1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

In the perspective of the 1619 project, Robert Spencer points out (thanks to Ed Driscoll) that in saying in 2014 that “It’s an embarrassing thing to admit, the people who wrote the Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing”, Pete Buttigieg

demonstrated both his abject ignorance of the history of America’s founding and the utter failure of the American educational system to teach that history. No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters.

Buttigieg, the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is 37 years old; he reportedly attended Catholic schools, not public schools, in his youth. At this point, however, that is a distinction with barely a difference: both Catholic and public schools generally teach the spirit of the age, and that spirit dictates that the Founding Fathers, when not ignored altogether, should be presented as white male slave owners without any redeeming qualities.

If Buttigieg had received anything resembling a decent education, he would have learned about a fellow named Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States. Jefferson was a slaveholder, and that is likely to be all that young Mayor Pete was taught about him. But reality is seldom simple and cut-and-dried. As president in 1807, Jefferson promoted the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves, which outlawed the importation of slaves after January 1, 1808. Jefferson hoped that it would lead to the outlawing of slavery altogether, as he stated in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1806: 

“I congratulate you, fellow-citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally, to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe.”

 … The “Father of the Constitution” was another dead white male Mayor Pete may or may not have heard of: James Madison, who earned that nickname by being the principal architect of both the Constitution as it was originally written and the Bill of Rights (that’s the first ten amendments to the Constitution, Pete). Madison (yes, another slave owner) supported the prohibition on the importation of slaves, but was impatient with the delay of getting it going.

“It were doubtless to be wished,” Madison wrote in 1788, “that the power of prohibiting the importation of slaves had not been postponed until the year 1808, or rather that it had been suffered to have immediate operation.” He explained that 

“it ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy; that within that period, it will receive a considerable discouragement from the federal government, and may be totally abolished, by a concurrence of the few States which continue the unnatural traffic, in the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority of the Union. Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppressions of their European brethren!”

Once again, this sounds as if James Madison understood perfectly well that slavery was a bad thing. To be sure, there were some among the Founding Fathers who didn’t understand that, and anti-slavery forces at the Constitutional Convention had to make the hard choice between accepting slavery, hoping to end it in the near future, and dividing the United Colonies into two or more states, which would weaken them all. They chose the former, but that doesn’t mean that Jefferson, Madison, and many others, notably the irascible and fantastic John Adams, didn’t understand the evil of slavery.

If by some bizarre turn of events Pete Buttigieg becomes president of the United States, he would likely not be the first product of our shoddy, heavily politicized, and frankly anti-American educational system to enter the Oval Office without any understanding of or appreciation for the greatness of the office he now occupied, and its illustrious history. The first was Barack Hussein Obama. How many more such presidents can the free republic that Jefferson, Madison, and the rest bequeathed to us afford to have?

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Whistleblower: What Lies Behind the Trump Impeachment

Whether one is for or against Donald Trump, the main problem is, and always was, the whistle-blower (or the alleged whistleblower).

Yes, the whistleblower — any whistleblower — must of course remain anonymous as long as there is an investigation going on.

But whether the person investigated is famous and holds the strongest position in the land or whether he is a lower level bureaucrat and is barely known outside his department, then at one point, it is simply common sense that when you go to trial, the whistle-blower must come forward and be identified.

Once you go to trial, whether, again, you are famous and/or powerful or less well-known and far less powerful, the “defendant” — who no matter how powerful he is is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty — and his lawyers (as well as… the general public!) have the right to know who is making the accusation and to determine to what extent, if any, the whistle blower is motivated at least partly by bias.

Have the Democrats — who are all supposed to be lawyers and all — forgotten the age-old right of being allowed to confront one's accuser(s)?

As Matthew Continetti (thanks to law professor Glenn Reynolds) reports,

The mainstream media and liberal commentators have been quick to praise Schiff's performance, the Free Beacon recently reported, with talking heads arguing he would be remembered for "generations to come" and that he was "dazzling," "masterful," "very, very good," and "awfully impressive."

Well…

By the time that the members of the House were getting together to vote on impeachment, the whistle-blower should have been identified long since (while of course being under protection — if deemed necessary) and be subject to questioning, friendly or otherwise.

Why should one call witnesses when the first, and the main, witness is not allowed to testify and be questioned?

MSM journalists — echoed by movie stars such as Brad Pitt — will come up and insistingly ask Republican senators like Ted Cruz, "But aren't you curious to hear what John Bolton has to say?!" That sounds like it might be a pretty reasonable request if, and only if, they, or their colleagues, had deigned to ask Democrat congressmen and senators alike (as well as Republican ones, for that matter) the far more important question, "Aren't you curious to hear what the whistle-blower has to testify?!"

Doesn't the very fact that the whistle-blower's identity was never revealed by Adam Schiff suggest, in and by itself, that he (or she) was far from a neutral, an objective, and a believable witness?

(For your information, every single person in Washington does know who the whistleblower is; In case you’re interested, he shares the same first name as myself — although spelled differently)

That the whistleblower was still not identified after the Senate went into session for impeachment is nothing less than ridiculous or outrageous — if not both.

To be deciding a person’s guilt (no matter how much you think he deserves to be punished) on anonymous accusations and hearsay:

I will not say exactly that it is akin to a Stalinist show trial, but it sure seems that the United States has been trending in that direction these past few years (which, in turn, helps explain the outcome of the 2016 elections).

