Well, it’s settled. Everything we thought we knew about the American Founding is wrong. The real Founding is not the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or even the drafting of the Constitution in 1787. Instead, it is 1619 when the first slaves arrived in the settlement of Jamestown. Thus sayeth the 1619 Project of the New York Times, which seeks “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
Of course, the 1619 Project merely regurgitates what has become the mainstream view of today’s Democratic Party. For instance, Beto O’Rourke said recently that “this country . . . was founded on racism, has persisted through racism and is racist today.” Bernie Sanders said earlier this year that the United States was “created” in large part “on racist principles.”
How did this calumny take root? The answer can be traced to the project of an Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci, the father of “cultural Marxism,” who in the 1930s called on socialists and communists to subvert Western culture from the inside in order to prepare the soil for the overthrow of liberalism. In the 1960s, the German activist Rudi Dutschke dubbed this project “the long march through the institutions” . . .
Read the rest at the Providence Journal.