Ken Burns has once again shown his true colors—not as a historian, but as a woke ideologue hell-bent on rewriting America’s founding through a radical leftwing lens. His latest series on the American Revolution abandons honest history in favor of the discredited 1619 Project narrative, a politicized attack on America’s founding fathers and the very principles that birthed this nation. Burns’s disdain for the truth is nothing short of an insult to every patriot who cherishes the real story of American independence.
First, Burns pushes the absurd claim that the Revolution was driven mainly by a lust for stealing Native American land and that slavery was a central cause of the colonies’ break from Britain. These ideas sail straight into the territory of historical fantasy. The truth is the colonial rebellion was rooted in a fight for liberty and rights—the ancient rights of Englishmen—not some Marxist tale about greed and racial guilt. Southern slaveholders had already thrown off British control months before the so-called “Dunmore’s Proclamation” that Burns profanely cites as a game-changer. This proclamation, which promised freedom to slaves who fought for the British, was no catalyst for revolution—it was a sideshow in a much larger, deeper struggle for freedom from tyranny.
Burns doesn’t just twist timelines—he paints George Washington as a villainous slave owner locked in perpetual cruelty, ignoring the well-documented evolution of Washington’s thinking. Yes, Washington owned slaves, but he also came to embrace the abolitionist cause after the war. The story Burns clings to about Washington refusing to pay a young slave is a late-19th-century invention with no basis in fact and belongs in the landfill of leftist propaganda, not a reputable history series. Rather than celebrating Washington’s complex legacy and the colonies’ foundational abolitionist stirrings—once the first in world history—Burns slanders in the service of the woke agenda.
The abolitionist movement in colonial America sprang from the very core of Western thought that Burns pretends to dismiss. It was built on the natural rights philosophy championed by John Locke, the same philosophy that inspired America’s founding documents. Quakers, Methodists, and key figures like James Otis Jr., Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson all recognized slavery as incompatible with the ideals of liberty and justice. These were men wrestling honestly with their times, sometimes flawed but striving for a moral vision Burns deliberately obscures. Yet Burns, with all his prestige and resources, chooses to erase this crucial history, leaving only a caricature crafted for political weaponry.
This disgraceful distortion isn’t just bad history—it’s anti-American and anti-Western civilization. It smears our Founders, undermines our heritage, and fuels the never-ending leftist campaign that America’s greatness is a lie built on racist oppression. That narrative is not just false; it’s poison designed to divide and conquer. Ken Burns might have a gift for filmmaking, but his gift for spinning ideological fairy tales is worse for the soul of this country than any mythical British oppression.
So here’s the question: Why does Burns, who could enlighten and inspire, choose instead to peddle these leftist lies? Is it blind ideology? Careerism? Or the globalist effort to weaken American pride and patriotism by poisoning our historical truth? Whatever the reason, Burns’s abject failure to respect facts, context, and genuine American courage is a betrayal every true patriot must reject. The American Revolution was never about stealing land or preserving slavery—it was the fight for freedom itself. And no revisionist hack can rewrite that.
Source: American Thinker
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