MS Now’s Ali Velshi said Sunday he feels a “deep unease” about celebrating America’s 250th birthday because America “has never actually fully reckoned with its racist past and its original founding sin of slavery.”
“I feel a deep unease about the celebrations to which I am invited to mark the 250th anniversary of our so-called democracy,” the Kenyan-born, Canadian raised, now-American-citizen said.
Velshi isn’t alone.
Across academia, left-wing activist organizations, and even corporate media, America’s semiquincentennial is being treated as an opportunity for self-criticism rather than celebration.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund said of America 250: “Reckon. Reimagine. Refound.”
“This critical moment calls us to collectively envision and create a new chapter: a multiracial democracy where power is shared, dignity is sacred, and thriving is the standard for everyone,” The NAACP LDF said.
Likewise, the Harvard Kennedy Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights argues America must confront the “irony” of having “inspired and helped create the international human rights system – basic ideas and legal realities – while systematically denying rights to many of its own people all along.”
Meanwhile activist organizations like All of U.S. 250, Next250, Get Free, 50501, Youth250 and other groups are planning a ‘reckoning’ protest in Washington, D.C. on June 27. They plan to make a mockery of the nation’s birthday and the Declaration of Independence with their own declaration that celebrates abortion, gun control, the climate hoax, and a whole host of leftist talking points.
TIME Magazine’s Jeffrey Bennett wrote in March: “As the United States prepares to mark its 250th anniversary, there will be parades, commemorations, and renewed attention to the nation’s founding ideals. But the celebration is already raising a harder question. What, exactly, are we choosing to honor?”
For Bennett, “America’s 250th should not become an active celebration of people who enslaved other human beings.” Bennett cited people like Caesar Rodney, a member of the Continental Congress and slaveowner who made a legendary 80-mile ride on horseback through a violent thunderstorm in order to get to Philadelphia and break a deadlocked vote on independence. Rodney later signed the Declaration of Independence.
In other words, many of America’s founders are deemed unworthy of celebration because they were products of their time and participated in institutions that modern Americans reject. Never mind that these men risked their lives and fortunes to establish the same principles of liberty and self-government that ultimately made slavery’s abolition possible. Historical figures like the Founders, according to Bennett’s reasoning, should be judged according to contemporary moral standards that simply did not exist in their day.
But this urge to use America’s 250th birthday as a means of critique is the predictable result of Americans being taught generation after generation to hate this country and be ashamed of all her glory.
An Education Next Survey found more than one-third of students reported being taught “often” or “almost daily” that “America is a fundamentally racist nation” and that “white people contribute the most to racism in the United States.”
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting claimed that 4,500 classrooms modeled its curriculum on the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project places slavery at the center of the American founding while falsely portraying that the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, that blacks “fought back alone” to secure their rights, and that the nation’s entire history should be viewed as a struggle between blacks against white supremacy, as Peter M. Wood wrote in these pages. In other words, the 1619 Project argues America is irredeemably racist and fundamentally flawed.
Of course that’s nothing to celebrate — if it were true.
But this pessimistic and historically illiterate interpretation extends beyond early education.
Historian Donald Yacovone, an associate at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, said in 2020 that “white supremacy” is “an expression of American identity.” Yacovone, who also wrote the book Teaching White Supremacy: The Textbook Battle Over Race In American History, also said “of course” it was “fair” to characterize Thomas Jefferson as a “white supremacist.”
“When he wrote those famous words in the Declaration of Independence he thought only of white men,” Yacovone said.
The propaganda press has only reinforced these narratives. Amid the 2020 riots, ABC News described many of the Founding Fathers primarily in terms of their “histories of racism” as statues of figures like Jefferson were vandalized or torn down.
It’s no surprise, then, that the upcoming 250th birthday of the greatest country to ever exist feels less than exciting. Another part of this low enthusiasm about celebrating — not denigrating — America’s 250th is because patriotism is low. A June 2025 Gallup poll found only 58% of adults say they are “extremely” or “very proud” to be American — a record low. When broken down among party lines, just 36% of Democrats share that view, while 53% of Independents and 92% of Republicans do.
Those realities are a product of cultural and educational institutions that have spent decades demoralizing and indoctrinating Americans to hate their country and ancestors. The roots of this anti-American propaganda can be traced all the way back to the 1930s when The Frankfurt School fled the Nazis and came to Columbia University.
People like Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno brought with them critical theory, a Marxist-inspired critique of capitalism and the Enlightenment, amongst other things. Marcuse later wrote One-Dimensional Man that claimed capitalism suppresses true liberation. This laid the groundwork to view America as oppressive, and over time these ideas influenced entire academic disciplines. From critical theory evolved women’s studies, post-colonialism, and critical race theory.
And by 2001, “faculty opinion” at higher-education “took a hard left turn such that professors on the political left are now approaching a supermajority in the academy,” the 2023 issue of The Independent Review stated.
Of course none of this is to say America is beyond any criticism. But a healthy — and much needed — patriotism recognizes that any shortcomings are overshadowed by the achievements of America and her people. The United States is not merely a story of slavery and sin. It is the story of a people who have continually risked their lives, fortunes and honor to secure the blessings of liberty endowed to us by our Creator.
If Americans seem less enthusiastic about celebrating America’s 250th birthday, it’s probably because so many of us have been taught to view America as an oppressive regime requiring perpetual apology and remaking.
