Stop trying to segregate the American founding



Race relations in the United States have unraveled in recent years, not only because of genuine disagreement, but because many Americans now grow up believing the nation is fundamentally unjust — racist to the core, perhaps even irredeemable.

This idea, once fringe, now enjoys institutional backing. Critical race theory and DEI ideology assert that the U.S. was founded on slavery and white supremacy. And they dominate schools, corporations, and government agencies alike.

Don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t divide what should unite us.

As a result, America has seen a quiet comeback of sanctioned segregation. Colleges increasingly host race-based graduation ceremonies. Society encourages people to define themselves first by racial identity, not shared citizenship. That should alarm anyone who once marched for equal rights in the 1950s and ’60s.

When Americans stop thinking of each other as fellow citizens, the glue that holds the republic together dissolves.

Juneteenth and the new segregation

Consider one example of this trend: the push for a separate “independence day” for black Americans.

On June 17, 2021, Joe Biden signed Senate Bill 475 into law, establishing a new federal holiday: “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” The bill commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Texas and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that slaves in the state had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation — two years after it was signed.

Former slaves in Texas celebrated, and in the years that followed, Juneteenth spread across the South. But it never held central importance in the broader civil rights movement.

Juneteenth did not abolish slavery. It merely marked the day slaves in one state learned they had been legally freed. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, applied only to states in rebellion — excluding Union-supporting border states like Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery remained legal until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.

A false independence narrative

Some activists now argue that Juneteenth should serve as “Black Independence Day.” That’s a mistake.

This view implies that African Americans have no rightful claim to the Fourth of July or to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. But those ideas belong to all Americans — not just the descendants of the signers.

It’s true that many historical figures sought to exclude black Americans from the promise of the Declaration. Chief Justice Roger Taney made that argument explicit in the Dred Scott decision. Confederates like Alexander Stephens and John C. Calhoun claimed that “all men are created equal” never applied to African Americans.

They were wrong.

What Frederick Douglass really believed

Some cite Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech — “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — to support the idea that black Americans should reject the founding. But they ignore the full context.

Douglass, speaking two years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, condemned the hypocrisy of a country that declared liberty while tolerating bondage. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” he asked. “A day that reveals to him ... the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

But unlike Taney, Stephens, and Calhoun, Douglass didn’t reject the Declaration. He upheld it.

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Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images

Douglass took hope from the principles it proclaimed and called on America to live up to them. He dismissed the Garrisonian claim that the Constitution was pro-slavery. “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” he said, “the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”

He believed America’s founding held the moral resources to defeat slavery — and it did.

The universal promise of 1776

America’s founders didn’t invent slavery; they merely inherited it. At the time of the Revolution, slavery was a global institution, practiced on every continent and defended by every empire. Slavery, including African slavery, was a manifestation of the argument of the Athenians at Melos as recounted by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Even Africans sold fellow Africans into slavery.

The Declaration of Independence marked a sharp break from that past. It asserted that all human beings possess natural rights — and that no one may rule another without consent.

Thomas Jefferson famously observed that humanity had long been divided into those born "booted and spurred” and those “born with saddles on their backs.” The founders rejected that model. They established a republic based on equality before the law, not the interests of the stronger over the weaker.

They also knew slavery contradicted those ideals. Many believed the institution would die out — an Enlightenment relic destined for extinction. Still, the political compromises they made to preserve the Union allowed slavery to persist, and it took a war to end it.

Why the founding still matters

The Civil War was not a rejection of the founding. It was a fulfillment of it.

As Harry Jaffa wrote, “It is not wonderful that a nation of slaveholders, upon achieving independence, failed to abolish slavery. What is wonderful ... is that a nation of slaveholders founded a new nation on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’ making the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity.”

The Declaration of Independence lit the fuse that ultimately destroyed slavery.

So let Americans celebrate Juneteenth — gratefully, joyfully, and historically. Let the holiday recall the biblical jubilee it was meant to evoke.

But don’t displace the Fourth of July. Don’t segment America’s founding. Don’t divide what should unite us.

As Douglass said: “I would not even in words do violence to the grand events, and thrilling associations, that gloriously cluster around the birth of our national independence.”

He went on: “No people ever entered upon the pathway of nations, with higher and grander ideas of justice, liberty and humanity than ourselves.”

Douglass understood something too many have forgotten: The genius of the American founding lies not in who it excluded but in the promise that, one day, it would include everyone.

Trump reparations would be Dems’ biggest loss since the GOP took their slaves away



Donald Trump has a rare chance this Juneteenth to deliver Democrats their most painful political blow in 160 years.

The man hailed by supporters as a master dealmaker could throw the American system into upheaval by proposing a “MAGA-vellian” reparations plan — a bold mix of populist theater and strategic ruthlessness.

