If leftists can’t cancel 1776, they’ll cancel the founders one frame at a time

A Democrat state senator in Nebraska last month decided to remove portraits of America’s founders from the Capitol in Lincoln. Security footage shows state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh taking down images from an exhibit designed by PragerU, marking the nation’s 250th year with portraits of Declaration signers and prominent women.

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

The left now treats America’s founding principles as cover for sin rather than a constraint on it.

I’m disappointed too. But I’m not surprised. The left has poured gasoline on the founding for years.

In 1927, historians Charles and Mary Beard published “The Rise of American Civilization,” portraying the American Revolution as a struggle driven less by ideals than by economic self-interest. Their Progressive Era “economic interpretation” challenged what they saw as romanticized narratives about the founding and helped shift elite opinion toward suspicion of the founders’ motives.

Nearly a century later, the left moved from economic critique to moral indictment. Slavery became the founding’s “original sin.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the United States was “created” in large part “on racist principles.” The New York Times championed Nikole Hannah-Jones’ project urging schools to teach that America’s true founding occurred not in 1776 but in 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived. That framework recasts the Revolution less as a rebellion against tyranny than as a defense of slavery’s economic advantages.

Then came 2020. In Portland, mobs tore down statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Protesters smeared them with graffiti and slapped a sticker on Washington’s forehead: “You are on Native land.”

My new book, “Trump’s Superpower: A Historical Novel About the Founding Fathers & One Founding Mother,” stages a rebuttal in story form. I bring the founders down from heaven to participate in a re-enactment of the founding on its 250th anniversary. They collide with modern America in darkly comic ways. Ben Franklin gets arrested for misgendering someone. George Washington fixes his teeth. Will Lee, Washington’s enslaved valet, discovers online commentary and becomes a social media sensation.

Those scenes deliver laughs, but the book’s center holds a serious conversation: Did America become what the founders hoped it would become? That debate carries its own evidence against the modern indictment. These men believed they were handing Americans tools — freed from Britain’s rule and debts — to pursue their own dreams and build lives worth living.

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In the book, Thomas Jefferson and the others see Jefferson’s memorial for the first time and learn about the campaign to cancel him. Franklin reads the moment with unnerving clarity. “I am beginning to think,” he says, “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.”

Jefferson’s Declaration 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, Jefferson also condemned Britain’s role in the slave trade, accusing King George of waging “cruel war against human nature itself” by trafficking human beings. The Continental Congress struck the passage, fearing disunity on the eve of war.

That context matters. The founders lived amid contradiction and compromise, yet they articulated principles that gave later generations the moral language and constitutional structure to attack slavery, defeat it, and expand rights. The left now treats those principles as cover for sin rather than a constraint on it. That inversion forms the point of the portrait-taking: It’s not merely about flawed men. It’s about discrediting the founding itself.

Lately, watching riots in Minneapolis and other blue cities tied to federal immigration enforcement, I wonder if we will even make it to July 4. Blue jurisdictions openly defying federal authority in 2026 sounds uncomfortably close to the pattern of states putting themselves above the Union in 1860.

The country should treat that warning seriously — not as a pretext for more cultural demolition, but as a reason to recover what America’s founders built: a constitutional order that binds us together, even when we want to tear it apart.