The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Silverstein then did a little rejigging of his own. In his introductory essay, published in August 2019, he had written: 1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Soon the online version of this, too, was silently edited. Specifically, the words “this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date” were deleted. Perhaps Silverstein wondered for a moment whether to pretend that the words “is wrong” was also a rather brilliant metaphor, also praised by many critics. Instead, he fell back on something else, which was claiming that the changes to the text were “so minor as to be immaterial.”6