The New York Times is having an identity crisis. Is it a newspaper and the paper of record still, which has its own point of view but prints both some hard news and some other opinions? Or is it an “opinion journal,” a magazine like National Review or the Nation, which has one view and sticks with it while patrolling all parts of its turf?

The indications suggest it’s becoming the latter. The 1619 Project is Exhibit A. This project suggested the defining moment of the new country was not its Declaration of Independence in 1776 but the arrival on these shores of the first slave ships nearly 160 years earlier. In short, racism and the enslavement of black people formed the entire basis for the founding of this nation before the colonies even had names.