Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, that recent turmoil following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, could help Americans confront centuries of systemic racism, drawing a vivid contrast with President Trump amid a reckoning that has galvanized millions across America.
“We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the original sin of this country, 400 years old … slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said at Grace Lutheran Church, where he met with community leaders after a private session with Blake and his family. Bill Barrow, Will Weissert and Scott Bauer report.
[emphasis added]
The so-called “1619 Project'' is a New York Times initiative that holds that America’s true founding was when the first African slaves were brought to Jamestown in 1619. It holds that slavery, not individual freedom, defines America. Obliterated—“canceled” in today’s fashionable terminology—is America’s actual Founding, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence from Britain was signed and adopted as the first Law of the new American nation. Gone, then, is the philosophical bulwark that stands against all forms of tyranny of man over man; the moral sovereignty and of every individual, and his liberation from any master. America, according to 1619, is no longer the nation that embodied the promise of the Enlightenment, a promise that stands opposed to slavery, and led to its end in the west. The American Revolution was to protect slavery, claims the 1619 project, not to liberate the individual.
Ignored are the Enlightenment ideals of individualism, political and legal equality, and inalienable individual rights that spawned America, brought to us by philosophers and intellectuals most of whom weren’t even born until after the arrival of slaves to the shores of North America in 1619. John Locke, the most influential of these thinkers, was born in 1632. Ignored is the fact that Jamestown was a British colony. America wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye in 1619. Ignored is the fact that the 18th Century gave rise to the first ever meaningful opposition to slavery, which had infected humanity for thousands of years, leading to the Abolitionist Movement. Abolitionism was not just about the Confederacy. It was integral to and an established force at the American Founding in 1776. Ignored is the fact of the success of the movement to abolish slavery. Abolitionism was an established force in 1776, which is why slavery began to be extinguished in the new American nation shortly after the signing of the Declaration. Every state in 1776 was a slave state. With the Declaration of Independence at their backs, state after state began to abolish slavery; first in Vermont in 1777, followed by Pennsylvania in 1780. Across all of the Northern States, slavery was abolished by 1804. Further victories for the anti-slave movement included the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which ensured “that the modern day states of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana entered the Union as free states.” (Page 43) Thanks to the Declaration of Independence, slavery was on its way out during the Founding period.
Until Abolition stalled in its tracks as the Southern States reacted. They defended their slavocracy by repudiating America’s Founding principles. How is it that the states that honored the Founding ideals outlawed slavery, and those that didn’t repudiated those ideals? Unlike the New York Times, the Southern slavocracy understood that slavery is incompatable with America’s true Founding in 1776, and to save slavery it had to do exactly what the 1619 Project intends, repudiate 1776—that is, cancel America.
1619 doesn’t just acknowledge that slavery is evil. It doesn’t just acknowledge that America’s Founding was incomplete, allowing slavery to linger in parts of America through the early decades of the new nation. Borrowing from religion one of the most vicious frauds ever foisted on humanity, 1619 declares slavery to be America’s Original Sin, thus tainting America and Americans with unrearned guilt in perpetuity (Thank you Christianity.)
The words of the Declaration of Independence, that All Men are Created Equal in their inalienable Rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—words that gay rights movement hero Harvey Milk believed “can never be erased”— get erased as if trivial and historically unimportant; tainted, like everything else American, by the “Original Sin of Slavery”. Just as all humanity is irredeemably tainted according the Christianity, so ““In this worldview,” observes Columbia University Professor John McWhorter of the 1619 Project, “redemption for the [American] founding seems impossible.”
Even on its own terms, there was nothing “original” about slavery in 1619. Slavery had existed throughout the world, including in Africa, for thousands of years. Even the Transatlantic African slave trade wasn’t original to 1619 Jamestown. It began in the 16th, not the 17th, Century.
1619 is, of course, sheer folly. But as Ayn Rand put it,
There’s always a purpose in nonsense. Don’t bother to examine a folly--ask yourself only what it accomplishes.
