The Courage to Be Free by Ron DeSantis

Author:Ron DeSantis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

By any measure, this far-left ideology represents a perversion of basic American principles—and is a recipe for exacerbating even more the divisions throughout our society.

While the CRT ideology lacks factual rigor and broad intellectual appeal, claims of systemic racism, calls for reparations, and accusations of bigotry against every opponent do have support in many of the country’s elite institutions. In 2019, the New York Times launched the 1619 Project, a politically motivated attempt to concoct a new, historically inaccurate narrative about American history that identifies the year 1619—not 1776—as the true founding of America, because 1619 was the year African slaves first arrived in the British colonies in the New World. Under this CRT-inspired worldview, the American Revolution itself was a conspiracy of white supremacy; the 1619 Project’s creator claimed that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

The 1619 Project initially appeared as a series of essays in the New York Times Magazine, but was later reformulated into lesson plans, distributed free to teachers, for classroom instruction in the wake of the protests and riots during the summer of 2020. The goal was to distort American history taught to students in a way that delegitimized America’s founding so that schools could advance a modern-day, anti-American ideological agenda.

It does not require much historical scholarship to expose as false the 1619 Project’s claim about the supposedly central role slavery played in the American Revolution. There is an abundance of historical evidence that traced the radical Whig impulses of many of the colonists, their fear of being taxed without representation, and their growing disgust with King George III. We do not need to accept crackpot theories about our nation’s birth because we can read the copious amount of historical documents, particularly the pamphlets from the period, that outlined the philosophical underpinnings of the American Revolution.

Far from being a pro-slavery event, the American Revolution put slavery on the defensive. Until 1776, slavery had been a constant throughout human history, dating back to antiquity. The American Revolution—by rejecting the divine right of kings and embracing the idea of natural, God-given rights—began the process that ultimately led to the end of slavery in America following the Civil War. Of course, it took the birth of the Republican Party, founded to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories, and the election of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, to bring about the abolition of slavery, initially (and incompletely) through Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and then through the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by the Republican-dominated Congress.

The left’s distortion of our nation’s founding to serve their political ends is wrong. Born into a society in which slavery was unquestioned, the Founding Fathers risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to establish a new nation based on the fundamental truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

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