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Black progressive lawmakers on Sunday questioned the inclusivity of the freedoms celebrated on Independence Day as the White House prepared for an evening of traditional festivities.

As Biden's White House readied fireworks and burgers for America's annual celebration of nationhood, progressives expressed their views on what the Fourth of July means from the Black American perspective.

"When they say that the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this: the freedom they're referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land and Black people still aren't free," tweeted Missouri Rep. Cori Bush.

On July 5, 1852, abolitionist Fredrick Douglass challenged the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence in a keynote address commemorating its signing.

"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" he asked. "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."

California Rep. Maxine Waters, the House Financial Services Committee chair, echoed Douglass' sentiment on Sunday, tweeting, "July 4th... & so, the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal. Equal to what? What men? Only white men? Isn't it something that they wrote this in 1776 when African Americans were enslaved? They weren't thinking about us then, but we're thinking about us now!"

This year, America moved to designate Juneteenth as a federal holiday, but for decades, many Black people have been celebrating their day of freedom on June 19which commemorates the emancipation of African American slaves.

In a searing op-ed for theGrio, Tour, an author and former MSNBC host, criticized the Fourth of July, arguing that it "wasn't Independence Day for Black people." He wrote that Juneteenth casts a "long shallow over Independence Day, making it look like a hypocrite and a damn fool."

"Independence for who?" Tour asked. "It wasn't independence for Black people, for our ancestors, so why would we celebrate the Fourth of July?"

He also cited the Pulitzer Prize-winning essay for the "1619 project" by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which noted that colonies sought to emancipate from Britian partly to protect the institution of slavery.

"America wanted to protect its cash cow and, even more, it was wealth derived from slavery that allowed the colonies to afford to pay for the War of Independence," Tour wrote. "The founding of this country is intertwined with slavery. Why would we celebrate that?"

Newsweek reached out to Cori Bush and Maxine Waters' office for further comment. This story will be updated with any response.

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Progressive Lawmakers Call Fourth of July Freedom for Whites: Blacks 'Still Aren't Free' - Newsweek

After a year of violence and unrest, large American cities serve as a cautionary tale for the progressives in Washington who want to move the country further to the left. The Democrats airtight lock on the urban vote has allowed political leaders to pursue ideological agendas without fear of reprisal, which has revealed just how much the elite left comprised mostly of affluent, liberal whites who dominate media narratives is out of step with the concerns of rank-and-file urban residents.

Take crime. Defund the police was always an unworkable project, but that never stopped progressives from working on it. Rep. Rashida Tlaibs infamous no more policing it can't be reformed may have been more extreme than the Democratic norm, but its basic sentiment dominates the elite lefts obsession with policing injustices and relative indifference to street violence. White House press secretary Jen Psakis inability to acknowledge America has a crime problem is but one example of the conventional lefts unwillingness to depart from the standard script.

Meanwhile, the five cities that reduced their police budgets the most in 2020 (Austin, New York, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Denver) saw murders spike over the past year well above the national average. Thirty-six of the 50 largest cities in America saw murders rise at double-digit rates. Compared to 2020, shootings and homicides in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles were way up. Crime in large progressive urban strongholds far outpaces more moderate and right-leaning cities.

Minority and urban residents know exactly what is going on, which is why we have seen mayoral candidates in New York City recently pivot to crime as a top issue. In a May 2021 poll, more than 60 percent of New Yorkers supported increasing the citys police budget, and a plurality named crime as their number one issue in this years mayoral race. In July 2020, as protestors and rioters filled city streets across the country, 81 percent of Black Americans said in a Gallup poll they would like police to spend the same amount of time or more time in their neighborhoods. In Minneapolis, the epicenter of the defund the police movement, Black residents were more opposed than white residents to reducing the size of the citys police force and more likely to perceive that crime had increased. In poll after poll, nationally and locally, city dwellers and racial minorities have consistently been at odds with the elite lefts views of urban policing.

Schooling is another example of the elite lefts disconnect with urban residents. Bill DeBlasios declaration during his failed 2020 presidential campaign that he hated the privatizers and wanted to get away from charter schools was merely a blunt articulation of the leftward drift of the Democratic elite over the past 20 years. The partys platforms have become increasingly hostile to charter schools since the 2000 presidential election, as Jonathan Chait has documented.