What does the 1619 Project nonsense accomplish? Just as the Confederacy understood that the Founding Principles of America are an insurmoutable barrier to slavery, so the political Left in America understands that the Founding Principles of America are an insurmoutable barrier to socialism. Overlain with the Original gambit, assuming enough Americans are dumb enough to be duped in unearned guilt, the cancellation of 1776 paves the road for a criminal socialist agenda. After all, what socialist program can not be rationalized as penance for America’s Original Sin? Just as Christians must atone for their Original Sin by submitting to obedience to God (or Jesus), as determined by His representatives on Earth, the Christian clergy, so Americans must atone for their Original Sin by submitting to the American Collective’s representative, the socialist state, under the guise of “racial justice”, “social justice”, “environmental justice”, “anti-racism”, or whatever collectivist rationalization the Cancel Left can come up with. (Once again, thank you Christianity.)
The Left is attempting to revive slavery as a current issue for political purposes. But slavery is history. There are no “vestiges” of slavery in America today. We are not “finally now getting to the point where we’re going to be addressing the . . . sin” of slavery.” “Getting to the point” now? Slavery was addressed in 1776 and the ensuing Revolutionary War, the decades that followed, the Abolitionist Movement, the Civil War and its 620,000 casualties, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th “Civil War” Amendments. Slavery polarized America like nothing before or since, ultimately leading to the nation’s breakup as the Southern states seceded and formed the Confederacy. A nation that went through a wrenching decades-long soul-seaching, secession, and bloody Civil war has certainly addressed its sin of slavery. To say America hasn’t addressed slavery is a flat out lie.
So why revive slavery now, ignoring history? For crass political opportunism. Original Sin is a monstrous injustice in all of its forms—and un-American. Americanism holds that no person can be guilty of or judged by wrongs he did not commit, including crimes committed before he is born. By attaching Original Sin to slavery, Biden is declaring that no attonement imposed on innocent current and future Americans, especially white Americans, will ever be enough to “cancel” the unearned guilt. The “original sin of slavery” is a political ploy that, if accepted, will keep on giving to the collectivist, socialist, egalitarian, statist, racist American Left, since any resistance to the Leftist agenda will be met with a play on the unearned guilt of America’s “Original Sin of Slavery”.
As 1776 Unites agrees, America was born in 1776, not 1619. America was born amidst two overlapping historical trends—slavery, which was in its dying stage, and universal freedom based on individual rights, the revolutionary new concept born of The Enlightenment. America was created to establish a free country, not to protect slavery. It is the New York times and the Democratic Party that is determined to protect slavery and undermine freedom. Any lingering injustices against blacks in America can only be dealt with by consulting 1776 and the true Founders of America, not rewriting American history.
And in rewriting American history, the Times is not original. They are following in the footsteps of the defenders of slavery. Yes, the Confederacy! As historian Timothy Sandefur explains:
The myth that America was premised on slavery took off in the 1830s, not the 1770s. That was when John C. Calhoun, Alexander Stephens, George Fitzhugh, and others offered a new vision of America—one that either disregarded the facts of history to portray the founders as white supremacists, or denounced them for not being so. Relatively moderate figures such as Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas twisted the language of the Declaration to say that the phrase “all men are created equal” actually meant only white men. Abraham Lincoln effectively refuted that in his debates with Douglas. Calhoun was, in a sense, more honest about his abhorrent views; he scorned the Declaration precisely because it made no color distinctions. “There is not a word of truth in it,” wrote Calhoun. People are “in no sense…either free or equal.” Indiana Sen. John Pettit was even more succinct. The Declaration, he said, was “a self‐evident lie.”
It was these men—the generation after the founding—who manufactured the myth of American white supremacy.
[My Emphasis]
The Left is living in the tribal past. It is aligned with the reactionary defenders of slavery. The future belongs to Americanism. By repudiating the philosophical underpinnings of 1776, Biden is cancelling America. It’s just one more reason to despise Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, and the entire Leftist philosophy. It is philosophic treason. The 1619 Project is premised on a Hitlerian style Big Lie, and Biden has bought into it. Biden, the 1619 Project, and the Democratic Party should be morally condemned and defeated in the 2020 presidential election, even at the price of a second Trump term.
Related:
1776 Unites: A counterpoint to the 1619 Project
The ‘1619 Project’ Fraud Begins its Poisonous Infiltration into American Politics
Obama's Collectivist Manifesto-Part 1...the "Original Sin" gambit
Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle
A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig
The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism
The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery
Thomas Sowell on slavery -- quotes from The Thomas Sowell Reader by Mark J. Perry for the American Enterprise Institute
Frederick Douglass, The Columbian Orator, and the 1619 Project by Joseph R. Fornieri
