The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Yet there it was. Or there it had been. For as the controversy grew, the New York Times silently edited the web pages in question so that this especially inflammatory claim no longer appeared on them. The words “understanding 1619 as our true founding” were quietly removed. And after they had done this little bit of erasing, the paper’s editors then went about pretending that they had never said the words that they had in fact said, or that when they had used the words, they had used them in a way that had a different meaning than the usual meaning such words had. Jake Silverstein, for instance, wrote that what the project was trying to explain was a “rather complex idea” and that when they had said that 1619 was the true founding date of America, they had in fact intended it as a “metaphor.” In a generous act of self-back-patting, he noted that some critics had said that this metaphor of his offered “a clearer vision” of American history than had previously been available.5