If Trump launched the MAGA Fund, he wouldn’t just rewrite political norms — he’d cement his place as the most disruptive figure in modern American history.

Call it the MAGA Democrat Slavery Compensation Fund.

This plan wouldn’t just shake up Washington. It would redraw the partisan map and deal a death blow to the race-peddling civil rights industry by exposing the fraud at the core of progressive politics. And coming from a president who has vowed to restore Confederate base names, the MAGA Fund would remind voters which party fought to keep slavery alive.

Timing is everything.

Trump acknowledged Juneteenth in his first term and pledged to make it a federal holiday during the 2020 campaign. Biden signed it into law in 2021, but the effort quickly became partisan theater. Critics said Democrats only embraced the holiday after the George Floyd riots, hoping to appease Black Lives Matter activists.

Candace Owens called Juneteenth “sooo lame” and “ghetto.” Charlie Kirk dismissed it as a “CRT-inspired federal holiday” meant to compete with Independence Day.

But now that Trump’s back in the White House — more popular among black voters than any Republican since the 1960s — he’s well-positioned to pull off a maneuver that could rattle his ideological base and neutralize his fiercest critics.

The MAGA Fund would benefit only the descendants of American slaves — not black immigrants, not “people of color,” and not members of the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ rainbow coalition. It would expose the cynical way Democrats — whose party symbol is a donkey — have used black Americans as political mules for every new “civil rights” cause since the 1960s.

Duke economist Sandy Darity estimates full reparations would cost $10 trillion. The MAGA Fund? Just $855 billion. It would draw from corporate donations — a logical move, since more than 1,000 companies pledged more than $200 billion to “racial justice” causes in 2020.

The MAGA Fund would also weaponize the left’s favorite buzzword: equity.

Progressives insist policies must favor the disadvantaged. Why not apply that within the black community? Under this plan, Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James wouldn’t get the same payout as a Mississippi man working three jobs or a single mom raising four kids in the inner city.

Here’s how it would work:

  • Black households earning over $100,000 (about 25% of the total) would receive a symbolic $345, referencing the 345 years between the arrival of African slaves in 1619 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
  • Households earning $50,000 to $100,000 (roughly 30%) would receive $34,500.
  • Families under $50,000 (about 45%) would receive $103,500.

The MAGA Fund would channel the populist energy dominating the right. It would highlight how Democrats, backed by elite institutions, claim to represent the oppressed while serving the powerful. It would force them to either support Trump’s plan or explain why the party of “equity” opposes targeted aid to poor black Americans.

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Saud Ansari via iStock/Getty Images

Even critics like Ann Coulter might back the idea. She’s blasted Democrats for extending black reparations programs to every new “oppressed” group. She’s also listed the conditions under which she’d support reparations.

Of course, Republicans would need to manage their white working-class base. Conservative pundits would rage. But behind closed doors, they could frame the plan as a final settlement — a way to declare the race debate closed. The race hustlers would need a new line of work after Trump stamped the national debt to black Americans “Paid in Full.”

And it wouldn’t just be symbolic.

Put nearly a trillion dollars into circulation and watch what happens. Dave Chappelle joked in a 2003 sketch that reparations would send gold prices soaring, phone bills plummeting, and “8,000 new record labels” starting within an hour. The skit played off stereotypes — but behind the comedy was economic truth.

Studies of universal basic income show recipients typically spend on essentials like food and transportation. A Washington, D.C., program gave low-income moms $10,800. One woman used $6,000 to take her kids and their father to Miami. You don’t need a PhD to know that pumping money into poor communities stimulates demand.

If Trump launched the MAGA Fund, he wouldn’t just rewrite political norms — he’d cement his place as the most disruptive figure in modern American history. Who else but a twice-divorced real estate mogul and ex-Democrat could overturn Roe, win over evangelicals, survive two impeachments and an assassin’s bullet — and then sign big, beautiful reparations checks with a smile?

Will it happen? Probably not.

Politics is too polarized. Corporations would recoil at helping Trump. Professional race merchants would denounce the plan as pandering. The left would lose its mind. The right might lose its nerve.

Still, if the last decade taught voters anything, it’s this: Never bet against the Teflon Don.

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Telling America’s story is too important to leave to radicals



Every nation has a story. Recently, the Washington Post described the Smithsonian Institution, with its 21 museums and 14 educational and research centers, as “the official keeper of the American Story.” What kind of story have the Smithsonian museums been telling about our country?

On March 27, President Trump issued an executive order arguing that there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” and promote a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” This “revisionist movement” casts American “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” A White House fact sheet calls for “revitalizing key cultural institutions and reversing the spread of divisive ideology.” Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, will lead the administration’s efforts.

The debate over the Smithsonian is only one front in a wide-ranging, ongoing conflict over first principles and concepts of justice (equality versus equity).

