The Left Comes For The Founding Fathers, and For The Founding

Recently, a state senator in Nebraska took it upon herself to remove portraits of the Founders from the Capitol Building in Lincoln. State Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh (D) was shown on security footage, a smirk on her face, taking down portraits from an exhibit, designed by Prager U, celebrating 250 years since America’s founding with images of the Declaration of Independence signers and of prominent women.

“Celebrating America during our 250th year should be a moment of unity and patriotism, not divisiveness and destructive partisanship,” Republican Gov. Jay Pillen wrote in a post on X. “I am disappointed in this shameful and selfish bad example.”

But not surprised. The Left has been pouring gasoline on the founding for years.

In 1927, historians Charles and Mary Beard published The Rise of American Civilization, in which they portrayed the American Revolution as driven not by lofty ideals of democracy and rights of citizens but by crass economic motives.

Part of a Progressive Era embrace of big government solutions to urban blight, the book popularized the “economic interpretation” of American history, challenging what they considered romanticized views of the nation’s founding.

Nearly a century later, leftists had abandoned the economic critique of the founders for one grounded in the Original Sin of slavery. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders said the United States was “created” in large part “on racist principles.” The New York Times sponsored an apologia for black victimhood, printing Nikole Hannah-Jones’s major distortion of American history and urging classrooms to adopt its teaching. She argued that the founding was not in 1776, when the United States in great passion declared its independence from Britain, but in 1619, when the first slave stepped onto America’s shores. This framed the founding not as a rebellion against tyranny for religious freedom but as one meant to preserve the economic advantages of slavery.

Then in 2020, during the BLM fever that followed George Floyd’s death, residents in Portland tore down statutes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, decrying them as white slave owners. Protestors covered them with graffiti and placed a sticker on Washington’s forehead saying, “You are on Native land.”

In my new book, Trump’s Superpower: A Historical Novel About the Founding Fathers & One Founding Mother, those present at the creation of this country beg to differ. In the book, I bring the Founders down from Heaven to participate as actors in a re-enactment of our founding 250 years ago. They have many amusing encounters with 21st century Americans — Ben Franklin is arrested for misgendering someone, George Washington gets his teeth fixed and Will Lee, Washington’s slave and valet, discovers the world of online commentary and becomes a social media sensation.

But the larger theme is an ongoing conversation between them about whether today’s America is what they had hoped to leave us. And in that debate is the evidence that proves the critics wrong — these were patriots who thought they were bequeathing us the tools, freed from indebtedness to Britain, to pursue our own dreams, to thrive.

I describe the angst that Jefferson and the other founders felt on seeing for the first time his memorial, and learning of the campaign to cancel him. “I am beginning to think,” said Ben Franklin, “that they’re not trying to discredit us as people so much as to dishonor us for what we achieved. In a way, they are denouncing not only the founders but the nation we founded and the Constitution we left behind.”

In his majestic Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson insisted that rights come from God, not man, and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In his first draft, he said Britain’s King George had forced on America the barbaric trade in human beings. “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation,” he wrote. Congress edited that passage out, fearful that if they went to war with Britain, they would need all the colonies, North and South, marching together.

Lately, given the riots in Minneapolis and other blue states over enforcement of federal immigration law, I sometimes wonder if we will even make it to July 4th. Blue states defying the federal government in 2026 sounds an awful lot like the southern states seceding from the Union in 1860. Are we at the cusp of civil war — again?

I prefer to imagine President Trump holding the American flag aloft as he leads us like a proud warrior in patriotic celebration. I titled the book Trump’s Superpower because I believe the 47th president is standing on the shoulders of the founders — their values, their principles, their Enlightenment ideals and their European heritage — in his attempt to wrest this nation back from the hands of Marxist ideologues. While the rest of us salute God, country and family, they are the ones who are driven by economic greed and a lust for power that would put King George to shame.

Buy the book. You can laugh as you celebrate.