In August, 2019, the New York Times began driving an ill-conceived propaganda campaign called Project 1619, named for the year that slavery first came to America in the Jamestown, Virginia colony.
It is that year, argued the Times, that defines our national character to this day — not the iconic 1776.
With their latest propaganda-Pulitzer as a stamp of credibility, the Times and its willing dupes have been ramming this America-hating 1619 propaganda into K-12 and college curricula. But this time the Leftists are getting some real pushback.
Kudos to parents who are speaking up at K-12 school board meetings against the one-sided Project 1619 and the odious Critical Race Theory in their children’s curricula. And kudos especially to Christopher Rufo, who has led a principled, eloquent resistance to the Left’s racialized Marxist indoctrination initiatives.
Another way to fight back against the Left’s propaganda is with an accurate counter-narrative about the Pilgrims’ experience in Massachusetts. The remainder of this article sketches such a counter-narrative.
If educators want to go back four centuries in search of our “national character,” it is the Year 1623 that they should be featuring. It was in that year that the Pilgrims, starving and dying under socialism, abruptly switched to private property and free markets. In short order, the Pilgrims moved from starvation to prosperity, paid off their debts to their English sponsors, and actually did establish a national character that survives to this day.
It is that new national character based on private property, free markets, and personal responsibility that drew a massive migration to America — not the sad introduction of the fusty 10,000-year-old institution of slavery in 1619.
It is with this thought that I write this article with hope.
Namely —
I hope our American educators and media will develop an explicit, deliberate, and positive Project1623 counter-narrative to the one that the Times has been ramming into our media, schools, and our children’s minds.
If Leftist school boards manage to preserve their beloved Project 1619 narrative, then at a minimum, both narratives should be taught with equal vigor, side-by-side, in our schools. Spirited debates by the students, comparing the two narratives would be a positive step.
Prediction: In the near term, as the Democrat Party slides ever-more-leftward toward desultory socialism, racialized Marxism, and communism, the 1623 narrative will emerge as the more positive and relevant today for We the People.
Brief Summary of The Project 1623 Narrative
In November, 1620, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. They promptly lost half their population to starvation, sickness, and exposure that first winter, and they fared little better the second winter. We were all taught that a Native American named Squanto taught the survivors to fish, plant corn, use fertilizer, and hunt deer. While mostly true, it is surely the lesser half of the story.
What most of us never learned (or glossed over) was that the original contract the Pilgrims brokered with their London sponsors required that everything the Pilgrims produced was to go into a common store, and every member was to be allotted one equal share. Further, all the land they cleared, and all the buildings they constructed, were to belong to the whole community rather than to any individual.
To those with visions of Utopia, this must have sounded like the ideal society. Free of outside evil influences from old England and Europe, private property and greed were to be banished. Everyone was to work hard for the common good. Each was to contribute all that one could and take out only what one needed. In modern terms, it was to be a kind of Bernie Sanders neo-Marxist equity-for-all paradise.
So how did it all work out for the Pilgrims?
Horribly!
In the two winters beginning in 1621 & 1622, a great many died from starvation, pneumonia, or both. Here are excerpts from Governor William Bradford’s own retrospective summary of the community’s experience with what we now variously call collectivism, socialism, or communism:
This community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. … Let none object this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.
In other words, said the Governor, it simply didn’t work, even when their very survival depended on it. Mankind’s inherent nature simply wouldn’t accommodate it, no matter how “ideal” it may have seemed to its proponents.
Simply put, Bradford had discovered that even the most idealistic of peoples have no reason to put in any extra effort without the motivation of personal incentives to do so.
Wisely, in April, 1623, Bradford abruptly abandoned socialism. Instead, he assigned a plot of land to each family, permitting them to keep everything they produced and to market anything they didn’t consume themselves. He actually harnessed all that supposed human ”greed” and put it to work in a free-market system of the type Milton Friedman was to espouse so eloquently in the 20th-century Free to Choose series of books and videos.
So … for the Pilgrims, how did free markets and private property work out for the same people in the same place under the same circumstances?
Boffo!
The Pilgrims soon had more food than they could eat or trade among themselves. They set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Native Americans. They paid off their debts to their London sponsors and soon attracted a great European migration. Their new society still had its problems, but hunger was never again one of them.
