08/18/2019
See, earlier: Why VDARE.com/The White Doe? by Peter Brimelow, December 25, 1999
When VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow launched this site, he named it VDARE.com after Virginia Dare, the first white child born of English parents in North America. Virginia Dare was born 432 years ago today on August 18, 1587, but thereafter she and her whole family — her whole colony — vanished.
Peter wrote
I have always been fascinated by the story of Virginia Dare. She was the first English child to be born in the New World, in August 1587, shortly after the founding of what was to become known as “The Lost Colony” on Roanoke Island off the North Carolina coast. It says something about the mettle of those settlers that any pregnant woman would cross the Atlantic, the equivalent of a lunar expedition at that time — and Virginia’s mother Elenor was no less than the daughter of John White, the colony’s governor.
Perhaps you have to have a daughter yourself to appreciate what White must have felt three years later, when he finally returned from a supply trip to England, much delayed by the Spanish Armada. The smoke he took at first to be proof of occupation turned out to be brushfires. The settlement stood abandoned. Over a hundred settlers, his daughter and granddaughter among them, had vanished. He would never see them again.
We don’t know what happened to Virginia Dare. If she survived, she might have been “adopted” by Indians, and married into the tribe. While you will hear, below, that slavery began in America when white people 
brought Africans to America, in fact the Indians used to kidnap and enslave each other all the time, without needing the example provided by the white adoption of the African custom of slavery. They were quite capable of kidnapping and enslaving a white child, if available. Indeed, it’s not impossible that they ate her.
Now, as Steve Sailer has pointed out in Retconning American History: The 1619 Project Vs. The Wretched Refuse, the big project of America’s Ruling Class is to make 1619, the date that African slaves were first imported onto American soil, the date of the founding of the real America:
The Fourth of July in 1776 is regarded by most Americans as the country’s birthday. But what if we were to tell you that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August 1619?
That was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years and form the basis for almost every aspect of American life. The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times memorializing that event on its 400th anniversary. The goal of the project is to deepen understanding of American history (and the American present) by proposing a new point of origin for our national story. In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.
Watch: The Times Presents the #1619Project, by the New York Times, August 13, 2019
This is simply a lie. I think the problem is that black Americans can’t get it through their heads that most of American history is not about them.
In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery. https://t.co/3OXXRhmpbI @nytimes
— Mara Gay (@MaraGay) August 13, 2019
The 1619 project is a bridge too far even for cuckservative Rod Dreher, who has sometimes shown signs of being “red pilled,” in spite of his white Southern guilt about racism.
Look, I have no objection at all to the Times wanting to tell us more about the history of American slavery, this nation’s original sin. What is astonishing is that they want to claim “that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.” A screenshot from one of the Times‘s essays in the series:
The importation of the first slave into the land that would become the United State is the “true founding” of America? That is a breathtaking — and breathtakingly ideological — claim. This is substantially different from claiming that slavery was a key part of this country’s identity — a claim that is indisputably true, and important to recognize. The Times — our newspaper of record — is on record now saying that the establishment of slavery was the Ur-event of American history.
A Newspaper, Or The Oberlin Faculty Senate?, by Rod Dreher, American Conservative, August 16, 2019
And of course, as Steve Sailer also points out, this conflicts with the years of propaganda that the real birth of America happened in the 1880s with the post-steamship Ellis Island era of immigration. You know, when they were all steaming past the Statue of Liberty.
In 2002, I was writing about Martin Scorsese’s paean to immigration (it’s actually a horror story) Gangs of New York, which was marketed with the tagline “America was born in the streets” — during the era of New York immigrant riots.
I wrote, “You thought America was born at Plymouth Rock? Wrong! Hollywood has decreed that America wasn’t really born until the era of mass immigration.”
Of course, both are wrong. America was a group of British colonies from the 1590s to 1776, when it was a group of ex-British colonies based on Anglo-Saxon customs, law, and heritage. As we’ve said many times before, this wasn’t even controversial until sometime in the 1960s. In Why VDARE? Peter Brimelow wrote:
Today, Virginia Dare seems to be vanishing from American education too. But she was a fixture for earlier generations. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt felt free to give a speech commemorating the 350th anniversary of her birth. [Roosevelt on Roanoke, The Lost Colony.org, August 18, 1937] At one point, I planned to pay homage by bestowing her name on the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles. It seemed … symmetrical.
I was dissuaded.
Democratic icon FDR was all for the rights of black people, and he was all for immigrants as well, but he was not under the illusion that they were the “real America”. As a Mayflower descendent, with added Dutch “patroon” ancestry, he knew that America was already there when they arrived. He was sworn into office four times on a family bible that dated from 1686.
In a famous play The Melting Pot, written in 1908 by Israel Zangwill, an immigrant himself from Great Britain, the hero, David Quixano is a pogrom orphan who’s come to New York as a refugee, and got a job teaching violin.
He’s an enthusiast for immigration and assimilation, and has an argument about it with his brother, also an immigrant. He feels that America’s assimilative powers have created a melting pot, or crucible, in which a “new man” is being made. His brother is somewhat skeptical.
DAVID: A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians-into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.
MENDEL: I should have thought the American was made already — eighty millions of him.
My emphasis. Of course, Mendel was right. The Historic American Nation started with Virginia Dare, and later Jamestown, not African slaves, or Ellis Island immigrants.
And it hasn’t stopped yet. At VDARE.com, we’ll continue to defend it — with your help.
Previous Virginia Dare Birthday Columns
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