Can Leftists Really Cancel The Fourth of July?

In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass cancelled a Fourth of July parade in Sunland-Tujunga, in the foothills of the San Fernando Valley, a 50-year tradition. City officials suggested organizers move the event to a different date. “The mayor’s office jerked us around for so long,” Neighborhood Council President Lydia Grant said. “All the ICE protests, now they don’t have money.”

In Rutland, Massachusetts, a hotbed of patriotic fervor during the American Revolution, the annual celebration — parade, concert and fireworks — has been cancelled. Officials cited inadequate police and fire staffing. “Inexcusable,” Executive Director of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance Paul Craney said. Craney has asked the state attorney general to investigate what happened to the town’s donations.

All over the country, socialist and Marxist officials are spitting on tradition. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani blamed the World Cup games when he banned gatherings of more than 20. 

These officials are part of a woke elite who despise America and disdain President Trump’s efforts to restore the capital. After restoring statues toppled during the 2020 riots, Trump is also replacing the Biden-era algae-ridden Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with American flag blue water, subbing pride for squalor. Despite stunning side-by-side photos, The Washington Post said it couldn’t tell the difference.

The New Yorker recently ran a piece belittling patriotism, calling it a “brand” campaign designed to sell characters like George Washington as heroes. The author concludes that excessive patriotism “debases the nation.” And there’s the rub. Intellectuals have always looked down at those of us who wave flags and watch fireworks, dismissing us as rubes unschooled in the latest revisionism. 

After a long career in journalism, I returned to university to pursue a PhD in American history. I remember being shocked that the subject of the American Revolution did not merit its own course. The verdict of the profession seemed to be that the rebellion against Britain was not so much a revolution — like that bloody one in France — but more of a course correction.

I also learned: the Left has been discrediting the Founders, and the Founding, for a very long time.

In 1913, historian Charles Beard argued that the Founders did not create America for freedom but for economic greed. Ever since, dumping on the men and women who risked their very lives is a popular sport on college campuses. Racism, misogyny, white colonization — anything that will stick. 

More than a century later, the trend has grown ever more absurd. The 1619 Project flooded our schools with a dishonest assertion that America was not created for religious freedom when the Mayflower arrived in 1620. Instead, the project traced the country’s founding to one year earlier, when a ship landed whose passenger list included a slave. This would be big news to the Puritans.

Several years ago, I visited the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are all on display. They are kept in the U.S. Capitol rotunda under bulletproof glass, the signatures protected by a darkened room in chilled temperatures. A few months earlier, two climate crazies splattered a red chemical on them. The archives closed for four days as conservators made sure the documents were undamaged. I wanted to go look for myself.

As I walked the room, I wondered what the Founders would think of us now. Would they marvel that millions of Americans visit the rotunda every year? Be horrified that protestors were trying to destroy their very words? Be shocked that leftists trying were canceling our culture? 

In my new book, Trump’s Superpower: A Historical Novel about the Founding Fathers & One Founding Mother, I bring the Founders from heaven to participate in our 250th birthday. They have amusing encounters with 21st century Americans — Ben Franklin is arrested for misgendering someone — and an ongoing debate among themselves about whether this is the nation they meant to leave us.

From my research, I concluded that Thomas Jefferson would not be surprised by our current turmoil. He believed the Earth belongs to the living, that each generation must remake the world.

Alexander Hamilton of Federalist Papers fame was far more bullish. He always thought rugged individualism, along with hard work and self-reliance, would make, and keep, the country great.

John Adams, a Harvard grad, feared the Declaration’s central claim — that all men are created equal — would open a Pandora’s Box. His wife Abigail had urged him “to remember the ladies” and warned that women would “foment a rebellion” if they didn’t win the vote.

Adams wrote to Judge James Sullivan, who was also in favor of liberalizing voting laws. “Everyone would want the vote — slaves, children, Indians, women, even unpropertied men. There will be no end to it.”

For her part, Mercy Otis Warren would no doubt argue that without the Bill of Rights, the country would not have lasted 250 years. As the states weighed ratification of the Constitution, she and other so-called “dissidents” said it gave far too much power to a central government (imagine that), and demanded Congress also ratify a Bill of Rights to protect the rights of states and citizens.

The July 4 cancellation that shocked me the most was in Nantucket, where the Second Unitarian Meeting House Society cancelled its annual reading of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights so congregants focus on “an on-going process … to better understand our own whiteness.”

Under Biden, America 250 was planned as a celebration of globalism, run by NGOs who would twist the narrative to an FDR sort of soft socialism. No doubt if Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election, our 250th anniversary would have been an apology tour for slavery.

Like all the founders, even those who did not go to church, George Washington believed that Providence was smiling on America. Nice to see she still is.