“I shot the sheriff,” the late lamented Bob Marley told us some years back, “but I didn’t shoot the deputy.”
So who did?
Specifically, who shot the deputies over the weekend in the unspeakably brutal attempted murders in Compton?
Obviously the individual most of us saw running away from the scene of the crime, gun in hand, is responsible.
But others prepared the ground, made this heinous act, and similar actions against law enforcement we hear about almost every day, a popular, even desirable, activity.
Holding the New York Times culpable for shooting the deputies may seem like an exaggerated claim, but an indelible line exists connecting the dots from the NYT’s 1619 Project to the blood-stained sidewalks of South-Central Los Angeles.
That along with such empty and meretricious academic inventions as “critical race theory” and “systemic racism” are the supposedly intellectual underpinnings of a movement yielding nothing but nonstop social unrest cum physical and psychological destruction.
An atmosphere of vengeance has been created, rocketing across the zeitgeist from Antifa to the Marxist leaders of Black Lives Matter to academia to Hollywood to the media to the myriad putatively “liberal” and “progressive” politicians, enabling violence in the streets of their cities, to the crazed individual who pointed the gun into the Compton squad car and plugged the deputies in the face.
Just as you are what you eat, you reap what you sow. And the editors of the New York Times, not to mention their slavish lackeys at the Pulitzer Prize committee, are responsible for the fruits of the theories they toss out with reckless abandon because actual wrecks ensue.
As a reminder, here is what the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project’s contributors assert:
“That American history began with the arrival of slaves in Virginia in August 1619; that the primary purpose of the colonists who declared independence from Britain in 1776 was to preserve American slavery from the danger of Britain’s outlawing it; that the Southern plantation system of growing cotton with slave labor is the foundation of American capitalism; and that Lincoln was a racist who had no interest in conferring real citizenship on those who were enslaved.”
That excerpt comes from the forthcoming (November) “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project” by Peter W. Wood. 1620 is the date of the Mayflower Compact—a kind of rough-and-ready early shipboard version of the Declaration of Independence. If you haven’t heard of it, or know little of it, as I did, you should read Wood’s book.
Mr. Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, does a superb job of contradicting the bizarre assertions of the New York Times’ “project.” He also assembles the many factual critiques of the project from historians, including such esteemed liberals as Princeton’s Sean Wilentz.
Under assault even from its traditional allies, the Times ultimately semi-walked back its arguably most extreme of several extreme statements—that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery—by allowing that this was the motivation of an amorphous, naturally unnamed, “some.”
You will note that I too do not name the woman who was the instigator and lead author of the project, because, in a country of hundreds of millions, there will always be irrational, hate-filled people—just as there always will, alas, be a, hopefully diminishing, number of racists.
It is the responsibility of the paper and its editors to understand this and behave accordingly, especially because they are still, to use an even older pop culture reference, “Leader of the Pack” on the liberal side. What they say is replicated everywhere and believed.
Which makes it all the more disturbing that Peter Wood also wrote: “The Pulitzer Center partnered with the Times to plant a 1619 curriculum in the nation’s schools.”
Talk about preparing the ground!
But then the NYT is scarcely alone. Such insanity is already implanted everywhere in American academia.
Just the other day, the University of Chicago—once the self-declared paragon of free speech to the extent it promulgated a famous statement on the subject—has announced that its English Department, in abject fealty to BLM, will only enroll graduate students this year “interested in working in and with Black Studies.” Those wishing to “brush up their Shakespeare” need not apply.
Somewhere George Wallace—“Segregation now! Segregation forever!”—is smiling.
Does anyone have a question anymore about who really “shot the deputies”?