by Arthur Bloom

I want to tell you why I like The 1619 Project. It has nothing to do with the history, all of which is known to any well-educated Virginian. Of course, these things are fundamentally propagandistic exercises, any leftist worth his salt would tell you that too. But it was symbolically very important. Here’s what it did: The New York Times shifted the locus and timeline of the American Founding from Plymouth Bay to Virginia, where it belongs.

It’s a common gripe of Virginians that when most Americans today think of the Founding, they tend to think of pilgrims in black-and-white, with buckles on their shoes, even though we were there first. The 1619 Project is helping to rectify this situation. I’m holding out for a 1607 Project. Give it time, the actual Jamestown fort wasn’t even rediscovered until around 25 years ago.

The New York Times was engaged in some powerful voodoo, not to be trifled with — if you look at everything through the lens of race you won’t see it — but it’s very real. Catholic education molded Nikole Hannah-Jones, and she went on to strike a hammer blow against Yankee cultural power. The Empire of Guadalupe rises.

This was necessary, because if the affirmative action lawsuit at Harvard is successful, Harvard will become even more Chinese, and its prestige will fall. Our people won’t go there anymore. That’s why I’m rooting for Conservative, Inc.’s devious plan to turn Harvard into a Chinese enclave, it’ll be the greatest thing they’ve ever done. These two things are mortal blows to the cultural prestige of Massachusetts. And as Massachusetts falls, Virginia rises.

As an editor, I love the scene from 1776, where John Adams and Thomas Jefferson have a prideful confrontation over the wording of the Declaration. Ben Franklin, notorious horn dog, probable spy, and the true hero of the great rebellion, sides with the Virginian, because he is wise.

That’s the thing about these Harvard guys, they think they know, but they don’t know.

Like Angela Davis, I’m a Mayflower-American who grew up in the South, and I’ve made my peace with the Roman Church. So I read Yoram Hazony’s blockbuster book on conservatism and came away with the distinct impression he was not talking to people like me. He clearly doesn’t like Catholics, Southerners, or the legacy of Rome. I like all of those things.

His new narrative of Anglo-American conservatism begins with John Selden, a 17th century philosemitic jurist who, if he was living today, would be a member of the intellectual dark web. Perhaps he had a beautiful mind, but his political instincts were way off. And why bother defending the Anglican establishment today, when the Anglican Communion doesn’t even exist?

The thing is, Virginia is called the Old Dominion because it was the last holdout for the House of Stuart. It’s rumored there are still some Jacobites around.

These Likudnik influencers like Costin Alamariu, also known as the Bronze Age Pervert, try to get young Americans to say nasty things about black people so they can be controlled. The way it works is, join a hate group or say a bunch of nasty stuff, they’ll let you rise, then cancel you when they have another useful person to move in—these are the people who invented cancel culture, and they’re very good at it.

What started as Norman Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem — and Ours” has become “Socrates was a n****r,” Dr. Alamariu’s most famous exhortation. Sic transit gloria mundi. Yale ain’t making them like they used to, either. He can get away with this stuff because he has powerful friends in the neocon establishment, presumably very racist ones, but you will not. Anyway this sort of gutter stuff is these days mostly a neurosis of Northern cities from which we are blessedly spared here in the mid-Atlantic.

Things have been getting a little crazy up in New York. So, like William Styron or Tom Wolfe, we had to send Mike Crumplar up there to make the Dimes Square people behave themselves. A very successful op, I should say, if he’s got Graydon Carter kissing his you-know-what. All this ironic fascism up there, and not a single one talks about auditing the Fed, which is how you can tell it’s all fake. As for Compact, Professor Žižek has been informed of your Paul Singer trip, gentlemen — perhaps you have not sufficiently separated yourselves from your neocon roots.

Virginia, dear friends, is the future. The smartest people in America are in NoVA. It’s growing, it’s pretty much recession-proof because of the federal government, and the schools are good. Amidst the mob war between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis — and that’s what it is — our own governor is looking like the steady hand. He led the Virginia GOP out of the wilderness, but like Moses, my guess is he won’t be allowed to enter Canaan because his tenure at the Carlyle Group was marked by selling out his country to the Chinese, a sin for which he is now feverishly repenting. But we’ll see.

Arthur Bloom is a Virginia-based editor who co-founded Jacobite and served in various roles at The American Conservative, Front Porch Republic, Modern Age, and The Daily Caller. This column is republished with permission. He studied colonial history and the violin at William and Mary and domestic extremism at the University of Kansas. He is concerned about the dreary quality of most political writing and is trying to think through what comes next, so make him an offer.