From the moment Ken Burns fires up his latest American Revolution series, conservatives should brace themselves. Instead of celebrating the timeless fight for liberty and the sacred rights of Englishmen that birthed this nation, Burns dives headfirst into radical left-wing revisionism. His opening gambit is shocking—a lengthy diatribe from an Indigenous perspective focused on land theft, setting a distorted tone that disrespects the true cause of our founding struggle.
Burns blatantly ignores the overwhelming historical evidence showing the American colonies rose up against Britain primarily over the tyrant’s refusal to respect their ancient rights—chief among them, no taxation without representation. Yes, taxes triggered the fight, not some nefarious plot to steal Indian land. Anyone familiar with British history knows how often kings lost their heads or crowns over the exact same abuses of taxing without consent. Magna Carta, the English Civil War, and the Glorious Revolution all testify to a centuries-long battle against government overreach. Yet Burns tries to erase this reality and replace it with a narrow and politically motivated narrative designed to divide and diminish the Founders.
The dishonesty deepens when Burns cherry-picks Ben Franklin’s testimony, stopping just short of including Franklin’s clear explanation that the colonies’ grievance was with Parliament’s internal taxes, not land. This selective editing is proof the series isn’t about historical integrity—it’s about pushing a woke agenda. Frankly, suggesting the Revolution was a land grab against Native tribes is a slap in the face to those who fought and died to build a nation of freedom and equality under law.
Then comes the laughable claim that the fledgling American government was built on Native American confederacies, a theory debunked repeatedly by historians and long dismissed as academic junk science. The Founders—steeped in classical knowledge of Rome, Athens, and British constitutional law—borrowed from centuries of Western tradition, not from tribal governments. Yet Burns reveres these fanciful claims as if they were gospel, pandering to modern progressive inclinations while rewriting the origins of democracy in America. It’s another layer of the left’s relentless assault on our nation’s founding truths.
PBS and Ken Burns have transformed what should be a noble tribute to America’s birth into a partisan lecture steeped in grievance and revisionism. They trade respect for history in exchange for woke narratives that seek to tear down the very principles that made this country great. If this is the future of public broadcasting, one has to wonder: what happened to honest storytelling? Or does America’s true history only matter when it fits a radical left agenda? Real patriots deserve better.
Source: American Thinker
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