The Patriot Post® · 1619 Project Author: Reparations Undermine U.S. Existence

For years, advocates for slavery reparations have claimed that America is indebted to the descendants of those who were enslaved centuries ago. Paying reparations, they assert, would acknowledge injustice and right a wrong by empowering those harmed by the institution of slavery.

Those who believed this might be a good idea wrongly assumed the reparations crowd was extending an olive branch and that giving in to their demands would finally put the issue to rest. Even though there are myriad reasons why paying reparations is a bad idea, the whole concept of reparations is simply a trap to ensnare those who blindly walk into it.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the infamous 1619 Project, has gone one step further. In doing so, she reveals the project’s true intent all along.

“Paying reparations is an admission of the crime,” Hannah-Jones told The Meteor, a left-wing media outlet, in a recent interview. “But it’s not an admission of the crime of a handful of bad apples or a few years of bad policy. It is the crime of the entire existence of the United States.”

And there it is. The project was never about telling the truth or admitting past mistakes or even healing old wounds. It’s about destroying the foundations of the country so the cultural Marxists can build a new society in their dystopian vision.

It’s one step down a long, destructive road of getting Americans to believe their country is immoral and illegitimate. It starts with dates, erasing 1776 as our founding date and replacing it with 1619, when the first slaves arrived. The project goes on to make outrageous but easily refuted claims, such as the American Revolution being fought to protect slavery, despite the near-immediate efforts to abolish slavery after that freedom was won by the colonists.

But acknowledging past injustices isn’t really what’s important to the people behind the 1619 Project. The real goal is a psychological operation designed to get Americans to question representative democracy, capitalism, and our constitutional system of checks and balances. More deeply, their objective is to shatter the belief that the very principles and values that have sustained us for 250 years and allowed us to live up to the ideals in the Declaration of Independence are criminal. Those principles unleashed a wave of freedom and prosperity for all people, the likes of which the world has never known.

As Joshua Nelson of Fox News explains, “The New York Times’ 1619 Project is a long-form collaboration that seeks to ‘reframe the country’s history’ by bringing slavery and racism to the forefront of the national narrative. While praised by liberals, the project has faced intense scrutiny and pushback from prominent historians who have publicly disputed its factual accuracy, particularly its claims regarding the motivations behind the American Revolution.”

Historians — even those on the Left — have found the project riddled with obfuscations, distortions, and out-and-out lies. Professor, historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gordon Wood explained in a 2019 interview that our Founding Fathers and those who fought in the American Revolution were laying the foundation of a new society that would end slavery.

“The important point to make about slavery is that it had existed for thousands of years without substantial criticism, and it existed all over the New World,” Wood explained. “It also existed elsewhere in the world. Western Europe had already more or less done away with slavery. Perhaps there was nothing elsewhere comparable to the plantation slavery that existed in the New World, but slavery was widely prevalent in Africa and Asia. There is still slavery today in the world.”

Slavery “existed in all of these places without substantial criticism,” Wood added. “Then, suddenly, in the middle of the 18th century, you begin to get some isolated Quakers coming out against it. But it’s the American Revolution that makes it a problem for the world. And the first real anti-slave [sic] movement takes place in North America. So this is what’s missed by these essays in the 1619 Project.”

It’s a substantial miss, indeed, and one that completely shatters the ideas on which the 1619 Project is built. The American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence were the daggers in the heart of the institution of slavery, paving the way for its abolition and raising the bar for posterity to live up to its ideals. It didn’t happen overnight, but Americans began having meaningful discussions about indentured servitude, slavery, and many other aspects of colonial life that had a powerful impact on society.

Telling the truth about America’s past is a good thing. History should never be swept under the rug, but that’s exactly what the 1619 Project seeks to do by dismantling the pillars of Western and American civilization. In classic cultural Marxist fashion, the project creates an illusion of ideas lacking historical clarity and truth while hiding its true objective. Now, it’s up to the rest of us in this 250th year of our independence to know our true history and defend it from its enemies.