Welcome to a breakpoint, a daily look, in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

The historian's task of making sense of the past involves far more than just merely examining events and relaying the details.

It involves a lot of interpretation.

In practice, especially in our upside down world where so often facts are

considered fiction and fiction considered facts, history is manipulated and used to advance a social

agenda. For example, those who view history from a neo-Marxist perspective look for those who are

the oppressors and those who are the oppressed. However, they don't look for those who actually committed acts of oppression or who were victims of it. Rather, they've already

grouped humanity into predetermined categories, so they know going in who the good guys are

and who the bad guys were. In this view, anyone with power is an oppressor, therefore evil,

and all without power are marginalized and oppressed victims,

and therefore innocent and virtuous. This vision of America begins the story in 1619 with the

arrival of the first African slaves. Under this rubric, the story of America, like all of

Western civilization, is only a story of racism and the oppression of minorities.

Even today, the story of the world continues as little more than a set of evil and exploitative

colonial powers dominating people of color. And this ideology has been widely mainstream to the

public through education and also by media, big tech, legal, and government voices.

Now, in response, there's been an equal but opposite ideological backlash, one that has arisen

to combat this understanding of American and Western identity.

Though not a fully coherent narrative and not nearly as effective of a crusade, it certainly, for

example, has an influence the nation's public school system to the same degree.

This response comes from the far right, and it aims more at defeating the historical revisioning of the far left than it does telling the truth about history.

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