Despite this trend, Democratic voters in cities like their charter schools and want more of them. A recent poll in New York City found that 70 percent of Democrats favor opening more charter schools, a figure that grows higher among Black primary voters and Hispanics. A majority of Democratic voters said they would prefer a mayoral candidate who supports charter schools as well as traditional public schools.

A 2019 poll found that nearly two-thirds of white Democratic voters had an unfavorable opinion of charter schools, while majorities of Black and Hispanic voters support them. This isnt surprising. Charter schools are mostly non-white and urban. While only 25 percent of the nations traditional public schools are in cities, 57 percent of charter schools are located in urban areas. The pandemics unplanned experiment in forced homeschooling has further eroded the publics confidence in the lefts ironclad embrace of traditional public schools. A recent poll in California revealed that the number of parents who say they would send their children to a private school if they could has increased by a third in the past two years.

The disconnect between the elite left and people on the street extends beyond crime and schools to basic American aspirations. A greater share of Black and Hispanic Americans than whites believe they are on the way to achieving the American Dream, and considerably more Black and Hispanic working-class people than affluent white liberals believe anyone can start a successful business.

Half of affluent white liberals believe very strongly that public buildings and monuments named after confederate leaders should be renamed, compared to much smaller shares of Black and Hispanic working-class voters, and a much greater percentage of affluent white liberals than Black and Hispanic working-class voters would be very upset if their son or daughter married a Trump supporter.

With their power over the daily media narrative, sadly, the elite left has been able to ignore the opinions of non-elite urban constituents with little political impunity. But that does not make their hypocrisy any less damning.

Ryan Streeter is the director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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OPINION | Will progressives learn from the cities? | Op-Ed | livingstonparishnews.com - The Livingston Parish News

We have reached the point at which Americas sophisticated opinion-makers are appending a trigger warning onto the Declaration of Independence.

Every year for the past 32 years, NPR began its Friday-morning news show, Morning Edition has broadcast a reading of the Declaration of Independence by NPRs staff. But after last summers protests and our country attempting to confront our history, we want and need to be honest about the words in this document.

What followed was a critique of that document, which was mostly a long list of grievances and charges against King George IIIa bizarre rebuke of the Declarations central purpose. NPRs hosts add that this tract declared all men are created equal, even though women, enslaved people, and indigenous Americans were not held as equal at the time. They note that the original draft of the declaration was amended to exclude references to Scottish mercenaries and the evils of the African slave trade, which offended some delegates to the Continental Congress and represented an obstacle to its adoption. Finally, a racist slur against Native Americans (that being merciless Indian Savages, who were excited to total war against the colonies by the Crown) remained.

NPR concluded that this piece of parchment encoded flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies into the nations political DNA. It was only ever a venue to express our collective aspirations and hopes for what this country might one day become but in many ways has never been.

This is how sophisticates within the ecosystem of respectable liberal discourse think youre supposed to talk about the American founding if youre an intellectually serious person. What this sort of talk reveals, however, is an astonishing parochialism.

The presentism on display in these remarks isnt just myopic. It contributes to the cumulative condition in which the left is ceding the miracle of American democracy to the right. Unconditional patriotism and veneration for the historical accidents that culminated in the American experiment are increasingly regarded by the left as unrefined and naive. That leaves us to tell the providential story of the American foundinga story that has the dual advantages of being both inspirational and true.

As anyone who has ever drafted a document by committee will tell you, most statements that are produced in such a manner end up as banal expressions of fealty to nothing at all. Its little short of a wonder that this process resulted in a statement of principle as revolutionarily egalitarian as it did. No government had ever committed itself to the Declarations enlightened liberal ideals in such a full-throated manner. And those ideals were very much a threat to the systems that kept men in chains all over the world, and not just in the American South. The fetters that bound people everywhere to monarchs, landed lords, feudal castes, hereditary nobility, and established churches were suddenly rendered breakable. And while the American capacity for compromise allowed the institution of slavery (among other evils) to survive for another 89 years, the predicate for its dissolution would not exist if these principles were not first articulated in this document.

