My digital subscription to The Philadelphia Inquirer hits my bank account for $27.96 every four weeks, or $363.48 every year. The City of Brotherly Love is where the members of the Continental Congress met and finally declared our independence from King George and Great Britain 250 years and one day ago. Yet our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper used the Semiquincentennial primarily to trash the United States of America.
I expected the column from far-left, Trump Derangement Syndrome-addled Will Bunch entitles “The America-turns-250 column Donald Trump doesn’t want me to write“. He is like a broken record.
We noted on Independence Day how the newspaper’s Editorial Board decided not to be proud of what our great country has accomplished, but to tell readers that our nation’s soul was in balance, because President Trump was doing something radical like actually enforcing our immigration laws and sinking drug smuggling boats. The newspaper, which spent much of 2024 telling us how democracy itself was at stake in the November election abhors the result of that free and democratic election. The newspaper told us, following President Biden’s bumbling debate performance which showed the entire country that he was sinking into dementia, the Board of the Inquirer, seeing The New York Times’ editorial title of “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race,” came up with “To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race.“
Apparently 77,302,580 Americans disagreed.
As the newspaper constantly decried Mr Trump not being thrown in jail, joining the chorus of Democrats telling us that “No one is above the law,” the newspaper wants us to believe that illegal immigrants are above our immigration laws.
The Inky has been aghast that President Trump wanted, and got, a display pointing out that George Washington owned slaves removed, to try not to trash the reputation of the commander-in-chief of our revolutionary Army who won our independence for us. And now I find an article trashing part of the Declaration of Independence:
Three words in the Declaration of Independence paint a cruel picture of Natives
As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, Native American scholars and tribal leaders are reflecting on the Founding Fathers’ use of the derogatory description.
by Dana Hedgpeth, The Washington Post | Tuesday, June 30, 2026 | 7:08 AM EDT
McKaylin Peters, a 24-year-old Native American graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, still recalls when she first heard the words “merciless Indian savages.”
Sitting in social studies class at her predominantly White middle school near Green Bay, Wisconsin — a school that once used an image of an Indian as its mascot, she cringed when the teacher read a passage deep in the Declaration of Independence: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Peters said she and the six other Native students in the class looked quietly at one another.
“I was upset. It just rolled off her tongue very easily,” recalled Peters, a citizen of the Menominee Nation who is getting her master’s in organizational leadership. “It seemed like no one else was shocked except for us, the Indigenous students in the classroom. We were like, ‘Did she really just say that?’”
When Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, which originated in an early draft of the Virginia Constitution that Mr Jefferson also produced, they were put on paper just thirteen years after the French and Indian War, very much in the recent memory of the members of the Continental Congress. Mr Jefferson’s home at Monticello is not that far east of the Appalachian Mountains, where Virginians wanted to spread in violation of the King’s “Proclamation of 1763, which barred settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.”
The fact is simple: in 1776, the rebellious colonists did see the aboriginal inhabitants as “merciless Indian savages.” I understand that McKaylin Peters, herself a descendant of Indians, doesn’t like that, but she’s using 21st century sensibilities to judge 18th century men. More interesting to me is that the Inquirer chose to reprint it. Why, it’s almost as though the newspaper is trying to trash the United States around the turn of our 250th year.
On Monday, the newspaper pushed again, publishing another OpEd piece comparing federal immigration enforcement officers to the British soldiers occupying Boston in 1770:
In January, Bruce Springsteen released a passionate anti-ICE ballad, “The Streets of Minneapolis,” in which he named Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “King Trump’s private army.” Dedicated to the memory of two protestors who died at the hands of armed government agents in a frigid Minnesota winter, the song invites comparisons to Paul Revere’s famous and equally passionate engraving of the 1770 “Boston Massacre.” Revere’s image depicts a bloodthirsty line of soldiers shooting directly into a crowd of unarmed Bostonians, killing five and injuring six more. In calling ICE a king’s private army, Springsteen drew on a long history of protest against standing armies, one built on the belief that accountability to the people and their representatives is the foundation for political liberty.
Except, of course, Renee Good was armed, with an automobile that she used to try to run down an ICE agent, while Alex Pretti was carrying and attempting to pull out a firearm when he was sent to his eternal reward.
The newspaper gave OpEd space to Michael Coard, who wrote:
The group I founded and lead, the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, is one of the groups appealing the decision — a ruling that called to mind one of the author James Baldwin’s most profound statements: “To be Black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.”
If you’re Black and conscious in America, you know about slavery and sharecropping and convict leasing and lynching and Jim Crow and disenfranchisement and gerrymandering and redlining and police brutality and mass incarceration — and therefore you are necessarily enraged.
Two adjoining paragraphs, both mentioning rage. Why, it’s almost as though Mr Coard is promoting rage . . . and the violence that implies.
This was just reporting:
Five arrested during Philly Fourth celebrations as protesters attempted to burn American flag
The arrests happen during an otherwise peaceful celebration of America’s 250th birthday in Philadelphia.
by Rob Tornoe | Aphelion Day, July 6, 2026 | 10:40 AM EDT
Five people were arrested ahead of Philadelphia’s July Fourth celebration after protesters attempted to set an American flag on fire, according to police.
A small group of protesters gathered outside Washington Square around 6 p.m. Saturday, with signs calling for “No celebrations of empire” and proclaiming “All empires fall.”
According to video of the incident, what began as a peaceful protest unraveled as an unidentified woman attempted to light an American flag on fire.
“During the protest, one of the individuals in the group placed an American flag on the sidewalk and doused it with a large amount of an accelerant,” a Philadelphia police spokesperson said in a statement.
Burning an American flag is considered a protected form of free speech, upheld by the Supreme Court. But burning a flag on a public street in Philadelphia is generally prohibited due to the city’s strict safety rules on setting fires.
There’s more at the original.
I can’t fault the newspaper for a straight news story, but I will note that the Inky isn’t trying to contribute to American patriotism in any way. Rather, they’d rather trash the most prosperous, most free country on earth.
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