We have a new theory about the mainstream media: they have decided to work without editors any more. How else to explain how the Washington Post slandered J.D. Vance with the claim that he decried the “falling white birth rate” (he said no such thing, and the Post had to correct the story), or MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell going to air with a completely uncorroborated story about Trump’s supposed Russian financial connections? Or how about MSNBC’s Chris Hayes (perhaps the least bug-eyed anchor in their stable of Unstables), who thought it profound to say that “if the electoral college wasn’t in the Constitution, it would be unconstitutional,” though perhaps MSNBC just goofed and aired his Saturday Night Live audition tape for a new “deep thoughts” sketch.

But the top honor will have to go to the Washington Post for publishing what may be the dumbest article ever written in the English language: Eve Fairbanks’s August 29 article “The Reasonable Rebels.” The thesis of the article can be stated plainly: so-called “reasonable conservatives” like Ben Shapiro are just like the Confederate defenders of slavery, because they use the exact same words and arguments—words like “facts,” “reason,” “logic,” even “truth.” No really, it is actually that dumb. You can feel your brain cells dying just getting through it, and you have to wonder why the Post has decided to abandon adult supervision.

As promised in our last episode, we return early this week with the first in a series of bonus episodes devoted to a deep dive into the New York Times‘s agitprop “1619 Project” that seeks to place slavery and racism as the central fact of the American story. In this first installment, Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, “Lucretia” (who happens to teach political philosophy and American government . . . somewhere), joins Steve Hayward in examining and explaining some of the myths about the Founding, and in particular the common claim that the Declaration of Independence did not mean to include blacks in its famous phrase “All men are created equal.”

From there Steve and Lucretia go on to discuss the significance of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and debunk a number of myths about the Constitution, such as why the famous “3/5ths Clause” did not mean that blacks were only three-fifths of a human being (quite the opposite in fact), how the Commerce Clause and the importation clause were substantial if complete victories for the anti-slavery clause, the deeper story behind the fugitive slave clause, among other things. Only by a gross or intentional distortion of history can someone claim that the purpose of the Constitution was to secure and promote slavery.