The New York Times Guild, the union of employees of the paper of record, tweeted a condemnation on Sunday of one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens. What angered the union today was an op-ed by Stephens on Friday which voiced numerous criticisms of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "1619 Project," published last year by the New York Times Magazine. One of the Project's principal arguments was expressed by a now-silently-deleted sentence that introduced it: "that the country's true birth date" is not 1776, as has long been widely believed, but rather late 1619, when, the article claims, the first African slaves arrived on U.S. soil." The 1619 Project has become a major controversy. In his Friday column, Stephens addressed the controversy by first noting the Project's positive contributions and accomplishments, then reviewed in detail the critiques of historians and other scholars of its central claims, and then sided with its critics by arguing that "for all of its virtues, ... the 1619 Project has failed." But his colleagues in the New York Times Guild evidently do not believe that he had any right to express his views on these debates. In a barely-literate tweet that not once but twice misspelled the word "its" as "it's" - not a trivial level of ignorance for writers with the world's most influential newspaper - the union denounced Stephens and the paper itself on these grounds: "It says a lot about an organization when it breaks it's own rules and goes after one of it's own. The act, like the article, reeks."