© Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images Sen. Tom Cotton attends a press conference announcing Senate Republicans’ opposition to D.C. statehood on Capitol Hill July 1, 2020 in Washington.

Cotton faced fierce backlash over the weekend after the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published an article about the senator’s efforts to target the Times initiative.

In response, Cotton, a strong ally of President Donald Trump, said he’s working on legislation that would withhold federal funding from schools that implemented the 1619 curriculum.

Cotton said he drafted the “Saving American History Act of 2020”, claiming that America was founded on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence rather than on the history of enslaved people, which began more than 100 years before the Declaration was signed. His bill would also make schools that teach the 1619 Project ineligible for federal professional-development grants.

MORE: en. Tom Cotton bill would prohibit federal funding for teaching The 1619 Project“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage,” Cotton said in a release.

“Curriculum is a matter for local decisions, and if local left-wing school boards want to fill their children’s heads with anti-American rot, that’s their regrettable choice,” he told the paper. “But they ought not to benefit from federal tax dollars to teach America’s children to hate America.”

Cotton called the proposed reinterpretation “a distortion of American history,” according to the paper. He dismissed the 1619 Project as “left-wing propaganda” and “revisionist history at its worst,” the paper reported.

MORE: Backlash after Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton pushes Trump to invoke Insurrection Act in NYT op-ed: ‘Send in the Troops’Cotton said he doesn’t, personally, support the concept that slavery was a “necessary evil,” but Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones pushed back on those claims via Twitter, saying, “You said, quote: ‘As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built.’ That ‘as’ denotes agreement. Further, if by path to extinction you mean growing the enslaved (population) from 500k to 4 million at Civil War, a war fought over slavery, then, ok.”

Cotton responded to Hannah-Jones’ tweet on Sunday, calling it “more lies from the debunked 1619 Project.”

“Describing the *views of the Founders* and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery,” he tweeted. “No surprise that the 1619 Project can’t get facts right.”

ABC News’ Bobby Gehlen contributed to this report.

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