The New York Times last year came up with a project to debase America, to say this country is about nothing but slavery, that the institution has determined everything we are, that it instructs us to this day on the maltreatment of Black people. The Revolutionary War was fought to keep it going, and the pretenses of liberty and equality have been just that, pretenses. Slavery even fashioned a capitalism that maintains its evils and built our economy, we learn.
Black Americans are the real purveyors of the ideas of liberty and equality, not racist whites, we are also instructed in the so-called 1619 Project that started with a bunch of essays in The Times Sunday magazine. The name comes from the year the first slaves arrived, said to be our actual founding, which has since determined our real values. The essays already won a Pulitzer Prize, bringing to mind the occasion in 1932 when The Times won a Pulitzer for stories written about the Soviet Union that emphasized its supposed economic achievements without noting its famines.
The really scary thing is The Times has so arranged things that a book of the project’s contents will be taught in public high schools. That will help to further dislodge future generations from any understanding of how our values fought slavery instead of bowing to it, that many have understood that slavery and Jim Crow are our vilest faults without saying we have no virtues.
It is certainly important to recognize our faults but also to acknowledge, as Black American pundit Thomas Sowell has pointed out, that Black Americans were making far more progress on their own initiative before some liberal politicians in the 1960s entered in to do misconceived things for votes and guilt atonement. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was certainly needed, however.
Right now, this leftist thesis of slavery is much of what is behind a demand for dramatic change of just about everything, not least capitalism that has been one of the foremost blessings in human history.