I just watched a fireworks show that was spectacular. Earlier I listened to President Trump speak. It’s clear he loves America. He spoke of the BBB and believes this will help restore American greatness. However, the left can’t give negativity a rest.
Newsmax published the contrasting statements from Republicans and Democrats today. Republicans got the most out of the day, and Democrats made it political, trashing the BBB and claiming it puts the American Dream out of reach.
RNC Chair Michael Whatley commented today on the country’s 249th birthday.
“On July 4, 1776, the American colonies united to declare their independence, rejecting tyranny and laying the foundation for the greatest experiment in self-government the world has ever known,” Whatley said in a statement.
“Independence Day marks the birth of our nation and reminds us of the extraordinary gift of liberty that defines the American spirit. As we gather with friends and family, we honor the courageous men and women who paved the way for this shining city on a hill with their honorable sacrifices. God bless our freedoms, and God bless America.”
The Democratic National Committee, in contrast, issued a July 4 press release that lambasted President Donald Trump and Republicans for passing the tax-cut and spending megabill and “putting the American Dream out of reach.”
“America should be the land of opportunity but under Donald Trump, the American dream is dying,” the DNC said.
The Wall Street Journal had an article up about the documentary of the American Revolution that left-wing filmmaker Ken Burns co-directed with Sarah Botstein. Burns is on the record as anti-Trump.
In six episodes and 12 hours, The American Revolution will say, “We were forged in violence, and that’s OK.”
I’m not sure if the WSJ is coming up with the following sentiments or Burns is, but it might not bode well for the project’s fairness.
On the eve of the country’s 250th birthday next year, Americans seem more interested in fighting over the past than learning from it together.
The New York Times’s “The 1619 Project,” published in 2019 and named for the arrival of the first slave ship to North America, provoked a wide and polarizing debate over the lasting legacy of the country’s slave-owning origins. The Black Lives Matter movement, empowered by mass protests in 2020 after a police officer killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, inspired a wider reckoning over race and history. Statues of Confederate generals were suddenly toppled, and the names George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were swiftly stripped from some schools because they were slave-owners.
Are we really going back to the fraudulent 1619 Project, the communist, Soros-funded Black Lives Matter movement, and the absurd George Floyd episode?
Restoring old names is verboten apparently:
The counterpunches have been similarly swift and dramatic, particularly in recent months. A spate of Trump administration moves and executive orders called for resurrecting Confederate statues, restoring old names and declaring that all federal sites dedicated to history offer an uplifting story of “American greatness.” Fights over the narratives available in history textbooks and public libraries are everywhere. National parks now post signs asking visitors to report anything that frames “past or living Americans” in a negative way.
Equating a few Confederate statues with American greatness is a message to us about President Trump from the Wall Street Journal.
Hopefully, Burns doesn’t buy into the Howard Zinn communist version of the Revolution. Yes, it was a war. Wars are bloody, and we know that. However, the Left has been trying to make it equal to the extremely violent leftist French Revolution for decades but it wasn’t.
The WSJ decided that Burns is the poet laureate of the nation’s past. Burns does say he wasn’t influenced by politics in the making of the documentary, so hopefully that is true.
More from the WSJ:
As with most Burns projects, the series aims to challenge some elements of conventional wisdom. The directors sought to remove what Burns has called “the barnacles of sentimentality” that have “encrusted” the Revolutionary War in clichés—Paul Revere shouting about redcoats, George Washington standing heroically at the bow of a boat while crossing the Delaware, all those Founding Fathers in their powdered wigs.
…
It was also a far more gruesome saga than viewers might expect, given the gloss of destiny the Revolution enjoys in the popular imagination. As Burns sees it, the instinct to paper over the brutality of this uprising comes from concerns that “by opening it up and understanding how extraordinarily bloody it was, that will somehow diminish the great ideas behind it. It doesn’t. The violence makes them bigger.”
Will the so-called honesty about the brutality preserve the great ideas? We’ll have to see.
Viewers learn, for example, that poor battlefield decisions by Washington led to a rout of his forces in the Battle of Long Island. The carnage, rendered in close-ups of brutally vivid paintings, is described by a chaplain haunted by the sight of men “hacked and shot all to pieces.”
The Left’s view of our history too often emphasizes the negative and leaves little to feel proud of by the time they are finished. Republicans want to see it from a positive perspective. The United States was built on brilliant ideas of freedom and equality.
To be patriotic means one loves one’s country and the values on which it was founded. It has become very politicized.
Somehow, it’s hard to believe Burns will be neutral, but we hope he will be because many will make this our history for the ages since he’s the ordained poet laureate. Unfortunately, if there is one thing the Left does well, it’s to rewrite history.
Careful! The Left has made “equality” into a shibboleth, an unchallengeable right. It is not. The only imaginable, sustainable equality is equality before the law. There is no other kind that’s consistent with our God-given rights to life, liberty, and justly acquired property.
The only revolution Democrats would celebrate is the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 Russia that created the Soviet Union, one of the most oppressive and bloody regimes to ever exist.