Since Mount Rushmore wasn’t considered a problematic tribute to white racists until just last week, it’s important to remember that Independence Day wasn’t a celebration of white supremacy under President Barack Obama.
Or any of the dozens of other presidents who preceded him, either.
While I was never a fan of Obama’s politics, our nation’s first-ever Red Diaper Baby president could deliver some nice remarks provided the teleprompter was functioning properly.
Here’s a little of what Obama had to say during his last Independence Day as president in 2016:
Obviously the Fourth of July — we enjoy the hotdogs, we enjoy the burgers, we enjoy the barbecue, we enjoy the day off for a lot of us, we enjoy the fireworks. But it’s important to remember what a miracle this country is. How incredible — how incredibly lucky we are that people, generations ago, were willing to take up arms and fight for our freedom. And then people, inside this country, understanding that there were imperfections in our union and were willing to keep on fighting on behalf of extending that freedom to all people and not just some.
Those are lovely words, regardless of whether Obama actually believed in them or not. Those words tell a uniquely American story: An imperfect nation founded in service of the noble ideals of liberty and equality before the law, that then struggled toward perfection in further service of those ideals.
Obama made the case more explicitly during his 2014 address:
Those early patriots may have come from different backgrounds and different walks of life, but they were united by a belief in a simple truth: that we are all created equal, that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…
But our success is only possible because we have never treated those self-evident truths as self-executing. Generations of Americans have marched, organized, petitioned, fought, and even died to extend those rights to others, to widen the circle of opportunity for others, and to perfect this Union we love so much.
The results of that foundation and of that struggle toward perfection are as inspiring as they are diverse. Here’s what Obama had to say about that during another Independence Day address:
We are the country of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass. We are the land of Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill Cody. We are the nation that gave rise to the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen — Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, George Patton — Gen. George Patton — the great Louie Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley, and Mohammad Ali. And only America could have produced them all. No other place.
Just kidding: That’s what President Donald Trump said last week during his Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore.
Don’t struggle too hard trying to figure out what Tubman, Owens, Armstrong, or Ali had to do with white supremacy or your brain might implode.
Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that this country elected and then re-elected its first black president. Maybe the Left will tell us next we’re suffering from rapid-onset white supremacy or something.
Back in the day, Obama even praised our military — that oppressive tool of white supremacy — on Independence Day:
Trump’s speech was derided by our Democrat-Media Complex for inciting a culture war, which is rich coming from the folks who have spent the last few weeks cheerleading the Marxist-led mobs gleefully tearing down statues of everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Ulysses S. Grant to Frederick Douglass. Those same people told you Trump’s speech was divisive, when in fact Trump did what almost every president before him has done on Independence Day: He reminded us of our founding ideals — the only thing able to unify such a wildly diverse nation.
Or as Obama reminded us during his first Independence Day address as president:
We are not a people who fear the future. We are a people who make it. And on this July 4th, we need to summon that spirit once more. We need to summon the same spirit that inhabited Independence Hall two hundred and thirty-three years ago today.
It was an incredibly short trip from having a Red Diaper Baby president who at least gave lip service to this country’s ideals, to having the entire Progressive movement reveal itself in no uncertain terms as un- and anti-American to its very core.
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