As promised in our last episode, we return early this week with the first in a series of bonus episodes devoted to a deep dive into the New York Times‘s agitprop “1619 Project” that seeks to place slavery and racism as the central fact of the American story. In this first installment, Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, “Lucretia” (who happens to teach political philosophy and American government . . . somewhere), joins me in examining and explaining some of the myths about the Founding, and in particular the common claim that the Declaration of Independence did not mean to include blacks in its famous phrase “All men are created equal.”
From there we go on to discuss the significance of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and debunk a number of myths about the Constitution, such as why the famous “3/5ths Clause” did not mean that blacks were only three-fifths of a human being (quite the opposite in fact), how the Commerce Clause and the importation clause were substantial if complete victories for the anti-slavery clause, the deeper story behind the fugitive slave clause, among other things. Only by a gross or intentional distortion of history can someone claim that the purpose of the Constitution was to secure and promote slavery.
We’ll have at least three more installments in this series over the next few weeks, so bookmark this podcast, and check back in often. We’re just getting started.
You know what to do. Listen here or from our hosts at Ricochet. Subscribe to Power Line in iTunes (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed.
P.S. Here’s an example of why the distortions of the Times series matter. It is fueling narratives like this:
Will it surprise you to learn that Flores is a professor of linguistics at Penn?
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