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As a child, I loved the overall theme, celebrations, and parades of Columbus Day, which was made a federal holiday in 1937 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
For me, it always conjured images of adventure, discovering new worlds, and planting the seeds of what would one day become the United States of America.
More than that, it was a day of celebration that would bring all Americans together…it wasn’t.
When and why did Columbus Day become so controversial? Like many protests against historical figures or periods, it began primarily on the left on college campuses.
Cancel culture in Congress dates back to John Quincy Adams, who refused to be silenced.
In 1992, Indigenous Peoples Day was created in Berkeley, California. The idea was to replace Columbus Day with a day to celebrate Native Americans. Not surprisingly, the movement quickly began to spread to college campuses across the country as left-leaning professors and students denounced Christopher Columbus.
I am all for honoring “indigenous” people and Native Americans. They should definitely be recognized, and their proud and fruitful history should be protected. I am strongly in favor of that, but I don’t think it should come at the expense of competing histories, facts, and truths that some on the left might find inconvenient.
In 2017, Harvard University, now a hotbed of protests, anti-Semitism and discrimination, instituted an Indigenous Peoples Day, seemingly in lockstep with the far-left Cambridge City Council, which essentially viewed Columbus as a war criminal.
Nadeem Mazen, who was a Cambridge city councillor at the time, argued: “Essentially we are saying ‘no’ to a day named after a tyrant, a torturer and a destroyer of Indigenous people…”
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Now, as someone who has watched many in the left-of-center media, academia, and so-called “historians” regularly censor, deny, falsify, or reimagine irrefutable facts over the past eight years in a disgraceful attempt to smear, tarnish, and dethrone former President Donald J. Trump, I have learned not to take the protestations from left-wing “defenders of history” with a grain of salt.
If that is true, how much faith should we have in the left’s view of centuries-old history? How clear is their perspective looking back over 500 years through today’s very cloudy and biased prism? Who is to say that some of the “facts” the left uses today to attack Columbus couldn’t be wrong, when they have changed the facts of history over the past eight years?
In that regard, other Columbus scholars believe that Columbus sought to build good relations with the native peoples of the New World, had no intention of harming them, and often fought to stop his crew from abusing them.
It’s time to restore the statues of heroes that were destroyed by rioters. They are our national treasures.
Whether or not the left has crudely denigrated Columbus, the result remains a total victory for them: With each passing year, more Americans stop celebrating Columbus Day, forget about its existence, or actively denounce it.
This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, but many on the far left The exact same tactics To denigrate and invalidate our Founding Fathers, the Fourth of July, and the American Flag.
But it’s not names, monuments, moments or words that are being secretly attacked in the dead of night. It’s heroes, awe-inspiring statues, brave acts and iconic words that are being slandered, censored and destroyed in broad daylight by the extremists they dare to stop.
Our Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to one another. They risked it all to declare in their Declaration of Independence from a tyrannical monarchy:
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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. To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
We, who believe strongly in the vision and genius of our Founding Fathers, remain the majority of this nation. We are the ones who are governed, but for too long our consent has not been asked for or given. Too many times, despite our majority status, we have allowed the forces of the left to silence our voices.
I say this as someone who “lived” in 1776 for many months over three years ago, and I do so because I was doing research for a book, “The 56 – Lessons in Freedom Learned from the Men Who Risked All to Sign the Declaration of Independence,” which was published two years ago.
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of Only I wrote the book to warn of escalating left-wing attempts to abolish the Fourth of July, the American flag, and our Founding Fathers, and to outline how best to stop them.
President Reagan, whom I had the honor of writing for in the White House, once famously and presciently said, “Freedom is a fragile thing, only one generation away from being extinguished…”
I, and many others, believe that a generation of loss is now upon us. But I believe we can reverse this trend, protect our freedoms, and rebuild the vision of our Founding Fathers in less than a generation. All we have to do is reclaim our voices and reassert our consent.
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As fewer and fewer of us stop to celebrate the true meaning and glory of the Fourth of July, the best way to reclaim our voices will be to speak out in defense of this sacred holiday, our Founding Fathers, and our American flag.
If they don’t, they will surely suffer the same fate as Columbus Day.
To read more articles by Douglas MacKinnon click here