Founding Fathers' legacies under attack from far-left progressives
Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele joined 'One Nation with Brian Kilmeade' to discuss the far-left's war on American history.
When I was a child, I loved the overall themes, celebrations and parades surrounding Columbus Day, a day President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a federal holiday in 1937.
To me, it always conjured up images of adventure, the discovery of the "New World," and the planting of the seeds that would one day become the United States of America.
More than that, it was a day of celebration which seemed to unite all Americans… until it didn’t.
An American flag flies near the Christopher Columbus statue outside Washington's Union Station, Oct. 11, 1999, during the city's annual Columbus Day ceremony. (AP Photo)
When and why did Columbus Day start to become so controversial? Like many protests against historical figures and times, much of it started with the left on our college campuses.
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In 1992, in Berkeley, California, "Indigenous Peoples’ Day" was adopted. The idea was to swap out Columbus Day for a day that celebrates indigenous peoples. Not surprisingly, it was a movement that soon began to sweep across campuses nationwide as more and more left-leaning faculty and students condemned Christopher Columbus.
I am all for celebrating "indigenous people" and native Americans. They most certainly must be recognized, and their proud and fruitful history protected. While I am strongly in favor of that, I don’t believe it should come at the expense of competing history, facts or truths some on the left might find inconvenient.
Back in 2017, Harvard University – now a hotbed of protest, antisemitism and discrimination – adopted "Indigenous Peoples’ Day." They did so seemingly in lockstep with the far-left Cambridge City Council, which basically viewed Columbus as a war criminal.
Nadeem Mazen, the Cambridge city councilor at the time claimed in part: "At a basic level, we’re saying ‘no’ to a day named after someone who was a tyrant, and was a torturer, and was a destroyer of Indigenous people…"
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Now, as one who has watched many in the left-of-center media, academia and alleged "historians" regularly censor, deny, invent or reimagine incontrovertible facts over the last eight years in a disgraceful effort to smear, damage, or bring down former President Donald J. Trump, I have learned to take the protests from the "defenders of history" on the left with less than a grain of salt.
Knowing that to be true, how much faith should be accorded the left’s viewing of history from centuries before? How clear is their vision when they are gazing back over 500 years through very clouded and biased prisms of today? When they change the facts of history these last eight years, who is to say some of the "facts" the left uses to attack Columbus today can’t be wrong?
To that point, others who have studied Columbus believe he sought to form good relationships with the native peoples of the New World and had no intention of doing them any harm and often fought to restrain his crew from mistreating the native peoples.
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Regardless of whether the left has smeared Columbus with too broad a brush, the result is still total victory for them. Year by year, more and more Americans either stop celebrating Columbus Day, forget its existence or actively denounce it.
Not surprisingly to those paying attention, many on the far left are using the exact same tactics to smear and cancel our Founding Fathers, the 4th of July and the American flag.
But they are not names, monuments, moments or words surreptitiously being attacked in the dead of the night. They are heroes, majestic statues, courageous deeds and iconic words that are being smeared, censored and torn down in broad daylight by radicals daring you to stop them.
Our Founding Fathers did mutually pledge to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. They risked everything to declare in their Declaration of Independence from the tyrannical Crown:
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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Those of us who do strongly believe in the vision and genius of our Founding Fathers still represent a majority in our nation. We are the "governed," but for far too many years, we have not been asked – or given – our "consent." Even though we are the majority, we have allowed the forces of the left to silence our voices far too many times.
I say this as one who three-plus years ago, spent months "living" in the 1776 timeframe. I did so because I was doing research for a book. Two years ago, that book, "The 56 – Liberty Lessons from those who risked all to sign The Declaration of Independence" was published.
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The sole reason for writing that book was to warn of the left’s escalating attempts to cancel the 4th of July, the American flag and our Founding Fathers, and outline how best to stop them.
President Reagan – who I had the honor to write for in the White House – once famously and presciently said: "Freedom is a fragile thing and it's never more than one generation away from extinction…"
I – and many others – believe that generation of loss is now upon us. But I maintain that we can reverse that trend, save our freedom and reestablish the vision of our Founding Fathers in less than a generation. All we must do is reclaim our voices and reassert our consent.
Fireworks explode over the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2017. (Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images)
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As fewer and fewer of us pause to celebrate the true meaning and glory of the 4th of July, the best way to begin to reclaim our voices would be by speaking out in defense of this sacred holiday, our Founding Fathers and the American flag.
For if we don’t, they will surely suffer the same fate as Columbus Day.
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