It's not just Fox, but right-wingers generally have freaked out over the 1619 Project. Among the conservative worthies who have vented their outrage in recent days are Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, the National Review, American Greatness (bkf's favorite website), Erick Erickson of The Resurgent and frequent roundtable member on Meet the Press, the Cato Institute (right-wing think tank), Byron York, the chief political writer for the conservative Washington Examiner, Benjamin Weingarten of The Federalist, Jarrett Stepman of The Daily Signal, and many others have all unloaded on the Times and the 1619 Project. It's been called an attempt to delegitimize the Founding Fathers, undermine Trump's reelection by stirring up the racial issue, and so on.
Among the quotes from these folk's articles and twitter feeds on the 1619 Project: It's an attempt "to delegitimize America, and further divide and demoralize its citizenry", it is "the work of opinion writers who profit from seeing things through racial lenses”, and "an obvious attempt to "reframe" America's past to fit the aims of a modern, left-wing political ideology." Erickson seems particularly upset, writing that "If the land in which the United States was founded has been tainted by racism since the 1600s and everything derived therefrom is therefore tainted, then the US is illegitimate, the constitution is illegitimate, and revolution is the answer...Once you declare the United States a racist enterprise, you light a fire that will eventually consume you too."
A good summary of the reason conservatives are so upset about the 1619 Project (and their complaints have not hurt the popularity of the series): "For white conservatives, accepting that the United States wouldn’t exist without slavery would mean acknowledging that the Founders were not the creators of an infallible civic religion, which sets the limits on all modern claims for justice. It would mean that liberty was, in practice, as much a matter of exclusion as inclusion, and that success and prosperity owe more to centuries of exploitation than to God’s blessing of an exceptional people..But their political project depends on not even considering those possibilities. And so their response was equal parts furious and vague, a barrage of arguments that discussing this country’s history is the last thing this country needs: the Times was being divisive, or it was being nihilistic, or it was implementing a secret scheme to make Americans vote against Trump by claiming that racism was an ongoing problem.
Mostly, they wanted to express that they were very personally angry. The fact that they took a wide-ranging examination of slavery’s lasting ills as an attack on themselves was a fairly obvious confession." Indeed.