The Declaration of Independence was not, as NPR insists, an expression of our unfulfilled aspirations; it was the codification of a set of values that preexisted the document by a century. Those values were rooted in the proto-democratic institutions established by Congregationalists and Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians, Anglicans and Catholics, Lutherans and Jews who privileged radical autonomy over the oppressive, hegemonic structures of the Old World. Their collective covenant with one another produced the worlds longest-lived experiment in religious pluralism.

The documents use of the word men was in no way designed to exclude women from the social compact, as the historically illiterate now contend. The early American republic restricted the franchise not just on the basis of demography but on property ownership, tooan injustice that chic crusaders for the new Identitarian paradigm omit as it detracts from the slander that the United States was founded by white people, for white people. The use of a racist slur was an expression of the colonists experience in a variety of scorched-earth Indian Wars, which the left-wing imagination now believes occurred in the absence of decades of diplomacy, inter-tribal conflicts, and great-power politicsall of which are well documented. Last, the insulting notion that this country has only just now committed to confront our history is an attack on the generations of thoughtful idealists who sacrificed more to realize this documents unfulfilled promises than the denizens of the faculty lounge ever will.

All the world over, what at the time was as much a founding document as a suicide pact has inspired liberty-loving people to demand their own emancipation. For centuries, revolutionaries and reformers of every political stripe have looked to the rights preservednot grantedby governments instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed to justify their own struggles against tyranny. Even today, 245 years later, this is so. When the Chinese Communist Party sought to crush liberty in Hong Kong, the citys populace didnt pour into the streets singing The Internationale and flying the banners of the fashionable separatist cliques to which American progressives are increasingly inclined. They sang the American national anthem. They flew the American flag. They demanded the liberties enshrined in Americas Bill of Rights. And they adopted the language crafted by Thomas Jefferson and ratified unanimously by the Second Continental Congress in their own Declaration of Independence. Their sacrifices and the risks they were willing to take in defense of their liberties shames the effete critics of our own.

All this is probably quite provocative for those whove steeped themselves in the dogmas popularized by Americas humanities departments. So much the better for the American right. By all means, progressives, concede the vision of a liberated human species conceived in the Enlightenment and pursued first by the United States to conservatives. Let us articulate the virtues of the American civic compact, the permeability of its social strata, and the opportunities it affords all who believe themselves capable of making it on merit and aptitude alone. Surrender to us the love of country that isnt alloyed by some laborious pedagogy about how awful we have always been. We will be good stewards of that noble tradition. It is an enlivening and inspiring observancea positive force, which has so much more capacity to arouse and animate than the hopeless pessimism that today masquerades as refinement. We will be its custodians. And we will reap its rewards.

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Please, Progressives: Go Ahead and Cede What Makes America Great to the Right - Noah Rothman, Commentary - Commentary Magazine

AUGUSTA, Maine A national Republican group was quick to put out a statement hammering Gov. Janet Mills after former Gov. Paul LePage officially filed to face her in 2022last week.

But the sharpest criticism directed at Mills in the past few weeks has been from fellow Democrats as she came into conflict with progressives, ultimately vetoing more than a dozen progressive bills including several on criminal justice, tribal gaming and prescription drug prices.

It is the sort of division LePage and his Republican allies could benefit from in 2022, especially if a third-party candidatejoins a race that will not use ranked-choice voting. But despite objections from fellow Democrats on policy in recent weeks, there is little sign that liberals would abandon Mills in big numbers, with lawmakers who have criticized the governor still likely to support her.

Progressives were disappointed by her vetoes, viewing them as a wasted opportunity to pass ambitious legislation with a trifecta in Augusta, said Betsy Sweet, a progressive lobbyist who finished in third place behind Mills in the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary. But she also noted Mills COVID-19 response and proposals to increase child carefunding as positives.

There have been some really good things done, she said. This is not all about vetoes.

The open divisions are somewhat new for Mills, who was quick to reverse controversial LePage policies after riding into the Blaine House with full Democratic control of the Legislature in 2018. She signed an order to expand Medicaid on her first day in office.

Last years legislative session was cut short with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which abruptly flipped the tenorof Mills first termfrom good times to crisis. But Maine weathered the pandemic relatively well and federal funding helped avert what could have been a state budget crisis, allowing for a new, bipartisan state budget that met Maines K-12 education funding goalfor the first time. While Mills has sharply raised state spending, she has held the line on taxes.