Critics of the executive order responded quickly. They maintain that the Trump administration wants to “whitewash the past and suppress discussion of systemic racism.” The Smithsonian, the critics contend, is led by nonpartisan professionals whose aim is to be truthful and inclusive and tell the whole story of America, including groups that have been neglected in the past. Professor David W. Blight of Yale, president of the Organization of American Historians, complained that the executive order is a “laughable thing until you realize what their intent actually is and what they’re doing is trying to erode and then obliterate what we have been writing for a century.”

Is there a divisive ideology being taught, as the Trump administration maintains, and if so, what is it? What have university professors been writing about America, if not “for a century,” for at least the past decade? Professor Blight’s OAH revealed its ideology by embracing the New York Times’ 1619 Project, declaring:

The 1619 Project’s approach to understanding the American past and connecting it to newly urgent movements for racial justice and systemic reform point to … the ways in which slavery and racial injustice have and continue to profoundly shape our nation. Critical race theory provides a lens through which we can examine and understand systemic racism and its many consequences.

What do we call the ideology that, as the OAH explains, “acknowledges and interrogates systems of oppression — racial, ethnic, gender, class — and openly addresses the myriad injustices that these systems have perpetuated through the past and into the present”?

As most are aware, the ideology expressed by the OAH is dominant in universities today. It views American history negatively through the lens of “oppressors” (white males) versus “oppressed” and “marginalized groups.” This ideology has been variously called political correctness, identity politics, social justice, and wokeness. We could use Wesley Yang’s term “successor ideology,” meaning it is the new, radical, left-wing ideological successor to the old patriotic liberalism of politicians like Walter Mondale and historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Not surprisingly, given its pre-eminence in America’s universities, this divisive “successor ideology” is at the heart of the worldview propounded by the leaders of the Smithsonian.

Something rotten in the Smithsonian

The current secretary of the Smithsonian is Lonnie G. Bunch III, who is adept at dealing with donors, stakeholders, and Republican congressional appropriators. His language is mostly measured and reasonable. He talks in terms of truth, nuance, complexity, and nonpartisanship. But in reality, Bunch is a partisan progressive, a skilled cultural warrior, and a promoter of the leftist “successor ideology.”

Bunch partnered with and promoted the biased 1619 Project, which asserts that slavery is the alpha and omega of the American story and that maintaining slavery was a primary motivation for some American colonists who joined the revolutionary cause. The architect of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, bragged that it “decenters whiteness,” and she denounced her liberal academic critics as “old white male historians.”

Nevertheless, Bunch proclaimed, “I want the Smithsonian to legitimize important issues, whether it's 1619 or climate change.” Of the Smithsonian’s participation in the 1619 Project, he declared, “I was very pleased with it.” Bunch proudly noted that people “saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on [the 1619 Project]. And that to me was a great victory.”

Bunch pictures America as a nation in which systemic racism is pervasive. During the George Floyd riots, Bunch told the Atlantic, "It is really about systemic racism throughout, not just the police department, but many parts of the American system.”

Further, he made excuses for the violence in the summer of 2020, which resulted in more than a dozen Americans killed and between $1 and $2 billion worth of property damage:

How dare they loot. Well, that kind of protest is really one of the few ways the voiceless feel they have power. And while I am opposed to violent protests personally, I understand that frustration sometimes pushes you over the edge. I think what’s important for us to recognize is, let us not turn attention towards looting in a way that takes away what is the power of these protests.

Three years ago, the Smithsonian assisted in the creation of a new College Board AP course on African American Studies. Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar Stanley Kurtz has revealed how APAAS is a radical neo-Marxist, anti-American project that calls for the socialist transformation of the United States. APAAS is soaked in the tenets of critical race theory, flirts with supporting violence, and implicitly advocates dismantling the American way of life, including free-market capitalism. It is a curriculum where students learn from Frantz Fanon that America is a “monster” and from Aimé Césaire that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a model society. Nevertheless, the APAAS curriculum is promoted on the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab.

Under the leadership of Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida legislature passed the Stop Woke Act that bars APAAS from the state’s K-12 schools because it promotes the divisive concepts manifest in CRT. Lonnie Bunch and his close ideological ally Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, falsely accused DeSantis of ignoring African-American history. On the contrary, DeSantis created a new black history curriculum based on serious and accurate scholarship. In response to DeSantis’ opposition to APAAS, Bunch complained to Alexander:

I am upset because you know we were involved in helping [APAAS] and the notion that somehow simply having a course that forces us to understand complexity, nuance, and ambiguity is a problem, that’s a problem for all of America.

In truth, there is very little “complexity” and “nuance” in the Smithsonian-promoted APAAS. It is one-sided, partisan propaganda. Kurtz notes that APAAS is not in fact inclusive, ignoring the work of black conservatives “like Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, or Robert Woodson” or even “liberal black intellectuals, like Randall Kennedy or John McWhorter.”