Does that sound like hyperbole? Not only was proof against the defendant — aka the guilty person — allowed in testimony from anonymous neighbors, but a classic occurrence in a USSR trial was the defendant declaring that "I am innocent." The reply of the Soviet judge (not the prosecutor): "Then why are you here (in the first place)?!"

In that perspective, the sympathizers of Democrats the world over have been repeating exactly the same basic message: if The Donald is impeached, the reason must be that he is guilty, and the House of representatives must discover which crime(s) he committed.

To paraphrase Stalin's chief of police:

“Show Me The Man, And I’ll Find You The Crime.”

Indeed, writes Howie Carr in the Boston Herald, Donald Trump is, as it happens, charged with only one crime: being Donald Trump.

This kind of charge has been the case for conservatives, both in and before the Trump era, from Brett Kavanaugh to Roger Stone, along with people unrelated to The Donald, such as Christian cake bakers, wedding photographers, and boy scouts.

One of Donald Trump's  most important memes is that

"In reality they're not after me; they're after you; I'm just in the[ir] way."

Michael Goodwin:

With a likeness to the Uncle Sam “I want you” poster, the disrupter-in-chief reaffirms in 14 words the belief of Trump Nation that the political establishment, the media, the permanent bureaucracy and yes, the deep state are trying to crush him and them.

The president tweeted the image the day House Democrats voted to impeach him, and hours after his raucous rally in Michigan that evening.

The tweet included no added comment because none was needed. The message is clear: I am all that stands between you and the barbarians at the gate. If I fall, you are next.

As Brendan O'Neill wrote a day after the 2016 election, the reason that Donald Trump pulled his shocking upset was, and is, the élites'

barely concealed disgust for the rednecks and cretins of ‘flyover’ America who are apparently racist and misogynistic and homophobic

Every non-leftist citizen is a deplorable who is guilty of racism, sexism, transphobia, and
and who needs to be punished. To that end, a nanny state needs to be built with an ever-expanding army of bureaucrats, along with lots of courts and courthouses to manage "the ignorant, the everyday, the non-subscribers to the New York Times, … America’s strange, Bible-toting inhabitants", and rain down punishment upon them when necessary.

The leftists love courthouses to manage those who would be free. (On an international level, it is so-called "international law" that is supposed to reign in the United States (along with other Western nations like Israel).) Shaming the citizenry (especially men) is also the purpose of such cultural things as the 1619 project…

Speaking about Roger Stone, Sean Hannity started his opening monologue on Fox News (via Yael Halon):

"Please listen closely. You've got to understand right now if you are a conservative, if you are a Republican in the United States of America, you have every, every single right to feel that you are not being treated fairly, that the justice issued in this country is not equally applied," Hannity said.

"You have every right to feel that way, because it seems that in this United States, on this night, only conservatives, only Republicans, and especially people that like Donald Trump can get prosecuted ... all while Democrats in the deep state can pretty much do everything without consequence."

 …  Hannity said [Nancy] Pelosi's comments point to a "two-tiered system of justice" which has frustrated the president.

"Here's the point. This is serious because we are talking about a two-tiered system of justice. It has to be fixed. The frustration that I feel, the president feels, all these people, they all get the book thrown at them. All these other people, they seem to always get away with it and nothing ever happens. "

Indeed, my own take on 2016 was, and is, that leftists ensured they would lose that year when they started suing your neighborhood baker for hundreds of thousands of dollars and forcing institutions to open bathrooms to transgenders…

Listen to President Trump again:

"In reality they're not after me; they're after you; I'm just in the way."

Related: Trump was to be impeached for asking about a corrupt arrangement; but no one is ever impeached for engaging in it

Dear US Senate, please end this shoddy junk impeachment

Damian Bennett has this to say:

I have followed a variety of sources on the impeachment, watched or listened to hours and hours of the Senate impeachment trial. With all that it is hard to wrap my mind around some things:

• The shoddiness of what the Democratic House Managers ("DHM") brought to the Senate to adjudicate
• A case so shoddy liberal Constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley protested its shoddy process and shoddy findings
• Liberal law professor Dershowitz was so appalled by the unConstitutional legal theory behind the Articles he joined Mr. Trump's defense team
• The DHM argument that Mr. Trump misdemeaned in pursuing an investigation of Ukranian corruption without linkage, an investigation on which the previous administration had actually exercised carrot-and-stick linkage
• The whole Pelosi urgency thing:
• No time for court adjudication of contested House subpoenas but plenty of time for  court adjudication of contested Senate subpoenas (the evidentiary obligation being on the House; the Senate is only obliged to hear the House evidence presented)
• A rushed vote to impeach (the shortest investigative run-up to a presidential impeachment in American history), followed by withholding the Articles so 'urgently' drafted
• The whole Pelosi "sad, solemn, and somber" thing:
• Sad solemn souvenirs*
• Somber fist bump

* Missed opportunity to go all out, Nancy!

• The DHM argument that John Bolton** is a relevant and indispensable witness (he might have been, had the House subpoenaed him and won in the courts to allow his testimony) but the Bidens somehow are not (as targets of the Ukrainian corruption probe how could they not be?)  