Behind that approach, Mills has weathered limited backlash given increasing polarization. She maintained a 57 percent approval ratingin a Digital Research Inc. poll released last month, which is 10 points higher than LePages highest markduring his tenure as governor.

Mills careful path so far made recent criticism from Democrats stand out. Maine Conservation Voters, which endorsed Mills during the 2018 general election campaign, said it was disappointed in Mills after she vetoed a bill to ban the use of aerial herbicides. Maine Youth Justice, a group that advocates for criminal justice reform, called Mills veto of a bill to close Maines only youth prisona grave misstep.

Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, said Mills did not have the courage to stand up to pharmaceutical companies after she vetoed bills he championed targeting prescription drug prices. (Mills, in her veto message, argued the bills would be unlikely to withstand constitutional scrutiny and may not accomplish Jacksons intended goals.)

That was a sharp remark, but the Mills squabbles look quaint next to the wars between LePage and Senate Republicans. The latter group largely allied with Democrats on budget issues in the run-up to a 2017 government shutdown. LePage vetoed a record 642 bills during his tenure in a mostly divided government; Mills has vetoed 16 as of Friday after 10 in her first two years in office. Two Democratic-led Legislatures have sustained all vetoes so far.

Mills recent decisions have also kept her in good graces with groups that might be more likely to oppose her. Ben Lucas, executive director of the Maine Jobs Council, a conservative-leaning business advocacy group, pointed to a bill aimed at reforming the unemployment system as the only recent major one the governor backedthat was opposed by the business community.

Mills vetoed several other bills that business interests had spoken against, including a graduated real estate tax and a bill limiting referendum spending by companies owned by foreign governments.

We certainly appreciate the governor holding the line on a lot of these very anti-jobs proposals, Lucas said.

Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, a moderate who praised Mills recent vetoes, said there would be a clear philosophical difference between the governor and LePage. Sweet said progressives would not defect, but that their enthusiasm to help Mills could wane due to recent actions.

Theyre not going to vote for LePage, she said. But I think its really the difference between voting, and then enthusiastically working, canvassing and helping.

Mills has not formally launched her reelection campaign, though she resumed fundraising in late March. The campaign against her has already begun, with the Republican Governors Association, in a statement after LePage filed, saying she had driven Maine into a ditch with her extreme liberal pet projects.

Advocates have still begun to step up on her behalf. Recent bills, such as the bipartisan budget, showed Mills is willing to work with conservatives and progressives to achieve shared goals, said Emily Cain, a former Maine lawmaker who now is executive director of EMILYs List, a group that helps elect Democratic women and aided Mills in the 2018 primary.

When you consider the combination of the pandemic, along with heightened partisanship in our country, Janet has remained true to her Maine values with every decision that she has made, Cain said.

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Janet Mills stalls progressive priorities as race with Paul LePage kicks off - Bangor Daily News

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Former Vice President Mike Pence reportedly "lost it" and "snarled" at former President Donald Trump in 2018 after getting a crumpled up newspaper article thrown at him.

A new piece in The Wall Street Journal adapted from reporter Michael Bender's book Frankly, We Did Win This Election describes the conflict that arose between Trump and Pence in early 2021 when the vice president was set to preside over the certification of the election results. The report describes how Pence "wasn't practiced in confronting" Trump, with the only example that administration officials could think of dating back to 2018.

At the time, Pence's political committee had just hired Trump's adviser Corey Lewandowski, and Trump reportedly held up an article about the news while complaining it made him look weak and like "his team was abandoning him." Trump reportedly then "crumpled the article and threw it at his vice president," saying, "So disloyal." At that point, the report says Pence "lost it," growing frustrated because Jared Kushner had asked him to hire Lewandowski and he had discussed the plan to do so with Trump.

"Mr. Pence picked up the article and threw it back at Mr. Trump," Bender reports. "He leaned toward the president and pointed a finger a few inches from his chest. 'We walked you through every detail of this,' Mr. Pence snarled. 'We did this for you as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.'" Read more at The Wall Street Journal.

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Mike Pence reportedly once 'lost it' after Trump threw a crumpled newspaper article at him - Yahoo News