1619: Founding Fallacies

Last week, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Timesinformed his staffers that due to the collapse of their conspiracy to overthrow the president by disseminating their Russian conspiracy theory, the Times was pivoting to Plan B: to dump Trump by promoting their racism conspiracy theory.

As reassurance that this latest intrigue would not fizzle as ignominiously as the Times’ previous machination, Baquet proudly pointed to their 1619 Project. This commemoration of the first blacks arriving in Virginia 400 years ago megalomaniacally

aims 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.

How exactly retconning American history will get rid of Trump was left vague, but Baquet was confident that it was all part of the Times’ seamless plot.

By the way, that’s some hilariously shameless boasting about the power of The Narrative to warp minds.

As I’ve pointed out, The Narrative is pushed less by printing fake news or by completely censoring true news than by the power of the prestige press to pick out ideologically convenient items from the vast surfeit of events and declare them the news about which we are all supposed to have a “conversation.”

Did, say, a Catholic schoolboy “smirk” at a “tribal elder”?

Now, that’s national news!

In contrast, in the wake of the vaunted Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, did four Teens of Color in St. Louis, shouting “Kill the white people,” hammer a white man to death?

Why are you interested in a local police blotter detail?

And if there is a lot of news for powerful interests to pick and choose amongst, there’s even more history.

Which anniversaries are treated as late-breaking news and which are seen as mere dusty arcana is another exercise in Narrative supremacy.

Consider an example of a dog that has barely been allowed to bark: A number of milestones in Christendom’s heroic struggle to stamp out Islamic slave raiding, such as Thomas Jefferson dispatching the U.S. Marines to “the shores of Tripoli” in 1804 and the Royal Navy freeing 3,000 European slaves from Algiers in 1816, have passed quietly in this century with only minimal 200th-anniversary media commemorations.

Calling attention to the West’s long, ultimately successful struggle against Muslim slaving is not encouraged because it might be conducive to Islamophobia, which, as the word explains, is bad. On the other hand, obsessing over white American slaving is good, because if it were at all bad then there would exist a word for it ending in “-phobia.” But there doesn’t, so how can you even mention it?

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