George Will eviscerates what he accurately calls the “malicious, historically illiterate 1619 Project.” Two slices:
The [New York] Times’s original splashy assertion – slightly fudged after the splash garnered a Pulitzer Prize – was that the American Revolution, the most important event in our history, was shameful because a primary reason it was fought was to preserve slavery. The war was supposedly ignited by a November 1775 British offer of freedom to Blacks who fled slavery and joined British forces. Well.
That offer came after increasingly volcanic American reactions to various British provocations: After the 1765 Stamp Act. After the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Boston Tea Party. After the 1774 Coercive Acts (including closure of Boston’s port) and other events of “The Long Year of Revolution” (the subtitle of Mary Beth Norton’s “1774”). And after, in 1775, the April 19 battles of Lexington and Concord, the June 17 battle of Bunker Hill and George Washington on July 3 assuming command of the Continental Army.
Writing history is not like doing physics. But event A cannot have caused event B if B began before A.
…..
The Times says “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” flows from “slavery and the anti-black racism it required.” So, the 1619 Project’s historical illiteracy is not innocent ignorance. Rather, it is maliciousness in the service of progressivism’s agenda, which is to construct a thoroughly different nation on the deconstructed rubble of what progressives hope will be the nation’s thoroughly discredited past.
Arnold Kling is wise. A slice:
Liberal values were hardly a priority for Mr. Trump, and some of his would-be successors at the National Conservatism conference were openly disdainful of liberal values. When I listened to recordings of speeches there, I thought I caught a strong whiff of demagoguery.
I think that middle America benefits from liberal values, probably more than people realize. For the economy, I think that neoliberalism is better for middle America than populism. I think that Mr. Trump’s supporters make the Republican Party more receptive to illiberalism on the right than it would be otherwise.
But unlike, say, Jonathan Rauch, I don’t see the illiberal right as an existential threat to our society. I think that the social justice movement does pose an existential threat. As institutions start to play by social-justice rules, they raise the status of the wrong people.
Most of the work to keep our society from being ruined by the social justice activists has to be done by those of us who see their game for what it is. We need to keep liberal values from being obliterated by the social justice movement.
Doug Bandow writes on the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union.
Hans Bader decries Biden’s politicization of medicine.
“Global freedom is on the decline” – so reports Eric Boehm.
Tunku Varadarajan talks with Phil Levy about today’s supply-chain web woes. A slice:
Ninety percent of all exported goods move over the ocean. These include not only finished goods but also parts. “So even if you’re manufacturing in the U.S.,” Mr. Levy says, “the odds are you’re using some imported parts.”
Ports are built “so you can just meet peak demand.” It’s too expensive to build at excess capacity, “because then most of the time you’d have lots of extra stuff sitting around.” The peak season is August through November, “when it’s, ‘How do you stock store shelves for the holidays?’ ” The problem is that a system that can “barely handle” a normal peak season has seen “above peak demand for about an entire year and a half,” placing it under “a cumulative strain it wasn’t really built for.”
