the brain processing power” and “what he said was wrong.” Leaving aside the question of how much brain processing power any pre-pubescent girl may be expected to have, no evidence suggests Kirk’s comments were directed toward Durant’s daughter or to black women in general. That suggestion, instead, comes from Durant himself and, apparently, Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Nor did Durant, a Christian, believe Kirk’s Christianity to be legitimate. This is because, as Durant and Hannah-Jones insist, Kirk’s brand of Christianity advocated stoning homosexuals to death. This false assertion came weeks after the writer Stephen King had to apologize for making the same claim.

In Kirk’s many public appearances, he showed how the pride and trans movements “groom” children—through drag queen story hours and gay-themed children’s books. But Durant explained to his daughter that these claims showed Kirk was “intolerant” and then Durant expressed his hope “that this moment of beatifying Kirk had passed.”

Much to Durant’s and Hannah-Jones’s “outrage,” however, “Oklahoma’s superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, directed all the state’s schools to observe a moment of silence in honor of Kirk.” The “state” (which, according to Hannah-Jones, has the authority to confiscate the property of white people and redistribute it to black people in the form of “reparations”) in this case had “no right to order his child and other children to honor a man whose words had often denigrated them.”

Hannah-Jones goes on to condemn the nationwide veneration of Kirk,

a man who espoused the racist Great Replacement Theory, which argues that white Americans are being systematically replaced by multiculturalism and by brown and Black immigrants; who continuously claimed that ‘there’s a war on white people in this country [original punctuation]; who said it was “a fact” that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people”; who gave a platform to people who believe in eugenics and race science; who contended that Black people commit more crime than white people and that the blame lies in a Black culture that accepts that Black men “impregnate women and they don’t stay around”; who referred to a transgender athlete as an “abomination” . . . ; and who declared that Islam, the world’s second-largest religion, “is not compatible with Western civilization” . . .

In other words, Hannah-Jones’s real gripe is with Western culture, which is the case for all Marxists. They reject Western objectivity, especially when it leads to observing inconvenient facts—like that black men commit a disproportionate number of crimes and that they proportionately father a larger number of babies out-of-wedlock; that Muslims are trying to replace American constitutionalism with sharia law in Dearborn, Josephine, Texas, and probably soon in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, Hannah-Jones who railed about “science deniers” for refusing the COVID shot, insists that female athletes should compete with men pretending to be women.

Hannah-Jones is also dismayed that in President Trump’s second term, Kirk’s ideas are being “embraced by Republican leadership” and that Kirk’s “knack for vigorous argument” is being used to excuse what she calls “the re-emergence of unabashed bigotry in mainstream politics.” She is particularly hostile to the “parts of polite society” that hold Kirk up as a “free speech advocate” because of “his willingness to calmly argue” about his ideas. Hannah-Jones considers Kirk’s ideas so repugnant that they are beneath respectful disagreement—indeed, they are ideas people should not be free to express.  

Hannah-Jones expresses deep disgust with TPUSA’s Professor Watchlist website which allows college students to “report professors who ‘advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.’” The Watchlist, created to provide consumer information to students registering for classes, is a sore spot for Hannah-Jones given that her name and the names of several of her leftist acquaintances appear there.

Hannah-Jones claims that at least three of these professors feared for their lives after their photos were posted on the Watchlist along with what she calls “highly misleading summaries of the thought crimes that landed them on the list.” In point of fact, the information listed on the website in most cases comes directly from  websites of the colleges in question, and, unlike the insurrectionary left, Turning Point never encourages harassment. Quite the opposite.

The criticism Hannah-Jones offers of Kirk’s “discourse” and his organization’s supposed flirtation with violence is rich coming from a “scholar” who failed to acknowledge three invitations from the National Association of Scholars to debate, who egged on student protestors rushing a Board of Trustees meeting at the University of North Carolina on her behalf, who was “proud” of the fact that her 1619 Project had inspired the riots in 2020, who doxed a New York Post reporter after he asked her questions, and who routinely insults and blocks dissenting scholars. Ignoring the fact that her “project” was nothing more than a collection of questionable essays at The New York Times Magazine, she called my own book, Debunking The 1619 Project, a “little pamphlet.” She ignored my request to point out errors in my so-called “pamphlet.” But as I document in my Afterword, Hannah-Jones knowingly lies about slavery and history, so we should expect that pattern of behavior from her concerning today’s events, too.

In the latest skirmish, Just the News reporter Jerry Dunleavy, who pointed out Hannah-Jones’s distortion of Kirk’s “brain power” statement, held a back-and-forth exchange with her on X. When that failed to go the way she hoped, she notified Dunleavy that she had “left” X for Blue Sky. Unlike Kirk and conservative speakers who have had the courage to confront his adversaries, Hannah-Jones conducts “discourse” only with sycophants.