Squad Dems: A Fourth to Be Reckoned With

July 6, 2021

Squad member Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) used the anniversary of America's Independence to parrot the 1619 Project's about continued racial oppression and fundamental injustice. She tweeted, "When they say that the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this: the freedom they're referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land and Black people still aren't free." This is a textbook example of the 1619 Project's false narrative of American history. America elected a black president in 2008, vice president in 2020, and many members of Congress, including Cori Bush herself. "Black Lives Matter," an organization with nothing but its name to recommend it, raised $90 million in one year. Not to mention America's many popular and successful black athletes, musicians, entertainers, scholars, and entrepreneurs.

In 1852, before America fought a bloody civil war to end the evils of slavery, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" in which he rebuked his audience for failing to achieve the "great principles of political freedom and of natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence." If you believe Cori Bush, all that blood was shed for nothing because blacks still aren't free. Bush treats the Declaration of Independence as empty rhetoric, by and for the benefit of powerful white men only. They interpret the line, "all men are created equal" to describe a present equality of condition, despite no evidence the Framers meant that.

Abraham Lincoln, who improved the condition of blacks in America more than any other American -- certainly more than Ms. Bush -- explained: They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them... They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed to this same idea, calling "the magnificent words" of the Declaration "a promissory note" applying to "black men as well as white men." He based his plea for equality in civil rights on the Declaration itself, concluding, "so we have come to cash this check."

The Declaration of Independence provided the moral force for the movements that ended slavery and segregation, but whereas the woke Left has indoctrinated our children against their own country, so that only 36 percent of adults aged 18-24 are proud to be American. They've intimidated patriotic Americans in the public sphere so even Olympic athletes are disrespecting the flag. Someone asked Bush, "How much more freedom are you looking for?" She responded, "WE are the experts on our own liberation. And we won't stop until it's won."

Bush presented an abbreviated litany of euphemisms for her Left-wing policy agenda: letting criminals out of prison, drug legalization, police defunding, socialized medicine, racist housing policies, discrimination against private schools, and the abolition of private property (implied in her expression, "stolen land"). And that's always been the point. Why is the radical Left force-feeding America a false narrative about our racist founding that reinterprets selective facts through the (racist) lens of critical race theory? Not so that we will heal our past racial divides and move forward as a nation. Rather, so they can ram a radical policy agenda through the chasm of racial strife they create.

Patriotic Americans are growing wise to the con, which is why parents, soldiers, businessmen, and everyday citizens are rising up to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defend the land of freedom we hold dear.