As Bradford summarized the new approach:
The women now went willing into the field, and took their little ones with them to plant corn, while before they would allege weakness and inability, and to have compelled them would have been thought great tyranny and oppression. … This [new approach] had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content.
Most importantly for us today, Bradford wrote about the bitter lessons learned from the failure of original socialistic plan:
Let none argue that this is due to human failing rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself …
Note even circa 1630, when he began writing his notes, Bradford used the term “communistic.”
The Pilgrim experience of 1623 stands as the most authentic-ever, real-life, before-and-after comparison of socialism versus private property and free markets.
Bottom Line: Socialism lost. Free markets won.
In modern times, when confronted with the undeniable historical record of socialism’s many failures, the Left usually argues that the “right people” weren’t in charge, and if only they had been, their utopian socialist vision would have succeeded. If Bradford could speak today, he would surely disagree based on the Pilgrims’ real-life experience. It wasn’t human failings that were the problem — the fault was in the communistic plan itself.
So then …
Why isn’t this 1623 lesson featured up front, in neon lights, in American history classes? Why isn’t it the lead story of the Pilgrim experience? Why has the history even been falsified and its most important lesson ignored? Why has the New York Times overlooked it and focused on the 1619 introduction of slavery instead?
Perhaps it’s because the people who write our history textbooks still don’t want to believe it. Perhaps those authors still cling to the hope that some form of their beloved faculty-lounge utopian socialism, collectivism, Marxism, communism, progressivism, or whatever-ism will one day triumph over private property and free markets.
See also this link , which provides an explicit record of three major countries that tried socialism with good intent and suffered horribly for it.
It is now 400 years since the landing at Plymouth Rock. As we cast our votes in 2022 and 2024, all Americans will do well to remember the hard-earned lessons learned by the Pilgrims about socialism versus free markets.
Democrats love to talk about the need of establishing a “universal” health care system that provides everyone with the same quality of care. That was the major theme pushed by the left and the media when Obamacare was signed into law in 2010.
We always knew that it was propaganda and that a government-run healthcare system would result in worse care for everyone. What we didn’t know is that the left doesn’t even support this claim. They do like the idea of providing different care to different people, so long as it promotes their radical, race-based social justice agenda.
Rationing COVID treatments based on race
To kick off the new year, health officials in Democrat-run New York made the call to prioritize non-whites as part of their criteria to decide who is eligible to receive monoclonal antibodies. And while white people can still receive the treatments, they’ll have to show that they have medical conditions that increase their risk for severe illness. Non-white patients, however, are automatically eligible.
By now, you’re probably fed up with talking about school shutdowns. And frankly, we’re getting fed up with fighting the left on this issue. But leave it to the teachers’ unions and RedforEd to call for more school shutdowns right before students returned from their winter break.
While death of any sort is heartbreaking, these numbers prove that COVID is no more dangerous for children than the seasonal flu. But the teachers’ unions and RedforEd just can’t help themselves—because, as usual, it’s always about them.
The controversy over COVID management is not a medical disagreement but a political fight. It’s also a free speech issue, the question of whether those who disagree with the political/medical status-quo should be silenced.
Although we have learned more over time about the origins and development of COVID, there is no question it is a contagious virus that spreads primarily through respiratory secretions.
Infections range from symptom-free to fatal, but serious disease and death occur almost exclusively in the infirm and the elderly. Like all viruses, the coronavirus mutates, apparently into variants that are more contagious but less deadly.
So far so good. The disagreement is over its containment. Americans have become a risk-averse people, where nonsensical catch phrases like “if it only saves one life” and “in an abundance of caution” have supplanted sober cost/benefit analysis.
So, our government’s go-to solution for the pandemic was lockdowns for everyone. Commercial, social, educational, and other personal interactions were halted to stop the spread of the disease.
The results of this massive experiment in public health were disappointing. 800,000 Americans have perished. There may have been some benefit to “flattening the curve”—spacing out illnesses to avoid overwhelming healthcare facilities—but the total number of fatalities was not much affected.
Meanwhile the cost of the lockdowns was enormous. The federal government spent $6 trillion in COVID relief, much of it wasted or misappropriated. Moreover, virtually all of the handouts were debt financed, pleasing current taxpayers/voters but assuring that Americans will be struggling financially far into the future.