** Once considered not credible by lead DHM Schiff, Mr. Bolton is now an impeccable witness

• The impermanence of liberal principles and ideas:
• The ever-evolving Democrat idea of bipartisanship
• The ever-evolving Democrat idea of due process (and this)
• The current Democrat idea of due process
• The liberal idea of double-jeopardy
• Reconciling Pelosi triumphalism (see above bullet for irony) with her an-acquittal-is-not-an-acquittal legal theory
• The marked contrast between the effectiveness of the defense presentation and the DHM ego-jockeys and their ham-handed prosecution
• The annoying outrageous pomposity of the lead House managers, culminating in final remarks by
  "Nadler for the dunk!"

Much much more, but so wearying when the opposition is so smug yet this stupid -- unabashed by its powerlust, intoxicated by its own preening sense of importance. I would be more convinced of the sincerity of the Democrat's impeachment death wish had these same Democrats impeached Mr. Obama first for the very things they have impeached Mr. Trump.

Dear US Senate, please end this junk impeachment. Amen. Ask and you shall receive.

DGB

Frederick Forsyth: The "bourgeoisie" appeared to include anyone who did not agree with the college lecturer; those able to disagree more effectively were termed Fascists

— Frederick Forsyth in The Fourth Protocol (1984):

Emma Lockwood was nineteen, a student at art college and subscribed with all her youthful enthusiasm to radical politics. She abominated her father's political views and sought to protest against them by her own lifestyle. To her parents' tolerant exasperation she was never missing from anti-nuclear protest. One of her areas of personal protest was to sleep with Simon Devine, a lecturer at a polytechnic college, whom she had met on a demo. …

… Devine was a member of a number of revolutionary study groups and contributed articles to Hard Left publications of great passion and small circulation. …

 … He was no great lover, but impressed her by his firebrand Trotskyism and pathological hatred of the "bourgeoisie" which appeared to include anyone who did not agree with him. Those able to disagree more effectively than the bourgeoisie were termed Fascists.

Iran "Doesn't Seem to Fear Trump" Who "Is Eager to Resume Talks" with Tehran: Top New York Times Story Published During Baghdad Strike Is Unwittingly Hilarious

I just realized something: I have been waiting for the American military's air strike ever since I was a teen-ager during the Carter administration. (Thanks for the birthday gift, Donald Trump…)

But this post is about the New York Times. Of course, the main story on the Friday's front page is U.S. Strike in Iraq Kills Commander of Iranian Forces, which, naturally enough, gets the prized position of top right corner.

The problem for the Times is that their international edition had already gone to the printer hours earlier, by the time the drone attack on Qassim Suleimani had taken place, and there is no mention of that story anywhere (see pictures of the two editions' January 3 front pages below).

That is the risk of printed media and cannot be remedied, but what is amusing — shall we call it hilarious? — is David Sanger's article that the European edition chose to put in its right corner instead: Trump's talk fails to quell threats from adversaries. (Update: shookhran for the Instapundit link, Glenn Reynolds…)

In the American edition, the title is different: Trump Bet He Could Isolate Iran and Charm North Korea. It's Not That Easy. What we learn from the article that I read about six hours after Qassim Suleimani had been blown to smithereens is that "Trump is eager to resume talks" with Tehran and that

Both the Iranians and the North Koreans seem to sense the vulnerability of a president under impeachment and facing re-election … Many foreign policy experts say he fundamentally misjudged the reactions of two major American adversaries. Neither seems to fear him, precisely the critique he leveled at Barack Obama back in the days when Mr. Trump declared America’s toughest national security challenges would be solved as soon as a president the world respected was in office …

Oh yeah: Obama — if the MSM can introduce a defense of the Apologizer-in-Chief, by all means, let it do so.

 … [Donald Trump] dismissed the depth of Iran’s determination to re-establish itself as the most powerful force in the region.… Mr. Trump … simply repeats his mantra that Iran will never be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons … The attack on the outer walls of the American Embassy in Baghdad, even if short-lived, was clearly intended to send a shiver down the spine of Mr. Trump’s political aides, who remember … There are signs Mr. Trump is eager to resume talks, including his effort to lure President Hassan Rouhani to the phone when the Iranian leader was in New York in September for United Nations meetings. … That diplomatic initiative will doubtless continue in secret.

Friday's NYT, which appeared after the air strike

The NYT's international edition appeared hours earlier

That is the gist of this post. For those interested in more details, take a look at a more detailed excerpt of the article by David Sanger (whom I met in Paris years ago, incidentally, when he came to present the French translation of his book on Obama):

President Trump entered the new year facing flare-ups of long-burning crises with two old adversaries — Iran and North Korea — that are directly challenging his claim to have reasserted American power around the world.

While the Iranian-backed attack on the United States Embassy in Baghdad seemed to be under control, it played to Mr. Trump’s longtime worry that American diplomats and troops in the Middle East are easy targets and his longtime position that the United States must pull back from the region.

In North Korea, Kim Jong-un’s declaration on Wednesday that the world would “witness a new strategic weapon” seemed to be the end of an 18-month experiment in which Mr. Trump believed his force of personality — and vague promises of economic development — would wipe away a problem that plagued the last 12 of his predecessors.

The timing of these new challenges is critical: Both the Iranians and the North Koreans seem to sense the vulnerability of a president under impeachment and facing re-election, even if they are often clumsy as they try to play those events to their advantage. 

