"New Goal For The NYT: Reframe American History, And Target Trump Too"

To my mind, this is snapshot that does a pretty damn good job explaining why reasonable people should be concerned about progressivism--and about its control of the cultural superstructure. I'm someone who has always thought that slavery and racism are extremely important phenomena in American history. Though who doesn't? But the contemporary progressive views seems to be: race and racism explain just about everything about America. Racism is the central fact about us. The only stuff it doesn't explain are our other sins--the other -isms and -phobias. Behold:

In the Times' view (which it hopes to make the view of millions of Americans), the country was actually founded in 1619, when the first Africans were brought to North America, to Virginia, to be sold as slaves.

An important event and date, to be sure: but there is absolutely no plausible case to be made that it constituted "the actual founding of the country."
   This seems like a pretty dramatic deviation from what ought to be the task of the Times. The project is clearly polarized hard left. And they claim to intend to turn the output of the project into a school curriculum. Which seems to be a bit too much like brainwashing for comfort. Or at least there's a good chance that's what it'll be.

   And don't forge the comment from their recent internal "town hall":

"I'm wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting," one staffer asked Baquet. "Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn't racist, I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting."

   Race, racism and slavery have been extremely important in our history. But they don't pervade it. "White supremacy" certainly doesn't. And they aren't a reasonable "starting point." And they aren't "in everything." This is just a pile of contemporary far-left gobbledygook. Extremists aren't capable of seeing their obsessions in perspective--e.g. as merely important at best rather than as most important.
   Progressivism has lost its mind. And it's dead set on imposing its derangement on the rest of us. But somehow we--people in my sector of the society and the culture--are just sitting back and watching it happen--at best. Many of us are defending it. Or doing it. In part because orange man bad, orange man Hitler, and so on. But in part because there are, of course, no enemies on the left. The left is beyond reproach--unless it isn't left enough.
   On the whole, if I'm going to have a set of kooky religious beliefs forced on me, I kinda think I might rather go back to Christianity...
   Perhaps the NYT's evangelical project will fizzle out. But I don't see any reason to think that that it won't make things worse before it does.