The Atlantic Attacks My Documentary, Says I’m ‘Downplaying’ Slavery

I have released enough documentaries over the years to recognize an emerging pattern in terms of how the Left will respond. There are really only two options: Either they’ll ignore my documentary entirely (which is how most of the media responded to “Am I Racist?,” even though it was the top documentary of the decade). Or, in the alternative, they’ll publish extremely low-effort, highly dishonest articles, where they review some imaginary version of my documentary, put words into my mouth, and take every important scene out of context.

That was the case with “What is a Woman?,” when outlet after outlet accused me of being a “transphobe” who engaged in “hate speech” — even though 99% of the movie involved me asking basic, straightforward questions to self-described experts in gender ideology. And the other 1% was me asking why those experts were running away from me instead of answering my simple and straightforward questions.

So based on these experiences, when I released the first episode of my newest series at the Daily Wire, which is called “Real History,” I was expecting either a total media blackout, or a flood of desperate hit pieces. After all, “Real History” is a direct challenge to some of the most important tenets of modern Leftism.

But interestingly enough, “Real History” has not been met with a total media blackout. Nor has it been bombarded with a series of incredibly dumb and lazy smears. Instead, aside from a small number of YouTube videos from historians — which have mostly been positive, and very thorough — the only mainstream response to “Real History” has come from The Atlantic magazine, which considers itself to be the bastion of Left-wing intellectual thought.

And right away, that got my attention. It’s not that The Atlantic is a trustworthy outlet. It’s obviously not. In fact, they’ve created numerous high-level hoaxes in just the past couple of years, solely to influence elections. But at the same time, if The Atlantic — and only The Atlantic — is coming after you, then it means you’ve done something unique. It means that you’ve rattled the people who, in elite circles of the Democrat Party, are taken very seriously. Now, why might “Real History” have done that?

To answer that question, let’s see what The Atlantic says, specifically.

Matt Walsh would like you to know you’ve been lied to. Last month, the right-wing provocateur appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show to discuss his new video series, Real History With Matt Walsh. … In Walsh’s account, the left believes that “America was built on slavery, and it has no right to exist, and every white American carries, somehow, that legacy, that guilt in their blood”; therefore progressives feel they have the “moral justification to just do whatever they want” to white people. Walsh intends to stop this. So in Real History, he relentlessly downplays the brutality of slavery in the United States. Sanitizing slavery has become a core objective of the reactionary right under Donald Trump—a malignant response to the progressive left’s oversimplification of American history for their own present-day ends. But the truest understanding of slavery doesn’t serve any political faction. Rather, it acknowledges the horrors of racial oppression while still allowing us to see beyond them. … Walsh also notes that the descendants of Africans trafficked to what became the United States are now in better socioeconomic shape than those whose ancestors remained in the Old World or were transported to Latin America or the Caribbean. He draws an odious conclusion from this—American slavery wasn’t that bad—yet the point is not entirely incorrect. Other far more serious thinkers have made versions of it too.

There’s the sneering that you might expect from The Atlantic. They want you to know that there are “far more serious thinkers” than I am. But for all their preening and all their arrogance, it’s clear that the author of this piece, Thomas Chatterton Williams, has not even watched Episode 1, “The Real History of Slavery.” He couldn’t be bothered to spend the hour to actually watch the show.

And I can make that claim with confidence, because there is absolutely nothing in the episode — or any episode of the series — that “relentlessly downplays the brutality of slavery in the United States.” Instead, the episode is a roughly hour-long look at what slavery entailed, all over the world. And yes, as a matter of historical fact, Africans and the Barbary Pirates and the Ottomans generally treated their slaves far, far worse than Americans and American colonists. Americans weren’t known for floating canoes in the blood of their slaves, for example. Nor were Americans known for sailing thousands of miles away in order to snatch men, women and children from their homes, throw them onto boats, and sexually assault them. That’s not “downplaying” anything. It’s the truth. And “serious thinkers” — to use The Atlantic’s terminology — care about the truth, above all else.

But The Atlantic doesn’t care about the truth. That’s why, in 2019, they published an article entitled, “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts.”

What’s remarkable about this headline is that, indeed, the fight over the 1619 Project was about the facts. All of the history was completely wrong — including their claim that Americans fought the Revolutionary War to preserve slavery. But The Atlantic ran cover for the 1619 Project at the time, because it served the narrative of the Democrat Party. It advanced racial grievances, which they saw — correctly, for a time — as a pathway to power.

The point of “Real History,” on the other hand, is not to advance the interests of the “MAGA movement,” or anyone else. The point is to communicate historically accurate information that’s deliberately hidden from us, at every stage in our lives. Schools don’t talk about it. The media doesn’t talk about it. Movies don’t talk about it. Telling the truth is not “downplaying” anything. By contrast, it’s the fake intellectuals in the Left, people like the writers at The Atlantic, who have been downplaying the reality of the African and Ottoman slave trade for generations.

But according to The Atlantic, so-called “MAGA revisionists,” along with the Trump administration, are the problem here.

So let’s read on from their review of “Real History.”

Back in March, [Trump] strong-armed a host of institutions by issuing an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directs federally funded museums, monuments, and parks to remove materials that promote “corrosive ideology.” Last month, the park service obliged, eliminating an outdoor exhibit at Independence National Historical Park, in Philadelphia, where George Washington’s house once stood. The exhibit honored nine slaves who toiled at the residence … Trump and his allies seem unwilling to tolerate virtually any acknowledgment that America subjugated Black people. Rather than making a dispassionate case against the idea that the country was founded to enslave Africans, MAGA is taking down plaques commemorating basic facts, such as Washington’s slaveholding. In Real History, Walsh turns the clock back further still.

Notice the sleight of hand here.

They’re strongly implying that the Trump administration ordered the park service to remove an exhibit about the fact that George Washington owned slaves. But that’s actually not true. If you read the Executive Order, it orders the parks service to remove anything promoting a “corrosive ideology” that demonizes Americans. And as The Washington Post reported, the parks service interpreted that Executive Order as broadly as possible. It’s a form of “malicious compliance.”

The Post reported:

the removals were in line with President Donald Trump’s March executive order directing the Interior Department to eliminate information that reflects a “corrosive ideology” that disparages historic Americans. National Park Service officials are broadly interpreting that directive to apply to information on racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights or persecution of Indigenous people.

See how that works?

The Trump administration issues an order, telling agencies to stop advancing an anti-white, anti-American agenda. Democrats then remove displays of slavery. And then Democrats say, “Hey, you made us remove displays of slavery!”

And by the way, it’s especially ironic that they lump “Real History” in with this. Again, if this guy had watched the show — which he clearly hasn’t — he’d know that we talk, at some length, about Washington’s slaves. And in particular, we talk about his white indentured servants, who ran away around the time of the start of the Revolutionary War. Washington put out advertisements, seeking the return of these white runaways. And there were many more white runaways than black runaways at Washington’s estate. But no one at The Atlantic wants to talk about this, because it complicates their narrative that only blacks were victimized by slavery in America. So they hide the truth, and then they accuse us of being the liars.

What’s funny about all of this is that, back in 2019, The Atlantic put out an article stating that “reparations” could mean “telling the truth” about uncomfortable historical facts. So in that sense, you’d think they’d be happy about Real History. You’d think they’d consider it a form of reparations. Apparently not.

In reality, The Atlantic, like so many other bastions of Left-wing “intellectualism,” is collapsing in on itself. Their ideology is incoherent. They have no idea what they stand for, or how to construct even the most basic argument about anything they believe in.

This is a big, big problem for the Left in general.