… The protests in Iraq calmed on Wednesday … But events of recent days have underscored how much bluster was behind Mr. Trump’s boast a year ago that Iran was “a very different nation” since he had broken its economy by choking off its oil revenues.

 … Today the most generous thing one could say about those statements is that they were wildly premature. Many foreign policy experts say he fundamentally misjudged the reactions of two major American adversaries. Neither seems to fear him, precisely the critique he leveled at Barack Obama back in the days when Mr. Trump declared America’s toughest national security challenges would be solved as soon as a president the world respected was in office.

 … He dismissed the depth of Iran’s determination to re-establish itself as the most powerful force in the region.… Mr. Trump … simply repeats his mantra that Iran will never be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons 

… The attack on the outer walls of the American Embassy in Baghdad, even if short-lived, was clearly intended to send a shiver down the spine of Mr. Trump’s political aides, who remember well that a hostage crisis helped lead to President Jimmy Carter’s re-election defeat 40 years ago.

In recent months, Iran has repeatedly mounted a strike and pulled back, including its attacks on oil tankers, an American drone and Saudi oil facilities.

The Iranians have made clear what Mr. Trump needs to do to reopen negotiations: Essentially return to the deal struck with Mr. Obama, largely by lifting sanctions Mr. Trump imposed starting in May 2018. There are signs Mr. Trump is eager to resume talks, including his effort to lure President Hassan Rouhani to the phone when the Iranian leader was in New York in September for United Nations meetings.

That diplomatic initiative will doubtless continue in secret. …

Back to the latest development and update — U.S. Strike in Iraq Kills Qassim Suleimani, Commander of Iranian Forces:

Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani … was the architect of nearly every significant operation by Iranian intelligence and military forces over the past two decades, and his death was a staggering blow for Iran at a time of sweeping geopolitical conflict.

Again: I have been waiting for news like this from the best military on the planet ever since I was a teen-ager during the Carter administration.

In Paris, a No Pasarán webmaster and a NYT journalist

The Little Drummer Boy — Pentatonix

Little Drummer Boy
— by Pentatonix

Watergate—Trump learned from President Nixon's mishandling of the press: "it is not paranoia when they really are out to kill you"

From What Trump learned from Watergate by Don Surber (thanks to Ed Driscoll and welcome, Farm Maggie):

The [Watergate] archives have revealed that Nixon was railroaded.

In American Spectator, [Geoff] Shepard wrote,

"There is documented proof of a series of secret meetings between Chief Judge John Sirica and Watergate prosecutors. I don’t know which is the bigger surprise: that they were secretly meeting to resolve issues in advance of trial or that they were documenting their agreements in memos to their files."

 … Archibald Cox in retrospect made Jimmy the Weasel Comey look honest.

The deep state won.

Shepard wrote,

"It should have come as no surprise that Cox delegated the Watergate Special Prosecution Force recruiting to James Vorenberg, a fellow law professor who had taught criminal law. Vorenberg hired only people whom he knew or who were recommended by people he knew, and he assembled a specially selected team of some 70 lawyers, virtually all Ivy League graduates, the top 17 of whom had worked together in the Kennedy/Johnson Department of Justice. Readers should note the constitutional inversion here: these were the very people voted out of office with Nixon’s 1968 election, now in control of the government’s investigative and prosecutorial powers. Vorenberg announced at their first press conference in June 1973 their intent to investigate each and every allegation of wrongdoing by the Nixon administration since it had assumed office some five years prior."

Sound familiar?

That is why this will not happen again, or at least not to President Donald John Trump. He learned the lesson of Watergate.

We said of Sarah Palin, we cannot spare her; she fights. Donald Trump does not simply fight; he wins.

He was in his 20s when he beat the deep state the first time. Nixon's HUD sued him in its administrative court, hoping to coerce an admission of guilt. Trump's lawyer -- the commie-beating Roy Cohn -- advised him to take HUD to real court. 2 years later, the charges were dropped.

 … President Trump learned from President Nixon's mishandling of the press.

 … after a year of propaganda by the media and Democrats, the public fell for the Democrat lies. Kennedy somehow became the victim. And he never had to give up drunk driving. Always bear in mind, the Germans were the best-educated people in the world when they fell for Nazism.

 … President Trump learned from Nixon's firing of Cox, which created a backlash. He kept Mueller, which avoided an obstruction of justice claim.

The president has needled and ridiculed the hapless Democrats, but he also has given them everything they asked for. When they objected to his July 25 phone call to Ukraine, President Trump released the transcript. There will be no nonsense about the cover-up being worse than the crime on his watch.

That transcript should have ended the controversy, but Adam Schiff is insane, Jerry Nadler is a fool, and the press is corrupt. Down the rabbit hole of impeachment they dove.

Public sentiment, the law, and the facts are in President Donald John Trump's favor. He learned from Nixon. it is not paranoia when they really are out to kill you.

Related: The Troubling Parallels Between Today and the Watergate Era: The media was determined to "reverse the verdict of the election by non-constitutional means"; Trump 2016? No, Nixon 1972

Hiroshima: Did Japan's top officers know a bomber was approaching Nagasaki, 5 hours before the bomb was dropped, and do nothing?

