In the darkest doldrums of one of the feeblest, yet imperious presidencies it very much appeared that literally every positive symbol of America’s past would be stripped from public places. 

The little that stayed was slapped with “warning labels” by so-called experts, kept in a carefully gatekept bubble to ensure that Americans were fed a nonstop diet of the narrative about America’s racist and illegitimate past. 

Celebrating the Founding Fathers, the Constitution of the United States, and the American Revolution were examples of “structural racism,” nothing more. 

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The message from this country’s most elite institutions was that when you think of your country you must feel nothing but shame. 

But history isn’t static, it doesn’t move on a wheel. It can still be shaped by great men and millions of ordinary, free men capable of greatness and wisdom in the face of revolution and madness. 

America took a long nap under President Joe Biden. But morning has come. 

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” 

The purpose of the order is, for lack of a better description, to undo the large-scale attempt to twist and pervert American history and the meaning of this country. Under Biden, the federal bureaucratic leviathan went to work scrubbing our past, reshaping it to bow and bend to every demand of DEI ideology. 

Most elite private institutions eagerly went along with this movement too. 

No stone was left unturned. In fact, some literal stones were removed for being racist

Trump’s return to the White House demonstrates the tide has changed dramatically. Now the administration is taking serious steps to correct this colossal mistake. 

“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” Trump’s executive order reads. “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” 

This line could have come directly out of my book, “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” which was published in 2019. Shortly after the book came out, the Great Awokening took off in earnest. Statues were toppled, museums were transformed to fit the narrative about America’s irredeemable past, and legacy media outlets pumped historically revisionist nonsense that reframed all American history to revolve around racism and slavery. 

Many of the cleverer proponents of the war on history are going to suddenly have amnesia about how far they took things in the last few years. They are going to try to rewrite the past again to make us forget that they either kept silent or outright cheered when not only Confederate Statues tumbled, but monuments to Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and even Abraham Lincoln were toppled or put in the crosshairs for destruction. 

But we can’t forget what they did, all in the service of the Left’s aim to “fundamentally transform” America. 

Even the Smithsonian got in on the act. Here’s a pamphlet the museum released in 2020. 

But 1776 is coming back. It turns out Americans weren’t quite ready to jettison their intellectual and literal heritage on behalf of phony “antiracist” zealots who actually sounded a lot like plain old racists

Trump’s order aims to “determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”  

It will then “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties.” 

That’s the perfect way to go about this. It is to be a restoration movement to usher in a new American golden age. 

Perhaps after the blatant, wide-scale attempt to obliterate our history, Americans will find increasing appreciation of the gift we’ve been given to live in the United States, an undeniably great nation with a history to be proud of. 

For most of American history that was our attitude. It was one of pride and gratitude. The Left and the institutions they control tried to change that. But they’ve been repudiated by the American people. Their power and influence are crumbling. They’ve been exposed as frauds, in some cases literally

And with that newfound feeling of gratitude, we can move on from our age of resentment. The Trump administration plans to have a massive celebration in 2026 for the 250th anniversary of American independence.  

Let’s make this the greatest Fourth of July of our lifetimes. We are celebrating a Second American Revolution. We can send a message that Americans will never again forsake their history, that we will move forward as a nation with full hearts guided by informed patriotism, and with eyes fixed on an even greater future.