McLean, Virginia — It may at first sound hypocritical to collect $35,000 and demand first-class airfare for an hour-long presentation preaching “redistribution" and lambasting capitalism and inequality. But there was nothing capitalistic about Nikole Hannah-Jones gold-plated speech in Washington, D.C.’s wealthiest suburb on Feb. 19: Her massive speaking fee was paid by taxpayers.

Fairfax County Public Library redistributed $29,000 from county residents to the millionaire celebrity New York Times journalist and bestselling author, while the taxpayer-funded McLean Community Center chipped in another $6,000 for the appearance.

Hannah-Jones sounded subversive notes, attacked capitalism, and called the Constitution racist. "The 1619 Project is the red pill in 'The Matrix,'" Hannah-Jones said. "You read this book, and suddenly you start to question your reality. ... And then you try to subvert it. I want all of you to do that."

But at the end of the day, her message for the well-heeled crowd was a pedestrian and partisan one. For one thing, she promised the good liberals of McLean that "you don't have to feel responsible for something that you didn't personally do. ... None of us should feel personally guilty about our past."

But the most concrete way she came up with "subverting" the current reality was by voting for Virginia Democrats.

She said the backlash against her was because her work challenged the very foundation of our current unequal society, but when you take in her presentation as a whole, she actually fits perfectly into that very system.

Hannah-Jones pointed to Virginia’s history to emphasize the importance of pitching her book in Virginia.

“That’s why you have to have these conversations here. I mean ‘Massive Resistance’ to Brown v. Board—the strategy was born here.” It was a poignant reminder. And then she descended into pedestrian, partisan everyday politics: “And yet you have a governor who does not want children to learn that history,” Hannah-Jones falsely said as the crowd let a loud mmm-hmm “even as they still sit in segregated classrooms. So that’s why Virginia.”

This charge is untrue. The state history guidelines issued by Gov. Glenn Youngkin explicitly include teaching about Massive Resistance. One of the four mandates in the state’s standards for Virginia history after 1900 is that “The student will apply history and social science skills to understand the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia by … explaining the social and political events connected to desegregation and Massive Resistance, with emphasis on the role of Virginians in the Supreme Court cases, including but not limited to Green v. County Board of New Kent County, Brown v. Board of Education, and Griffin v. School Board of Prince Edward County.”

But Hannah-Jones had a broader, forward-looking point: “Importantly, this is also a state on the verge of becoming something else, right? A red former-Confederate state that turns blue, and now it’s in the balance. Who will this state be? Which legacy will this state succumb to, or will it be a state that moves forward and leads the way as it has the potential to do? That’s why these conversations are so important. ... Because Virginians can and have chosen something different, and we see how fragile that balance is.”

And there it is. Hannah-Jones’s says her hourlong conversation was necessary to ensure Jim Crow is remembered in Virginia, but that’s false. She paints her speech as a way to prevent Youngkin from hiding Virginia’s defense of segregation, but Youngkin’s history guidelines demand precisely what Hannah-Jones says they cover up.

So what remains to make this $35,000 speech a “necessary conversation” is partisan state politics: This hourlong conversation in McLean was valuable because it helped highlight that Republicans are bad and Democrats are good, and Virginia could be tipped from Red to Blue.

If her occasionally radical talk about deconstructing capitalism seemed out of place in a $35,000 speech by a millionaire hawking her books to a wealthy McLean audience that arrived in their Teslas and BMWs, this humbler assertion makes more sense: She’s a black Democrat telling rich white Democrats that they can make up for their racial shame by voting for Democrats. In fact, they already “have chosen” well in the past, presumably by electing Ralph Northam, who, after all, feels bad about either the blackface he wore, the KKK hood he wore, or both.

It was a comforting message to a comfortable crowd.