America is days away from its 250th birthday, and CNN is doing what CNN does best.
The country is preparing to celebrate a quarter-millennium of freedom, and the left-wing media can barely hide how much that bothers them.
And a CNN anchor just took a shot at the Declaration of Independence itself that a lot of Americans are not going to forget.
CNN anchor Victor Blackwell went on the air and declared that the Declaration of Independence is soiled with a “slur” against Native Americans, making his remarks during a segment on *First of All* on a Saturday morning.
Blackwell’s complaint centers on a passage most Americans have never memorized, buried deep in the document’s list of grievances against King George III.
He acknowledged that most Americans know the opening lines — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that 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” — but said far fewer people know that further down, the Founders condemned King George III for encouraging “merciless Indian Savages.”
The full passage, as written in 1776, reads: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Worth stopping here for a second. The Founders were not celebrating frontier warfare. They were building a legal case against a king they accused of deliberately inciting it against American colonists. The passage is a grievance, not a celebration. Calling it a “slur” dropped casually into the founding charter strips it of every ounce of historical context.
But accuracy was never really the point of the segment.
Blackwell is not the only cable anchor using America’s milestone birthday as an occasion to air grievances. MS NOW anchor Ali Velshi told his viewers he feels a “deep unease” about celebrating the country’s 250th birthday, citing the country’s “unresolved racial politics” and slamming America as a “so-called democracy.”
Velshi said: “In one month, America will mark the 250th anniversary of its founding. Like previous anniversaries, there is a deep unease about this. I feel a deep unease about these celebrations to which I am invited to mark the 250th anniversary of our so-called democracy because this 250th anniversary is taking place during yet another period of deep and fundamental and existential unrest in this country brought on by the country’s unresolved racial politics.”
Velshi, for what it’s worth, was born in Kenya and raised in Canada before becoming an American citizen in 2015. He chose this country. Then chose to spend a national milestone telling the people who were born here that their founding document represents something to be ashamed of.
There is a pattern worth naming. Every time America gets close to a moment of national unity — a birthday, a military anniversary, an inauguration — a reliable segment of the media decides the real story is everything wrong with the country. Not the 250 years of self-governance. Not the fact that no nation in human history has produced more freedom, more prosperity, or more opportunity for more people. Not the millions of immigrants who crossed oceans to get here. Just the grievances, curated and served up on a Saturday morning.
And the framing is always the same. Take a historical document, strip out the context, label it toxic, and let the audience draw the conclusion that the whole enterprise was rotten from the start.
The Declaration of Independence was written by men who understood they were making history. Thomas Jefferson knew the document would be read for centuries. The grievance against King George’s use of frontier warfare was one of 27 charges laid against the Crown — a legal brief, not a cultural statement. Historians have debated the language for generations. Reasonable people can hold different views about how to reckon with the full complexity of the founding era.
But calling it a “slur” on the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday, on a national cable platform, is not a history lesson. It’s a choice about what kind of country CNN wants its viewers to think they live in.
And that choice tells you something.
The left-wing media has spent years building an audience that views American patriotism with suspicion. The 1619 Project. The push to tear down monuments. The steady drumbeat in government schools that American history is primarily a story of oppression. All of it feeds the same machine — one that profits, politically and financially, from keeping a portion of the population alienated from their own country.
Blackwell’s segment fits that template perfectly. His remarks came just a week before America celebrates its 250th birthday. The timing was not accidental.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are planning cookouts, watching fireworks, and teaching their kids why July 4 matters. They are not waiting for CNN to give them permission to love their country.
The Declaration of Independence is not a perfect document produced by perfect men. Nobody serious has ever claimed otherwise. But it is the document that launched the idea — radical in 1776, still radical today — that human beings possess rights that no government can take away. That idea changed the world. It still does.
CNN can call it a slur. The rest of America will be celebrating.
Sources: Mediaite; American News Nation; NewsNation; Twitchy