What does it mean to be a liberal in today’s world? More than anything else, to be a liberal is to be anti-American.

Byron York describes a New York Times project of which I was unaware, but by which I am not surprised:

In the Times’ view — which it hopes to make the view of millions of Americans — the country was actually founded in 1619, when the first Africans were brought to North America, to Virginia, to be sold as slaves. This year marks the 400th anniversary of that event, and the Times has created something called The 1619 Project. This is what the paper hopes the project will accomplish: “It 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.”

The coincidence of slaves arriving in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 has been seized on by liberals as an excuse to talk more about slavery–a subject that an objective observer might think had already been talked to death. The “400th anniversary” was to be celebrated by the City of Minneapolis in bizarrely racist fashion, with “white bodied” and “black bodied” city employees attending different consciousness-raising sessions. Those events were canceled after we brought them to light.

The basic thrust of The 1619 project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It begins with an overview of race in America — “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make the true.” — written by Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones….

The idea that “everything in American history is explained by slavery and race” has become conventional wisdom on the Left. Basically, nothing good has ever happened here, at least not until recently. The Left now includes the public schools, so that one of my kids came home from second grade with the understanding that Martin Luther King had freed the slaves.

The essays go on to cover the economy (“If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”)…

This is profoundly stupid. The South had a relatively primitive economy; the North was the home of capitalism, which is why the North had the economic strength to win the Civil War. There was a time when everyone understood this, but the Times has regressed.

…the food we eat (“The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery.”); the nation’s physical health (Why doesn’t the United States have universal health care? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War.”); politics (“America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.”); daily life (“What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot.”) and much more.

That this is childish doesn’t mean it is harmless.

[A] project with the aim of reframing U.S. history has to be more than a bunch of articles and podcasts. A major goal of The 1619 Project is to take the reframing message to schools. The Times has joined an organization called The Pulitzer Center — which, it should be noted, is not the organization that hands out the Pulitzer Prize — to create a 1619 Project curriculum. “Here you will find reading guides, activities, and other resources to bring The 1619 Project into your classroom,” the Center says in a message to teachers.

As noted above, the Times might be surprised to learn how far gone in leftist idiocy our public schools already are. The Times’s anti-American message will be welcomed by the far-left National Education Association and the other teachers’ unions, which control public education.

A normal person might wonder why the Democratic Party, in the person of the New York Times, is so obsessed with slavery, which was abolished 154 years ago. Isn’t it time to move on? Forty or fifty years ago, that is what just about everyone thought. But the Times, on behalf of the Democratic Party, is trying to stir up race hatred. Democrats think racial hostility is essential to defeating President Trump in 2020–their paramount goal, next to which everything else is an afterthought. They face a problem, in that Trump has been the best president for blacks, certainly since Reagan, maybe forever. So, they say, let’s focus on 1619. And then go out and vote for Democrats, the party of slavery and Jim Crow.

Can a country that is despised by its own establishment, which seeks to undermine it at every turn, survive? I don’t know. We will find out.