The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan claimed on today’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show” that The New York Times was demonstrating “a racist, Klan-like stupidity” by running its “1619 Project” series to recognize the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the American colonies.
The stated premise of The Times’ reporting is not to insinuate that “everything that happens in America is due to racism,” as Klavan claims, but rather to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The project seeks to recognize and explain how slavery played a fundamental role in the design of the United States and its history.
Klavan and his friends in right-wing media have criticized their imaginary version of The Times’ project, claiming that "1619" was orchestrated by those with stakes in the success of the Democratic Party. Today, Klavan invoked the Ku Klux Klan to accuse the project of exhibiting racism itself and theorized that the project was part of a larger Democratic Party conspiracy to brainwash people of color, presumably by exercising their right to vote, into granting more power to the federal government.
“It’s really all about culture, it’s not about slavery. Blacks had a wonderful rush into homeownership and the middle class, which basically came to a crashing end with the Great Society, [Lyndon B. Johnson’s] Great Society, which basically created a welfare system that rewards dependency and dysfunction and illegitimacy and all the other things that the left promotes. I don’t even know if they mean to promote it, but once they promote it, it’s good for them,” Klavan said. “It means more people become dependent on government. Fewer people will exert their own independent rights, their own independent decisions, and that’s the way the elites like it.”
Klavan continued, “All you have to do is open your eyes to this and you will see the narrative being controlled for the sake of its simplicity, for its simplicity. You’d have to be a dunce. You’d have to be wearing those conical hats to think that everything in America can be defined and described and explained by one phenomenon, the phenomenon of racism or slavery.”
