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The Ghost Of John C. Calhoun Haunts Today’s American Left

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The Ghost Of John C. Calhoun Haunts Today’s American Left
 
The irony of the New York Times’ 1619 Project is that it embraces the critique of the American Founding espoused by the leading defender of Southern slavery, Sen. John C. Calhoun.

By John Daniel Davidson
August 20, 2019
 
It’s impossible to understand The New York Times’ 1619 Project as anything but sweeping historical revisionism in the service of contemporary left-wing politics.

The gist of the project, named for the year the first Africans were brought to North America to be sold as slaves, is that everything about America, from our capitalist economy to our politics to the food we eat, can be explained by slavery and race. In other words, America was conceived in sin, born of evil intent, and all its lofty ideals about equality and liberty are nothing but a sham—the hypocritical stylings of slavers and white supremacists bent on the subjugation of their fellow man.

The Times is unambiguous: “In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.” The arrival of those slaves in Virginia in 1619, we’re told, “inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years and form the basis for almost every aspect of American life.”

Everything that made America exceptional, every aspect of American life, all of it the legacy of slavery. The Times’ entire purpose here, by its own admission, is to “reframe the country’s history” by placing slavery “at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” It should come as no surprise that, in this telling, we are an irredeemably wicked people, and always have been.

The 1619 Project Is Garbage History

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https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/20/ghost-john-c-calhoun-haunts-todays-american-left/

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