Bunch often talks in terms of “nonpartisanship” and promoting the best of historical and cultural scholarship. But at the same time, he promotes the progressive left agenda, stating that the “job” of the National Museum of African American History and Culture is “really to create new generations of activists,” and “for me it really is about how … museums play a social justice role.”

Our story

To use one of Lonnie Bunch’s favorite terms, what is the “context” in which President Trump issued his executive order? It recognizes that a left-progressive cultural revolution (the “successor ideology”) has marched through our universities, schools, foundations, and museums, transforming the story of America into a tale of oppression and exploitation. The woke revolutionaries aim to “fundamentally transform the United States” from a nation based on a natural rights concept of the equality of citizenship to “equity,” a system of racial-ethnic-gender group quotas and group consciousness.

The debate over the Smithsonian is only one front in a wide-ranging, ongoing conflict over first principles and concepts of justice (equality versus equity). If the cultural revolutionaries are “transformationist,” in the sense that they aim to deconstruct the American way of life, the position articulated by Trump’s executive order is “Americanist,” in the sense that it represents a cultural counterrevolution that affirms America’s past and principles.

Are the Organization of American Historians and the current leadership of the Smithsonian right that America is a nation built on “slavery, exploitation, and exclusion”? Or is the American story what British writer Paul Johnson described as one of “human achievement without parallel,” the story “of difficulties overcome by skill, faith, and strength of purpose, and courage and persistence”? Was Johnson right when he wrote, “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures” and that Americans “thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history” are “the most remarkable people the world has ever seen”?

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

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DEI is dragging down America’s best and brightest



Growing up in Keyport, New Jersey, sports played a big role in my life. Naturally, I became an enthusiastic fan of the New York Yankees, Giants, and Knicks. Every year, I hoped one of my teams had the best shot and dreamed they would win the championship. After each season, my friends and I turned to the draft or free agency, eagerly discussing new player acquisitions. It's been exciting to watch how “fantasy” sports have evolved to the point that they’ve become a sport of their own.

When drafting for a sports team, the focus has always been on improving the current roster. Who is the fastest, strongest, or most durable? Who can improve the team’s chances of winning a championship? I’ve never heard — and still don’t hear — anyone say they’re looking for the most diverse player to promote equity. A sports team’s goal is to win.

If we don’t abandon forced DEI policies in our government, military, and corporations, our entire economy and national security will become a joke.

Thomas Jefferson penned the famous phrase in our Declaration of Independence: “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.”

What a powerful message. It’s the foundation of our society and government. We also know it’s an ideal we aspire to and that, in this country and worldwide, not everyone has been treated equally. Since the beginning of time, people have restricted others’ freedoms. Even today, millions around the world are trapped in slavery and don’t enjoy the freedom of religion, speech, or movement — freedoms we sometimes take for granted as Americans.

Even though mankind has abased it, the universal truth of freedom remains intact, which is why me must continue to fight for it in its ideal form every day.

However, equality of opportunity doesn’t mean we all have equal abilities or should achieve equal outcomes. Just as sports teams scout for new talent, not everyone can dunk a basketball, hit a home run, invent lifesaving medicine, run a business, or lead a country.

We all have an inner drive to compete, succeed, and win, but not always in the same way or with the same results. Consider some of the greatest success stories of the past century: Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Madam C.J. Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates. They all were highly motivated, willing to fail, and competitive and had a strong understanding of what people wanted. They were also intellectually gifted beyond many of their peers.

Instead of forcing everyone to be equal in drive and intellect or imposing redistributive government policies, our Founding Fathers fought for the freedom of these gifted, driven individuals to succeed. As a result, the nation has become far better for everyone. The United States is undeniably the world’s leader in technology, medicine, food production, and military strength.

Over the past 35 years, I’ve hired hundreds of people who were the best and brightest and who understood what we aimed to accomplish with our company.

The primary danger of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs is that they impose a new kind of slavery, shackling the best and brightest with the chains of the lowest common denominator. This approach benefits no one.

Do passengers want the most diverse pilot or the best pilot? Do cancer patients want the most diverse doctors or the best doctors? Do baseball teams win championships because they have the most diverse players or the best players?

Everyone should have the opportunity to compete for any job, with the same rules and minimum standards applying to all. However, DEI quotas at any level are wrong and anti-American, and they contribute to failure.

And for those who truly believe in DEI, stop with the hypocrisy. Demand that goods produced with slave labor in communist China or other repressive regimes be immediately banned in the United States. Demand that all sports teams immediately reflect the proportion of skin color among Americans. That would be something to watch in the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball. Actually, it would be something no one would watch because it would be a joke.

If we don’t abandon forced DEI policies in our government, military, and corporations, our entire economy and national security will become a joke as well.

End DEI. Let freedom and human ingenuity run wild. This will ensure that America’s greatness will never be in doubt.

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