NEW YORK, NY Oct. 10 (DPI) – More than a year after its publication, ‘The 1619 Project’ is finally getting some in-house scrutiny at The New York Times.

Columnist Bret Stephens today offered up some fairly obvious critiques of The 1619 Project – critiques that have been appearing everywhere but the NYT for months.

For one thing, Stephens pointed out that editors at the NYT have modified the original text of the series, apparently to soften its central claim that the founders of America, in their quest for independence, were driven by racism and preserving slavery.

The author of the series, Nicole Hannah Jones, has dismissed any criticism of her central claims, which include the suggestion that no white Americans played a role in the hard-fought process of emancipation and full equality for Black Americans. Meanwhile, the series has been getting digital revisions backing off those claims.

Readers whose posts managed to get by NYT moderators hailed Stephens for his “courageous” column. Among the most popular comments:

What a great essay. And, perhaps the wisest paragraph to appear in the NY Times in quite some time: “Monocausality — whether it’s the clash of economic classes, the hidden hand of the market, or white supremacy and its consequences — has always been a seductive way of looking at the world. It has always been a simplistic one, too. The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.“

This is brilliant, timely, courageous. It says out loud (in the pages of The NYT) something many vital Black liberal intellectuals — such as Coleman Hughes, Chloe Valdary, John McWhorter, and Thomas Chatterton Williams — have been saying in publications and places more “quiet” (to the average reader). Bravo, Mr. Stephens. I only wish there were more of your colleagues at the NYT who had the guts to cut against the grain like you did in this piece.

While the 1619 project does some phenomenal work, it’s ideological ambition is sloppy and at times anti-factual. Replacing one overly simplified historical narrative with another overly simplified historical narrative is neither good history nor good journalism.

Thanks Bret for a clarifying synthesis of the 1619 project criticisms I’ve been reading elsewhere. Thanks to the NYT for publishing it. You deserve zero blowback for this.