In August 1945, according to a Japanese (!) documentary which EXSKF's Ameravirpal has painstakingly seen and translated, "the Japanese general staff knew the B29 headed for Hiroshima was carrying the atomic bomb, they knew the B29 headed for Nagasaki was carrying the atomic bomb[, they] knew hours in advance, and… they did nothing.

The

Atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been described (at least in Japan) as "beyond expectation" (just like the Fukushima nuclear accident) and "surprise attacks" with no pre-warning by the US, who used to dump leaflets in Japanese from the planes to warn civilians of impending attacks.

But [an NHK documentary titled "Atomic bombing - top secret information that was never utilized (原爆投下　活かされなかった極秘情報)" which aired on August 6, 2011] says the top military officers in imperial Japan [did know], and did nothing. The military essentially was the government during the war.

I had never heard of such a thing. [Neither has anyone else.]

… Summary … :

Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been considered "beyond expectation", "surprise attack". However, the General Staff Office of the Japanese Imperial Army knew about the secretive US activities on Tinian Island in the Northern Mariana Islands since June 1945. The special intelligence unit directly controlled by the General Staff Office had been monitoring the code signs of B29s on the Northern Mariana Islands, and it noticed the peculiar code signs of about a dozen B29s that suddenly appeared on the island of Tinian in June 1945, two months before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The intelligence unit sensed these planes were on some unknown, special mission. The information was quickly shared with the top military officials.

Japan had been aware of the US efforts to develop atomic bombs, and it had started its own efforts to develop atomic bombs in 1943. But when the government had to abandon the effort in June 1945, it convinced itself that uranium extraction was impossible for anyone, including the United States. The Japanese government had information on successful detonation of the first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico, but it again convinced itself that it couldn't be an atomic bomb.

The intelligence unit continued to monitor B29s with V600 call signs and kept informing the top officials. They did not connect the dots, and the mysterious B29s on Tinian Island remained mysteries as the fateful August 6, 1945 approached.

 … So far, the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is considered to have been utterly "beyond expectation" for the Japanese, "surprise attacks". However, in fact, the Japanese military intelligence unit had known in advance the US activities surrounding the atomic bombing.　They were monitoring the US military communications.

NHK has uncovered what little information left on the matter, and found eyewitnesses, diaries, audio tapes of the deceased officers in charge of intelligence. What NHK has found out is the fact that the military knew the danger was imminent but nothing was done.

  … In case of Nagasaki, the top officers of the military knew the bomber was approaching Nagasaki, 5 hours before the bomb was dropped.

 … There was no air-raid siren. People were exposed to radiation and heat from the atomic bombs, without any protection. More than 200,000 people died in 1945 alone in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why was nothing done, when they had intelligence surrounding the atomic bombing?

For the first time in 66 years, here's the truth.

 … After the war, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs compiled the history of the war. A person who served as secretary to the Minister of War wrote a memo on the incident:

"We had the report of a new weapon tested in New Mexico that had large explosive power. But no one thought it was an atomic bomb."

Mr. Kigoshi, who was involved in Japan's effort to develop atomic bombs, says it was impossible for the top Army officers not to know it was an atomic bomb.

"Of course, even at that time, they must have thought the bomb was utilizing nuclear fission, I believe. Japan's development effort was just too small-scale. I thought it would be the US who would succeed."

The Imperial Army refused to recognize that the US had succeeded in developing an atomic bomb. Mysterious B29s on Tinian Island, dubbed "special task planes" by the Japanese intelligence, remained mysterious. The fateful day approached

EXSKF's Ameravirpal pursues his translation of the Japanese documentary:

In the early hours of [August 6], neighboring cities had been attacked by large formations of B29 bombers - Nishinomiya [in Hyogo Prefecture], Imabari [Ehime Prefecture in Shikoku] and Ube [in Yamaguchi Prefecture]. The General Staff Office in Tokyo had had the information of the impending attacks in advance, so it had contacted the regional headquarters which then issued air raid alerts for the residents of those cities.

 … Voice of Lieutenant Guggenbach, who was on board a B29 following "Enola Gay" to document the bombing:

"...none of our planes were ever shot at. Never saw a flight.. Prior to getting to Hiroshima, I did get out of my seat and I did stand behind the bombardier and the pilot. So I did have a look straight at the front of the plane."


… If only there had been an air raid alert. Ms. Oka is chagrined even today.

"We were working in this underground vault, and we were saved, with no injuries. If there had been an early air raid alert and people had taken shelters in the underground vaults, many people wouldn't have had to die, many more people would have survived."

Ms. Oka tended her injured classmates after the bomb dropped. But all she could do was to watch them die, one after another.

"A mother was holding her badly injured daughter and cried. But the daughter said, 'Don't cry, mother. I am dying, serving the country.' And she made a smile on her badly burned face and died peacefully. Every day was like that. It was hard. All we could do was to watch."
 … August 7, the day after the bombing of Hiroshima. Even after the news of destruction of Hiroshima reached them, the Imperial Army wouldn't admit it was an atomic bomb.

Shigenori Togo, Foreign Minister, demanded the affirmation of the fact. To that, the Imperial Army staff answered,

"The US is saying it was an atomic bomb, but it is also possible that it was just a conventional bomb with large explosive power."

Minister Togo said the Army, who denied the existence of an atomic bomb, was trying to minimize the effect of the bomb as little as possible.

