(Official Washington Examiner editorial, July 4) As this great nation celebrates its 245th birthday, it is time to fight back, hard, against the critical race theory and 1619 Project lies claiming that the founding was motivated largely by racism and slavery.
When even the National Archives, the repository of the original Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, wastes huge amounts of time and money in a mendacious initiative adopting the 1619 Project’s slander of the founding and of the nation, it is clear that the battle for the truth of our nation’s origins must be joined.
The truth remains, as it was taught in most schools until about two decades ago, that Americans founded a nation expressly on the ideals of liberty and have done more to advance the causes of liberty and human dignity than any country in the history of mankind. And despite the bizarre narrative of the anti-American “progressives” at the New York Times and the academic Left, the founding was not something dreamed up by a small group of wealthy men to protect their privilege, but an “expression of the American mind” that encapsulated the sentiments bubbling up from localities all across what then were 13 North American colonies.
The phrase “expression of the American mind” is Thomas Jefferson’s own, as he himself said that he definitely was not “aiming at originality of principle or sentiment” when he drafted the Declaration. Instead, as was shown by historian Pauline Meier (far from a political conservative, nor an unabashed admirer of the founders), many of the ideas, much of the format, and even plenty of the words and famous phrases themselves were remarkably similar to those in at least 86 other contemporaneous documents. Those documents were “declarations,” or “instructions,” adopted by states, counties, townships, and various quasi-public groups in just three months from April to early July of 1776…. [The rest of this editorial, with historical information I hope you find fascinating, is at this link.]
