The Left is more brazen and transparent than ever before about its desire to radically reconstruct America’s whole history into a morality play about oppression and racial grievance.
You might believe that our nation was founded in 1776, when 56 patriots signed the Declaration of Independence and set in motion the greatest experiment in self-government the world has ever seen. Or maybe you take a more expansive view, tracing this country’s roots to 1607, when English colonists established Jamestown.
Either way, the New York Times is here to reeducate you. The newspaper has just launched the “1619 Project,” an essay series designed to explain to you why the history you learned is outdated—and probably racist.
In the new version of history, our country began in 1619, when the first African slaves were sold in Virginia. The starting point of “America” is no longer the brave defiance of the Declaration, or the heroic sacrifices of the Revolutionary War, or the legal majesty of the Constitution. Nor does our nation originate with the landing at Plymouth Rock, or even with the discovery of the “New World” in 1492.
According to the Times, those “old dead white men” were at best irrelevant and at worst evil, even genocidal. The real story of America that the Times wants to tell starts and ends with slavery—and not just any slavery, which existed under Spanish rule in Latin America as far north as Florida from the early 16th century, but specifically the enslavement of Africans by Anglo-American settlers.
And it’s not just America’s founding they seek to redefine. They present the slave trade as essential not only to America’s birth, but to everything that has taken place in this country ever since.
The authors of the 1619 Project are quite explicit about this, with Times editorialist Mara Gay promising, “We will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”
The argument is almost too absurd to consider. But then, the project’s goal isn’t really to make an argument at all. The endeavor is just an effort to browbeat Americans into surrendering the national ideals that have sustained us for centuries in favor of a fanciful vision formulated over the past four decades by university grievance studies departments.
The contemporary Left is pushing this oppression narrative to shame Americans into supporting the progressive political program of reparations, socialism, and unlimited immigration. They even miss the great irony that the founders, who the Left attacks for having been slave owners, were the ones who created the path for freedom for all people including slaves in the ratified Constitution.
This project to redefine America started long before the New York Times launched the 1619 Project. For years, far-left radicals have been demanding that we tear down our statues, treat our founding fathers as “white nationalist terrorists,” and accept their claims that the president of the United States is a “white supremacist” because he has an unambiguously positive view of America.
They won’t succeed. President Trump is a pillar of patriotic fortitude who will never be ashamed of his love for this country, and his example bolsters the spirit of patriotic Americans in the face of this unrelenting assault from the left.
Under Donald Trump’s watch, the Spirit of ’76 will never yield to the Grievance of 1619. While the media are becoming more obvious about their intent, their objective has always been to revise our history in order to restructure our Republic and our society to favor their radical progressive agenda.