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Stand up on Independence Day

OPINION

BY LEN CABRERA

The nation seems to be on life support as it approaches its 244th birthday. That’s because, over the last few weeks, several groups decided to take a handful of incidents and implicate the entire society for “systemic racism.” They rarely make any specific indictments or propose actual solutions; it’s just Twitter-cancel-culture brought to real life.

Most people are so cowed by the blanket accusations that they refuse to cite facts countering the narrative. Those who do are ignored and/or labeled “racist” or “Uncle Tom.” The vast majority sit back and allow our nation’s history to be rewritten while anarchists take over city streets, vilify police officers, and terrorize business owners. It’s time for some courageous immigrants to stand up and dispel these asinine charges of “systemic racism.” The fact that these people chose to come to this country disproves the claim.

Out of one side of their cameras, media outlets try to claim the protests are peaceful (often with comically tragic results like these from MSNBC and CNN). At the same time, they fall over themselves to misquote Martin Luther King, Jr., saying, “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

That line is taken completely out of context from MLK’s “The Other America” speech, delivered April 14, 1967 at Stanford University. The previous sentence says, “Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots.” The previous paragraph says, “I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating.”

But why would we trust the media or the protestors to put history in proper context? Many rioters are roaming the streets like ISIS, destroying any cultural landmark that disagrees with their worldview. It’s not just about Confederate statues. They are also going after Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.

The push to remove the Lincoln Emancipation Memorial shows just how ignorant and/or disingenuous the entire movement is. The statue was financed by former slaves and coordinated by Charlotte Scott (herself a former slave). That part of the history is even written on the monument itself. The person kneeling is modeled after Archer Alexander. The keynote address at the dedication in 1876 was delivered by Frederick Douglass. If the memorial offends you, learn some history to appreciate why it was made.

You’d think a university town would help educate the public instead of caving to the Twitter mobs. Then again, our local elected officials would probably be more likely to man the CHAZ barricades than protect our freedom or property.

The agenda of these violent protests isn’t about being offended or oppressed. It’s about “fundamental transformation.” They misquote MLK to justify an insurrection while ignoring the love he had for our country and its founding principles.

Later in “The Other America” speech, MLK said he was “seeking to take the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” King didn’t want to destroy America or remake it. He wanted to make sure we lived up to our principles as stated in the Declaration of Independence.

He said the same thing four years earlier in his “I Have a Dream” speech: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir… I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

If the protestors claiming “systemic racism” actually read MLK, they’d label him an Uncle Tom, just like other blacks who praise our founding, including Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Joe Hicks, David Webb, Shelby Steele, Larry Elder, Jason Whitlock, and Coleman Hughes. (Take the time to watch/read at least one of those links.)

I guess I’m a “Tio Tomas” because I don’t support the “proper” policies for people whose names end with a vowel. I was recently called a racist and told that my “privilege is showing” because of my column using facts to dispel the myth of “systemic racism.” Guess what? Everyone born or living in this country has privilege, thanks to the many people who fought and died for the principles of our founding, which we should be celebrating on Independence Day.

My “privilege” came courtesy of a Marxist dictator who imposed “fundamental transformation” in Cuba. He shut down my father’s school, effectively ending his education in seventh grade. He put my mother’s father in jail because he happened to work at a rich man’s estate. He granted them strip searches at the airport before they left the island (after confiscating all their other possessions). Both sides of my family started from nothing in the 1960s, but they had the privilege of doing so in America.

Many of the people complaining about “systemic racism” also want to force millions of people who had nothing to do with slavery to somehow pay reparations. They’re busy quoting The New York Times 1619 Project, which rewrites American history as if we were the only country to ever have slavery. Read the account of the Narvaez Expedition to learn that slavery existed in Florida before 1528 (and the slaveholders were not white Europeans). According to The Guardian, over 40 million people currently “work in slave-like conditions” across the world.

There is not a single sitting politician who publicly espouses any racist ideas, let alone any that praise segregation or slavery. However, there are plenty of politicians advocating for the same policies as the tyrant who nearly destroyed my family. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors admitted she’s a Marxist in this 2015 video. Should I be demanding reparations from these politicians or BLM? They’re arguably more dangerous than white supremacists, who have no real political power.

The leaders of these violent protests want to rewrite the founding documents that enshrine our freedoms. Their followers are victims of our pathetic education system and are ignorant of our nation’s history and governing philosophy. They are a reminder of Thomas Sowell’s warning: “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

These Marxist leaders and their pawns have never actually experienced the government they want to push on the rest of us. They lack the wisdom of Jason Whitlock, who wrote,  “The longer I live, the more I travel, the more I understand other countries and cultures, the more I appreciate my American freedoms and sensibilities.”

It’s time for immigrants and refugees, Americans who have truly experienced oppression and fled to our shores, to stand up and fight for our founding principles. They should not allow BLM’s unfounded accusations against our country to go unanswered. This Independence Day is a fitting time to stand up to all of America’s enemies, foreign and domestic.

  • Thanks for eloquently publishing your thoughts regarding our country’s founding and the diversity of people who stood for and believed in those ideals. What’s sad is that many who claim to be “woke” are really just denying the “darkness” of ignorance they live in.

  • Great article. Yes, stand up on Independence Day!
    Did anyone notice that June 14th was Flag Day?
    It was also Trump’s birthday…I didn’t see a lot of flags
    out. I don’t think I even heard anything in the MSM
    news about it.

  • What Did Malcolm X Really Think about the Democratic Party?

    Malcolm X gave a controversial speech on December 1st, 1963 speech at the Manhattan Center in New York City called ‘God’s Judgment of White America (The Chickens Come Home to Roost)’ following the assassination of John F. Kennedy which earned him a 90 day suspension from the Nation of Islam:

    In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negroes (i.e., the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power. Among whites here in America, the political teams are no longer divided into Democrats and Republicans. The whites who are now struggling for control of the American political throne are divided into “liberal” and “conservative” camps. The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together toward the same goal, and white conservatives from both parties do likewise.

    The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.

    Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights. In this profitable game of deceiving and exploiting the political politician of the American Negro, those white liberals have the willing cooperation of the Negro civil rights leaders. These “leaders” sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition and token gains. These “leaders” are satisfied with token victories and token progress because they themselves are nothing but token leaders
    https://libya360.wordpress.com/2020/02/09/what-did-malcolm-x-really-think-about-the-democratic-party/

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