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IPFS News Link • United States

America's 250th Celebration Belongs To You, Not DC

• https://libertarianinstitute.org, by Jack Hunter

How independent the United States actually is these days or how much the country remains dedicated to the ideals of the founding is highly debatable.

What is not debatable is that it was the colonies making a break from old Europe and formally beginning a new nation as a distinct people in their own country.

What kind of people?

For America's 150th anniversary, President Calvin Coolidge said in a speech on July 5, 1926, "In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man – these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals."

This certainly sounded American enough.

100 years later, what would the celebrated American spirit or ideals have been had Kamala Harris won the 2024 presidential election?

We don't have to wonder. Mere days after the 247th anniversary of the Declaration in 2023, the Biden-Harris administration launched a "Pride Month" celebration on the South White House lawn complete with a scattering of rainbow flag motifs and a so-called "Pride Progress flag."

President Joe Biden said at the event, "You're some of the bravest and most inspiring people I've ever known. And I've known a lot of good folks."

It was certainly different from Coolidge.

President Biden added, "You set an example for the nation—and quite frankly for the world."

Okay. Despite its message of supposed inclusiveness, this display definitely wasn't for everyone.

The last administration did throw a proper barbeque to honor military families on the actual Fourth three years ago, but the Biden-Harris "pride" celebrations lasted throughout June and July, replete with drag queens and LGBTQ activists, which swallowed up the nation's actual birthday.

Note, this was then 80-year-old Joe Biden letting his rainbow freak flag fly. There's no telling what extremes a decades younger, identity-politics-driven President Kamala Harris might have gone to this Fourth of July.

Thankfully we'll never know.

Donald Trump kicked off the 250th anniversary season with an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn earlier this month, which was certainly a departure from anything a Harris White House would have done. It was a bro-fest that I personally enjoyed, while understanding that it too, in ways very different from "Pride Month," wasn't for everyone either.


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