However, the General Staff Office admitted, among themselves, that it was an atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

  … Before dawn on August 9. The same call sign came in - V675, exactly the same as in Hiroshima. It was coming from Tinian Island, just like before.

We found someone who was monitoring this very call sign. Mr. Arao Ota, 90, was a lieutenant in the intelligence unit. He spoke about the day for the first time on camera.

"It was the same special radio wave used by the B29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was coming from the airfield on Tinian Island. We didn't know what it said, all we knew was the radio wave was emitted. But it was me who caught the call sign. I knew it was out of the ordinary, I felt fear. I thought there was a high probability that within a few hours an atomic bomb would be dropped somewhere in Japan."

This information did reach the top officers in the military.

 … Mr. Minoru Honda, 88, was a pilot there. Mr. Honda and his fellow pilots flew "Shidenkai" (Purple Thunder). Shidenkai was one of the few fighter planes that could go as high as B29, to 10,000 meters. Mr. Honda says he was determined to take out B29 with the atomic bomb if it came again, even if that meant a suicide attack.

Mr. Honda happened to witness the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima from the sky two days earlier. He was on his way from Hyogo to his base in Omura.

"Just as I was flying over the Hiroshima Castle, I was blown off the course. The heavy Shidenkay was blown off. The plane became uncontrollable, and I must have dropped at least 500 meters. I finally regained control of the plane, and looked up ahead. Then I saw a cloud of red and black rapidly rising. The city of Hiroshima, which I had just looked on moments ago, disappeared. I couldn't see the city. I thought I had gone crazy. I couldn't tell if that was real."

 … However, no order came to Mr. Honda's unit to make a sortie. That B29 was approaching Nagasaki was confirmed, but they weren't told the B29 was carrying an atomic bomb.

Shidenkai pilot Minoru Honda looks puzzled:

"B29 is not impregnable. I actually shot it down. It is extremely difficult, but it's not impossible to shoot it down. Even today, I am vexed. Why didn't they issue us a sortie order? They lacked information that much?"

 … 

The top military officers present in the meeting, including Chief of Staff Umezu, insisted that it was possible to continue the war even after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and said the following:

Umezu: "It is true that the damage from the atomic bomb is extremely heavy, but I doubt that the US can keep using the bombs one after another."

There will be no atomic bombing the second time. As the B29 with the atomic bomb was approaching Nagasaki, the military was repeating the baseless assertion. [NHK's word, literally.]

At 11:02AM, while the meeting was still on-going, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Again, there wasn't even an air raid siren.

 … On August 11, with Japan's surrender all but certain, an order was issued to the special intelligence unit - destroy all information, including intelligence information, kept at the headquarter in Tokyo.

Mr. Ryoji Hasegawa was ordered to burn the documents. He says with some heat:

"I was told to burn them, and then turn them into dust. Destroy evidence. Destroy evidence of the existence of the unit."

Mr. Hasegawa says he kept burning the documents there, until the day of surrender.

Everything, including the fact that the Imperial Army knew about the activities surrounding the atomic bombing, was made to cease to exist.

Back to EXSKF's Ameravirpal:

This is beyond incompetence. They purposefully withheld the key information and lied.

 … Excuse can be made for the Imperial Army that by that time, having tens of thousands of people killed on one bombing raid must have seemed like nothing. In March that year, more than 100,000 people perished in Tokyo in one night in a massive incendiary bombing. Hundreds of B29 had been dropping bombs indiscriminately over cities. A few B29s flying toward Hiroshima may have hardly seemed worthy of any attention, even though they were with the peculiar call signs and did unusual things (like short-wave communication to Washington).

But all they needed to do might have been to sound an air raid siren so that people would stay in bomb shelters, and to send fighter planes to at least harass the B29s so that the B29s would abandon the missions (and drop the charge in the ocean, instead of over the targets).

Instead, they withheld, lied. The B29s were uncontested. It is almost as if the military wanted the bombs to go off.

 … Despite the revelation from, of all people, NHK, most Japanese don't seem to care that ordinary Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially abandoned by the central government in August 1945. From what I can tell, this documentary doesn't seem to have caused much impact in Japan at all.

The Japanese continue to let them get away with it.

It is an inconvenient truth, which doesn't suit anyone's narrative. The Japanese government wouldn't want to admit to any of this, after 68 years of having gotten away with it. Japanese people who condemn senseless killing of civilians by the US using atomic bombs would want to keep their narrative that the attacks were "surprise attacks" by the US. They have to remain the victims of the atomic bombs dropped by the US. They probably wouldn't want to admit that they were victims of their own government. …

Lefties are suckers for a pretty picture

So, for many, the question remains: how did such an incurable doofus, sadist and epic idiot attain such iconic status?

In a Daily Telegraph article featuring Humberto Fontova, Tim Blair provides the answer (gracias por Ed Driscoll):

Because lefties are suckers for a pretty picture. In other murderous commie anniversary news, we’re coming up to 40 years since the Jonestown massacre:

Although in many ways outwardly similar to a traditional Pentecostal church, Peoples Temple from the start contained radical political elements. Reverend Jim Jones, a loyal supporter of Marxism, communism, and socialism, used Peoples Temple as a cover to promote his radical agenda, claiming during Peoples Temple’s later years to have infiltrated the church with his unorthodox beliefs.

