The New York Times pushes historically inaccurate propaganda as a school curriculum. The Biden administration incentivizes school districts to adopt it. And … it’s Republicans “lean[ing] into the culture wars” and Mitch McConnell throwing “red meat” to the base?

Welcome to Politico’s latest entry in the “Republicans pounce!” mainstream media genre:

MITCH MCCONNELL no doubt is looking to throw some red meat to the base, and Republicans generally think these culture war issues could help them win the House and Senate.

The latest in Playbook: https://t.co/ix0PAGCOUm

— POLITICO Playbook (@playbookdc) April 30, 2021

EXCLUSIVE: MCCONNELL LEANS INTO THE CULTURE WARS — Senate Minority Leader MITCH MCCONNELL and 37 GOP senators will call on the Education Department today to stop a proposed rule that invokes the 1619 Project — the latest turn in the culture wars.

The Biden administration — citing the ongoing reckoning over race and the disproportionate effects of the pandemic on African Americans — has proposed updating American history curricula to more fully flesh out the consequences of slavery and contributions of Black Americans.

The lightning rod for Republicans? That the proposal specifically mentions the 1619 Project, which several prominent historians have criticized — particularly its suggestion that the American Revolution was fought to secure slavery. In a letter, McConnell and the other senators will blast the administration for putting “ill-informed advocacy ahead of historical accuracy.”

“Americans do not need or want their tax dollars diverted from promoting the principles that unite our nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us,” the letter reads. “Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil.”

The 1619 Project isn’t just nonsense — it’s dishonest nonsense. The NYT has had to make stealth edits to disguise its propagandizing. Its primary author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, flat-out lied about her claims after being forced to backpedal from them. It’s a journalistic fraud, being adopted by the Biden administration for its own political purposes.

It takes several paragraphs before Politico acknowledges that it’s not just Republicans pouncing:

IT’S NOT JUST CONSERVATIVES: The proposed rule has also triggered a more muted debate on the left. While it has largely skirted the attention of the mainstream media (National Review and the New York Post have pounced on it), several sources told us about conversations among a group of prominent liberal political strategists, academics and authors about whether to go public with their own criticisms. One of them already has: DAMON LINKER, a centrist columnist at TheWeek.com, posted a public comment in the Federal Register, calling the 1619 Project a “one-sided and dogmatic style of history” that “can be part of a curriculum, but NOT its core. Please, don’t do this. We will all regret it.”

FINAL THOUGHT: The anti-1619 sentiment is uniting one of the oddest coalitions in politics: McConnell conservatives, Linker-style centrists and anti-woke socialists.

Politico strangely calls everyone else “one of the oddest coalitions in politics,” which has this entirely backwards. The 1619 Project is a fringe, radical attempt to rewrite history and create false narratives, and everyone else has noticed it. In other words, this battle in the culture wars didn’t begin with Republicans. It began on the Left and in the mainstream media, and it was escalated by the Biden administration. Politico’s providing political cover for the radicals by painting this as a Republican offensive. That’s as much fake news as the 1619 Project itself, and Politico is shamefully carrying water for the true culture-war offensive.

The question isn’t why Republicans are pouncing. It’s why other media outlets aren’t. And we all know the answer to that question, too.