The collateral damage included over 90,000 “excess deaths” due to forced shutdowns of routine preventive and diagnostic care. There were sharp spikes in levels of depression, substance abuse, and overdose deaths, especially among the young.
The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) in October 2020 was based on addressing these “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.” It recommended an alternative approach called Focused Protection.
The authors were respected physicians from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford with 91,000 additional professional endorsements, including from a Nobel prize winner. Their paper noted that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 was over 1,000 times higher in vulnerable populations than among young people. For children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
Thus, it made sense to protect vulnerable populations if anything more vigorously, while reopening schools, businesses, and restaurants with reasonable precautions. Both overall mortality and social harm could be protected until we reached herd immunity.
In a society based on reason and open inquiry, this proposal would at least have received serious consideration. Instead, the Trump-hating media erupted in withering denunciations and cancellations.
Worse, recently obtained emails reveal that our “follow the science” authorities intentionally thwarted the dissenting viewpoint. Then-director of the NIH Francis Collins wrote Anthony (“I am the Science”) Fauci that GBD seemed to be getting some attention. “There needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premises. Is it underway?”
Fauci answered in the affirmative. Soon after, he informed The Washington Post that GBD was a fringe operation. “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.”
Several media outlets ran with criticisms by Fauci, who completed the cycle by citing their articles in his talking points. Facebook pitched in by censoring any references to GBD. It was the dreaded “misinformation.”
Focused Protection never got traction. But shutting down open dissent in favor of political agendas has produced tragic consequences. In spite of Fauci’s claim in October 2020 that the draconian remedies were temporary, when caseloads rose the next month, shutdowns were resumed.
Hard data is never available on the path not taken, but it’s undeniable that the costs of following the Fauci/Collins strategy were staggering: unbelievably enormous federal outlays, shattered businesses, untreated illnesses, suicides, and devastating educational achievement losses.
Let’s be smarter with omicron. Let’s vaccinate and medicate, protect the vulnerable but avoid panic and unnecessary disruptions in our lives.
The Great Barrington Declaration, the responses, and consequences are a reminder of the practical importance of free speech rights. Better decisions are made when all sides are heard out.
The article begins and ends with a heart‐wrenching story about a California‐licensed veterinarian who received a temporary Arizona license, granted under a 1967 law, to work at a Mesa, Arizona clinic. She’s been accused of poor surgical technique while operating on a kitten brought to the clinic on death’s doorstep. The kitten died and the vertinarian was fired from the clinic. Her temporary license expired after 30 days, and she was never granted the permanent license for which she applied. Yet readers are expected to view this as an indictment of Arizona’s universal licensing law.
Universal licensing dilutes the authority of state occupational licensing boards, so it is no surprise that a spokesperson from an organization representing that constituency, the Federation of Associations of Regulatory Boards, would be quoted in the article criticizing universal licensing over the fact that Arizona grants licenses to workers from states with less onerous licensing requirements—providing their out‐of‐state licenses are in good standing for at least a year.
It is wrong to assume that more onerous requirements are better. In many cases, incumbent occupations lobby state licensing boards to make requirements tougher for new entrants, usually “grandfathering” those already licensed, to reduce competition. Thus, EMTs must complete, on average, 33 days of training and pass 2 exams to get a license while cosmetologists need 11 months of training and interior designers need 73.
When it comes to the medical profession, licensing requirements are virtually identical in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. They include graduating an accredited medical school, passing a standardized national licensing exam, and completing at least one year of postgraduate training. Yet few people realize that private third‐party certification organizations do the heavy lifting when it comes to quality assurance.
For example, I am a general surgeon. As a licensed medical doctor, I can legally decide to switch my specialty to obstetrics and gynecology or dermatology or even psychiatry and display it on my door. However, health care facilities will not grant me practicing privileges without proof I completed postgraduate training in the specialty and will likely require board certification. Specialty boards will not grant me certification unless I complete accredited specialty training and pass their exams. Health plans will not include me on their provider panels without proof I completed the specialty training, and I will be unable to get malpractice insurance coverage for the same reason. Note how many independent, private third parties provide information and protection to consumers of already‐licensed physicians. These are the real guarantors of safety.
