Could Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary have fallen more neatly into that category of events that are shocking yet unsurprising? The announcement landed with a thud of inevitability, yet it was also a thumb jabbed forcefully into the eye of good scholarship and of reasonable people not in step with the vanguard of faddish leftism.

The prize-winning essay introduced the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Much has already been written on this, but the chutzpah of it is so egregious that a few details are worth revisiting. The project aims to wrench the accepted date of America’s founding a century and a half back from the 1776 Declaration of Independence to the year the first African slave arrived on the continent. The prize-winning essay argues that America declared independence to perpetuate the institution of slavery.