 … By the time the group migrated to Jonestown, Jones actively pursued his socialist dream, establishing a commune in the jungles of Guyana.

And then everybody died, as usual. But keep trying to bake that socialist souffle, kids.

Lefties are suckers for a pretty picture.

In his book, La Face cachée du Che (The Hidden Face of Che), Jacobo Machover said something similar: while Castro and his revolution were growing old, the Che photo gives the Cuban revolution an image of eternal youth.

Check out a Recap of No Pasarán's Che Guevara Posts

In The Smithsonian, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo gives us the backstory to Korda's photo:

Che was not Cuban. But in February 1959 he was granted Cuban nationality “by birth.” Che was not an economist. But by November of that same year he was president of the Cuban National Bank, where he signed the currency with his three-letter nom de guerre. Che wasn’t even very handsome, his features puffy after a lifelong battle with asthma. But he’s remembered as the most photogenic idol of the Cuban Revolution and beyond.

 … Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez [Korda], a staff photographer for the newspaper Revolución, was assigned to cover [a set of funerals on March 5, 1960, at Havana's] Colón Cemetery. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, enchanted with a tropical utopia that might lend color to the gray Stalinism of Soviet-style communism, were among the honored guests. Close to them stood Che, who years earlier had signed letters to his family as “Stalin II,” swearing to an aunt “before a stamp of the old and mourned comrade Stalin” that he wouldn’t “rest until seeing these capitalist octopuses annihilated.”

 … Korda would later recall his magic Che shutter click:

“At the foot of a podium decorated in mourning, I had my eye to the viewfinder of my old Leica camera. I was focusing on Fidel and the people around him. Suddenly, through the 90mm lens, Che emerged above me. I was surprised by his gaze. By sheer reflex I shot twice, horizontal and vertical. I didn’t have time to take a third photo, as Che stepped back discreetly into the second row…. It all happened in half a minute.”

 … According to his son, Carlo, [Italian businessman Giangiacomo Feltrinelli] baptized Korda’s masterpiece “Che in the Sky With Jacket,” a riff on “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” It’s an irony within an irony that Beatles songs were censored in Cuba at the time and that rock-and-roll lovers, considered “extravagant beings,” were being rounded up, along with homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and nonconformist hippies. They were sent off to forced-labor camps under the infamous program UMAP—Military Units in Aid of Production. These were prisons in the countryside where inmates were to be “turned into men” by hard work—a kind of aversion therapy that could have inspired Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange—and held without charges until their behavior, at least to all appearances, was deemed proper for members of the “dictatorship of the proletarians and farmers.”

 … In the end, it seems, Korda’s Che remains the guerrillero heroico— eternally pissed off and pained.

The Divine Right of Democrats: Kevin Williamson on the liberation of the Donkey party by the practical elimination of the Republican party

Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times has a dream, a dream in which about half of the American people are deprived of an effective means of political representation, a dream of one-party government in which the Democrats are the only game in town

writes Kevin D. Williamson in National Review

— “Dare We Dream of the End of the GOP?” her column is headlined — which also is a dream of visiting vengeance upon those who dared to vote for their own interests as they understood them and thereby schemed “to stop the New America from governing.”

That quotation is from a new book by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg bearing the title R.I.P. G.O.P. Greenberg himself has a new column in the Times on the same theme. “The 2020 election will be transformative like few in our history,” he writes. “It will end with the death of the Republican Party as we know it . . . [and] liberate the Democratic Party from the country’s suffocating polarization and allow it to use government to address the vast array of problems facing the nation.”

We might understand the Goldberg-Greenberg position as “the divine right of Democrats,” who apparently have an eternal moral mandate to rule for reasons that must remain mysterious to those outside the ranks of New York Times columnists.

Goldberg and Greenberg … do not understand the United States as having two legitimate competing political camps but as suffering from a kind of infection in the form of the Republican party, which inhibits the normal and healthy — meaning Democrat-dominated — political life of the United States. They believe that something they call the “New America” has an unquestionable natural moral right to rule and that the Republican party is not a competing pole but a blockage. To write as Greenberg does that the Democratic party is to be liberated by the practical elimination of the Republican party, and hence able to operate unencumbered, is to embrace not only the end of the GOP but the end of ordinary political opposition. 

 … Eliminating the Republican party would not relieve the country of the “polarization” — meaning opposition — that annoys the Goldberg-Greenberg camp.

 … The only way to achieve that would be through the political suppression of those with dissenting political views.

Which, of course, is the Left’s current agenda, from deputizing Corporate America to act as its political enforcer by making employment contingent upon the acceptance of progressive political orthodoxies to attempting to gut the First Amendment in the name of “campaign finance” regulation — it is the Democratic party, not the moral scolds of the Christian Coalition, that proposes to lock up Americans for showing movies with unauthorized political content — to grievously abusing legislative and prosecutorial powers to harass and persecute those with nonconforming political views (“Arrest Climate-Change Deniers”) and declaring political rivals “domestic terrorists,” as California Democrats have with the National Rifle Association.

 … The Democrats who are doing this believe themselves to be acting morally, even patriotically, and sometimes heroically. Why? Because they believe that opposition is fundamentally illegitimate.

