Recent years have witnessed a disturbing surge in fictional history – that is, in fabricated tales about the past passed off by ignorant ideologues as factual accounts to gullible audiences. Nancy MacLean’s pack-of-lies and half-truths about Jim Buchanan is one such instance of fictional history. The New York Times‘s “1619 Project” is another. In his latest column, George Will justly and eloquently eviscerates this “project.” A slice:
The phenomenon of slavery was millennia old in 1776, but as Gordon Wood says, “It’s the American Revolution that makes [slavery] a problem for the world.” Sean Wilentz (see his 2018 book “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding”) correctly insists that what “originated in America” was “organized anti-slavery politics,” and it did so because of those Enlightenment precepts in the Declaration’s first two paragraphs.