The Republic report implies to readers that malpractice is automatically a reason to deny or revoke a license. Oftentimes, when medical or other professional malpractice cases are settled, the defendants do not stipulate to liability. Both settlements and convictions get reviewed by licensing boards. But unless convictions are repetitive or egregious, boards rarely restrict or revoke licenses. The same is true when boards investigate complaints directly lodged by customers or patients.
Yet the authors of the report infer that something must be amiss if an applicant receives a universal license from a licensing board when they have a history of a malpractice settlement in the state where they are already licensed. If every malpractice settlement justified denying or revoking a license, the entire country would have a desperate shortage of doctors, dentists, and other health care practitioners.
Historically, it has been the incumbent members of professions and occupations who lobbied state legislatures to license and regulate them—not the customers, clients, or patients. While incumbents promoted licensing under the guise of protecting the public, they were really protecting themselves by reducing competition from new entrants and, in the process, inflating prices for their services. The report’s authors cite another organization that represents the interests of incumbents, the Alliance For Responsible Professional Licensing, that defends occupational licensing by saying “licensing helps to solve problems of income disparity, boosting wages most at the bottom end of skill distribution.” But that doesn’t account for the innumerable people who are locked out of the opportunity to lift themselves from poverty by using their skills to make an honest living.
For example, at one time Arizona required African‐style hair braiders to spend nearly one year and close to $10,000 to get a cosmetology license, which includes training to use chemicals to dye or treat hair, as well as hair cutting. They’re taught nothing about hair braiding. A lawsuit pushed lawmakers to end that requirement in Arizona, but such obstacles to hair braiders still exist in several other states. Louisiana florists “protected” the pubic from people who want to simply arrange flowers by successfully lobbying for a law that requires them to get a license. License requirements include passing a four‐hour exam during which the applicant must arrange flowers while being judged by licensed florists. Louisiana is the only state that licenses flower arrangers. Does the Federation of Associations of Regulatory Boards criticize Arizona for having less onerous requirements on flower arrangers who relocate from Louisiana? The Republic’s reporters didn’t say.
The proliferation of occupational licensing laws, from interior decorators to fire alarm installers, may have boosted the income of those protected by a license, but they have prevented many people from lifting themselves out of poverty by entering such fields of endeavor. Indeed, in 2016 President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors issued a report detailing how licensing leads to higher prices and reduced opportunity. The Obama administration convinced Congress to appropriate grants to help states “enhance the portability of occupational licensing.”
In an earlier time, licensing laws were also used to excluderacial and ethnic minorities. The Cato Institute held a policy forum on this subject in November 2020 called “Race and Medical Licensing Laws.”
Furthermore, most state licensing boards deny licenses to people who have a history of a felony conviction. With nearly one‐third of Americans these days having a record in the criminal justice system, licensing laws deny many people a second chance to better themselves. In May 2021 Governor Ducey signed into law HB 2067, which provides “Certificate[s] of Second Chance” to people convicted of certain felonies, which will help them obtain occupational and business licenses. The law does not apply universally to all crimes and convictions. For example, driving with a suspended license and criminal speeding are among the convictions excluded. Nevertheless, the new law at least helps some who’ve made mistakes in the past to clear the occupational licensing hurdle and forge a new and better life.
Arizona ignited a national trend in breaking down barriers to people of all backgrounds seeking to make an honest living while expanding options and choice for consumers. Universal licensing reform has bipartisan appeal. From blue states like New Jersey to red states like Missouri, lawmakers are uniting around the goal of removing the barriers to upward mobility that occupational licensing laws erect. Sadly, by citing irrelevant narratives, cherry‐picking data, and failing to provide adequate context, the Arizona Republic article did this reform a great injustice.
This article originally appeared on the Cato Institute blog and can be found here.
For a long time, school board elections have been one of the easiest to ignore. Maybe it’s because the names on the ballot don’t stand out as much as the candidates for President, Governor, or U.S. Senate. Maybe it’s because people are too busy to research the candidates. Or maybe it’s because voters who don’t have kids—or whose kids are not in public school—don’t see how school board elections can affect them.
But if 2021 has taught us anything, it’s that even the smallest election has consequences. And nowhere has that been more obvious than with the leftist agendas that have taken over Arizona’s school districts this past year.
