The dispiriting thing about the leaked New York Times town hall meeting is that, clearly, everyone at the NYT is on board with the “1619 Project,” the fantastical notion that the whole history of the United States should be understood in terms of race and slavery.

The idea, of course, is that white men are to blame for all the evils of the world. And don’t you forget it.

I think, Dean old chap, that you have completely missed the point. But let us accept your narrative that the only way to understand the present is through the lens of slavery.

Let us think. What has been the most egregious and monstrous eruption of slavery in history? Right the first time, Dean. Eruption Numero Uno: the Soviet Union. Eruption Numero Duo: The Peoples’ Republic of China. Total death toll, according to The Black Book of Communism, over 100 million, in the 20th Century! Wow, that’s some slavery!

These two states were slave states, straight up. Slave states, Dean. Every human but one in those states was a slave. Get it? This is no longer the jolly old Vikings of the Viking Rus’ sailing down the rivers of Russia with their boatloads of slightly used slaves for sale. Or the Genoese merchants transporting Circassian beauties from the Crimea to the harems of the Middle East. This was two great peoples of the world, plunged into slavery.

So I demand that you dump your “1619 Project” right now and replace it with an “1871 Project” that tells the tragic and evil story of socialism and slavery. Here are a few topics for you to cover, as I expect that most of the journalists at the Times “literally know nothing” about such things. A knowledgeable chap like you will know that I chose 1871 because that was the date of the socialist Paris Commune.

Retrospective: The Communist Manifesto. A failure of prophecy, for the capitalists were not that interested in power and the workers did not become “immiserated.” Who knew?

The First Socialist Government: The Paris Commune of  1871. Pensions for veterans, rent forgiveness, and a debt jubilee for workers that had pawned their tools to buy food. Yay!

Bolshevism: Starvation and Slavery. By 1921 the Russian people were starving, so Lenin allowed a resumption of capitalism for a season. Then Stalin deliberately starved the peasants so he could buy western capital goods. Meanwhile Stalin sent millions of Russians to slave labor camps, including the infamous Kolyma gold mines, and purged his old revolutionary comrades.

The Genius of Fascism. Hey, how about national socialism! In due course the Soviets switched to “socialism in one country” when they needed to rally the Russian people to fight the Nazis.

The Horror of Maoism. After winning a 30-year civil war, Mao sent the Chinese back to the Stone Age with the Great Leap Forward -- 30 million dead -- and doubled down on the Soviet purges with the Cultural Revolution. It took until 1979 for a Chinese leader to think: hey, maybe this socialism thing is for the birds, or maybe the bees!

The Tin-pot Socialist Dictators. From Castro to Pol Pot to Chávez and Maduro, the less said about those brutal #MeToo monsters, the better.

The Guilt of the Journalists. How journalists sucked up to the socialists and celebrated their evil socialist plans. There was the NYT’s Walter Duranty, of “what Ukrainian famine?” fame. There was the NYT’s Herbert Matthews doing PR for the Castro regime. What of Lincoln Steffens, who went to Soviet Russia and proclaimed “I have seen the future and it works.” The twerp.

Hey, Dean, when are you going to start struggle sessions at the Times to deal with the overwhelming guilt that journalists must feel after a hundred years of shilling for the monstrous evil that is socialism?

The real story of race and slavery in the West is that, for some reason, our forefathers decided that slavery was Bad Thing, and then they actually abolished it in the lands that they ruled.

The next thing that happened was that lefties all over the world decided to reinstate slavery. Because justice. If you really want to dig deep, Dean old chap, I suggest that you investigate why the best and the brightest, the educated, the evolved, the journalistic, the compassionate, the liberal, the woke, the graduates of the bestest universities, why all those noble souls could convert to the most murderous religion in all history. I just don’t get it.

Nevertheless, I think I am getting a handle on chaps like you, Dean, in my Great Reaction project, that proposes socialism as neo-slavery, the welfare state as neo-feudalism, and identity politics as neo-tribalism, etc.

“1871 Project,” Dean. That’s the ticket. Next up: reparations for the victims of socialism. I know you journalists will be the first to contribute.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.