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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Every week, a few of our magazine writers read out their pieces from the new issue.

This week, we're going to be joined by Jeff Finnpool, a historian who debunks what he calls the myth of the American stolen land,

i.e. how the European colonialists came to have the continent. We're also going to be joined by

Christopher Snowden from the Institute for Economic Affairs, who takes a look at the true cost of

coronavirus on the economy, and at the very end a notebook from Joe Deacon, who writes about

the situation of coronavirus in her home country of Madagascar. It's not her real name because

of the sensitivities of the topic. First,

Jeff Finnpaw. Last month, in the middle of the COVID panic, a group of first-year university

students at the University of Connecticut were welcomed to their campus via a series of online

events. At one event, students were directed to download an app for their phones.

The app allowed students to input their home address,

and it would piously inform them from which group of Native Americans their home had been stolen.

We all know the interpretation of history on which this app is based. The United States was founded by a monumental act of genocide, accompanied by larceny on the grandest scale.

Animated by racism and a sense of civilizational superiority, Columbus and his ilk sailed to the new world.

They exterminated whoever they could, enslaved the rest,

and intentionally spread smallpox in hopes of solving the native question. Soon afterwards,

they began importing slave labor from Africa. They then built the world's richest country out of a

combination of stolen land, wanton environmental

destruction, and African slave labor. This stolen country paradigm is now dominant in our culture.

...