As 2020 starts, a PC propaganda campaign called the “1619 Project” is taking hold in American news media, university faculties, and K-12 public school curricula. The New York Times Magazine published the original batch of articles on August 14 of last year, and the ramrod of the project was a reporter named Nikole Hannah-Jones. A Times writer named Mara Gay characterized the campaign this way: “In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”

The central claim of the “Project” is that United States, uniquely among all the nations on Earth, was founded on, and shaped by, the evil of slavery. The name comes from the claim that the first black slaves to arrive in North America were brought in August of the year 1619, exactly 400 years before the publication of the first “Project” articles. As a result, says Hannah-Jones, “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” with the implication that such deep racism does not stain any other nation the way it stains the US. The Times wants us to identify the United States so strongly with slavery that 1619, rather than 1776, will be viewed as the year of the nation’s true founding.