From the BBC:

Four Japanese rules to live past 100

Okinawa, long known as the island of the immortals, is home to the highest concentration of centenarians in Japan. The village of Kitanakagusuku ranks first in Japanese women's longevity. What is it about this island that makes its inhabitants live a longer and happier life?

Video by: Shiho Fukada and Keith Bedford

The rules have been variously described as exercise, diet, and socializing (5:08, 5:25), or diet, physical activity, self-help, and a mutual help system (3:00), not to mention Ikigai (spiritual health or a personal mission).

Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

Does [the 1619 Project] put forward the hypothesis that the introduction of these 20 individuals—who many scholars argue must have been indentured servants rather than slaves, since there was no provision for chattel slavery in the English common law—is to be taken to represent the nation’s real beginning,

asks Wilfred McClay in Commentary (thanks to the American Conservative's Rod Dreher, via Instapundit) —

and thereby to supersede the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, among many other conventional items, in understanding and accounting for the nation’s creation?

Does it mean that the existence of those elements we associate with American exceptionalism, such as individualism, political democracy, constitutional liberty, economic freedom, egalitarianism, inventiveness, and so on, are somehow to be attributable to slavery?

 … Be that as it may, we can say this much: Considered strictly as an exercise in historical understanding, and in deepening the public’s understanding of a profound issue in our national past, the Project represents a giant missed opportunity. It passes over the complex truth in favor of an exaggeration bordering on travesty. And if it has any influence, that influence will be as likely as not to damage the nation and distort its self-understanding in truly harmful ways—ways that will perhaps be most harmful of all to Americans of African descent, who do not need to be supplied with yet another reason to feel cut off from the promise of American life.

 … But to acknowledge that slavery and its effects have been woven deeply and indelibly into the fabric of American society, and will always be a part of the American story, is one thing. To say that they represent the predominant forces shaping American life down to the present—that is quite another.

There are two fundamental sets of questions, then, to be asked of the 1619 Project.

First, are its fundamental assertions plausible? Do they rest on a solid and uncontroversial scholarly basis? Is there an evidentiary basis at all for saying that “everything exceptional about American history” rests upon slavery?

The second set of questions involves what we are to make of the New York Times’ decision to take on this project in the way that it has. Is it the proper role of a journalistic organization, especially one as powerful as the Times, to promote and advocate for a particular interpretation of American history? Do such actions constitute responsible journalism? Do they contribute to the solution of our current problems through the introduction of honest, unflinching, and fair-minded consideration of the issues raised by the American experience with slavery?

Or are they doing something far less creditable, less balanced, and more polemical, using a distorted and one-sided account of our history to intervene in our current political wars, in ways that can only broaden and deepen those conflicts, and turn them into far worse forms of warfare?

The answer to the second set of questions will depend on what we conclude about the first set. And with them the Project seems to go astray almost immediately.

To begin with, there is an implication running through much of the 1619 Project that slavery is a subject that somehow is rarely if ever spoken of in American history. It would be hard to imagine a more absurd claim.

 … Here we come to an example of a real failure in our educational system, something that the Times could actually help address. Most of my college students come to class without any larger context for their understanding of American slavery. They compare the realities of American life against an abstract standard of perfection and find them wanting. Moreover, they believe that slavery is uniquely American, and uniquely Southern, and that freedom and prosperity are the default position of the human race.

They are shocked and disbelieving when they are told that slavery has existed all over the world, in most cultures and most time periods of human history, and that it has in fact been more the rule than the exception in human history. They do not know that the Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, the Byzantines, the Ethiopians all embraced slavery. They are shocked to learn that American slavery was exponentially more humane than that of, say, Brazil, and that the American portion of the slaves imported from Africa was only about 4 to 5 percent of the total number imported to the Western hemisphere. They are shocked to learn about the role of Islam in the propagation of slavery. They are shocked to know that slavery still exists openly today in countries such as Mauritania, and our vaunted agencies of international governance do little to nothing about it.

Will the 1619 Project bring these facts to light? Will it seek to give us a better- informed perspective on the uniqueness of the liberty and prosperity and order that we enjoy, and the obstacles in our own history that we have managed to overcome to get where we are? Will it point out that the United States did not create slavery, did not create racism or racial prejudice, that these things are as old as human history and are the default position of human nature, absent some strong countervailing moral force; but that the United States, while having a history that is touched by these evils and while having participated in them, is also a country that has a larger history of which it can be proud, a history of seeking to overcome such things?

It could indeed do that, if it chose to. But that is not what it has chosen to do.

Instead, the Times has chosen to link the commemoration of 1619—a project that in itself is indisputably worthy and important—with a highly questionable scholarly agenda and an equally questionable journalistic one. It uses 1619 as a pretext for other things. I have no idea whether the political gambit of attributing comprehensive bred-in-the-bone racism to the overwhelming majority of Americans can be successful. I doubt that it can, but who knows? But I do know this:

Rooting the nation’s institutions in 1619 not only becomes a way of denying the grandeur of the nation’s actual founding a century and a half later, and of the institutions, including the world’s oldest constitution, that were established then; and of denying the nation’s immense moral progress since that time, and its capacity for even greater progress. Even more important, it becomes a massive distraction, a way of not thinking constructively about the problems that face us, and the changes that could bring progress. Do we really want to continue down that road? I hope that we won’t. But the example being set by the New York Times is far from encouraging.

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619