As we celebrate our Independence Day, it is vital to recognize that it is vastly different than other government’s “National Holidays.” Far more than just a commemoration of the founding of America, it is the recognition of a major advance, indeed, a turning point in human rights.
That major advance is deeply threatened at home and abroad.
We are challenged overseas by the mightiest conglomeration of military power ever arrayed against us, as Russia has developed the world’s mightiest nuclear force and China has constructed the planet’s largest navy. Both Moscow and Beijing have engaged in overt acts of aggression and hostility.
At home, the very principles which caused our Revolution to be so courageously initiated are being challenged as never before. Censorship, the very antithesis of everything that is quintessentially American, is rapidly gaining acceptance. The repugnant effort to establish a “disinformation agency” which quite transparently has as its mission the suppression of views that oppose the current White House regime is but one part of that.
Hyper-partisan media moguls on the web, television, and print conspire to omit news that challenges their biases. District attorneys and attorneys general elected with funding from villainous foreign billionaires ignore the rampage of crime and instead engage in political witch hunts against those they disagree with. Leftist elected officials ignore and in some instances materially support those who for months on end riot, burn, assault, invade police stations and attack federal courthouses, but use a one-day, inexcusable, event by a small collection of idiots to persecute an entire political party.
In dramatic fashion over the past decade, we have endured relentless assaults on our Bill of Rights by some of the most powerful figures in the realm. An entire false narrative was developed and pursued by top bureaucrats and politicians in an attempt to overturn the 2016 election and destroy the subsequent presidency that resulted from it.
Even as we celebrate July 4, 1776 with fireworks and barbeques, we do so in an era when our centers of learning falsify the history of our nation’s founding, turning heroes into villains. Indeed, those academics and progressives in power today would be far more comfortable, as this column has noted previously, with George III than George Washington.
As our experiment in freedom matured, it spread ever wider. Despite that, a sizeable fraction of Progressives ceaselessly strives to disunite the United States, in some cases contriving false grievances and in others rehashing wrongs that have long been rectified.
Those courageous colonists fought against the world’s mightiest empire to win their freedom (by the way, Mr. Biden, those farmers and tradesman DID have cannonballs and other weapons, despite your recent comments) against all odds to win their freedom. Despite the extreme power of the Progressive Leftists who currently dominate our society, patriots will prevail if we do not lose heart.
This fight is not unexpected. On January 5, 1967, Ronald Reagan, in his inaugural address as governor of California, warned: “Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.” A little over a hundred years prior, Abraham Lincoln, speaking at Gettysburg, proclaimed that “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The challenges today aren’t coming from armed Confederate slaveholders, but from politicians, billionaires and extremists who would turn us into slaves.