As the anniversary of 1776 draws near, get ready for a resurgence of the New York Times’s false history.
When America celebrates its 250th anniversary next summer, some will mark the occasion by chronicling the nation’s imperfections rather than its achievements. Consider the New York Times’s “1619 Project” a grim preview of what’s to come.
Launched six years ago and led by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project is a series of articles that “aims to reframe the country’s history” in a way that makes slavery central to its founding and the animating feature of its rise. According to the paper, America’s “true founding” dates not to 1776 but rather to 1619, the year the first African slaves arrived in Virginia. Ms. Hannah-Jones’s profile on Twitter featured a banner graphic that showed the date “July 4, 1776,” crossed out and replaced with “August 20, 1619.”
Subsequent articles claimed that preserving slavery was the primary motive of revolutionaries in America’s War of Independence, and that our social order and economic prosperity derived from black bondage. “Some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy,” Ms. Hannah-Jones wrote. Jake Silverstein, a Times editor, claimed that “out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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