Ali Velshi's 'Deep Unease' Over America at 250

Tim Graham on Jun 3, 2026

One way you can appreciate that America is a free country is that the Left feels free to dump on the 250th anniversary of America's founding. The New Yorker can ask "How Problematic Is Patriotism?" Their answer is "very problematic."

MS NOW host Ali Velshi channeled this spirit on May 31. He fussed that "America has never actually fully reckoned with its racist past and its original founding sin of slavery. In one month, America will mark the 250th anniversary of its founding. Like previous anniversaries, there is a deep unease about this. I feel a deep unease about the celebrations to which I am invited to mark the 250th anniversary of our so-called democracy."

Our "so-called democracy." This is how leftists talk when their party is out of power. The Voting Rights Act has been "gutted," Velshi proclaimed, causing redistricting with "the explicit effect of taking political power away from black Americans." This complaint relies on the argument that blacks only have voting rights if they can vote other blacks into power -- and not just any blacks, but black Democrats.

These lecturers are never pressed about whether black Republicans count as blacks -- because the Congressional Black Caucus refuses to accept them. They kvetch about America being profoundly racist but aren't forced to admit that many black members of Congress are elected in white-majority (or white-plurality) districts or states.

Velshi touted his MS NOW colleague, professor Eddie Glaude, and his new book "America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries." On the Left, America is forever tagged as racist, and anniversaries are all about cultivating a harmful "mythology" of American greatness.

Velshi read a passage: "American double consciousness is the consequence of a nation that defines itself with the foundational principle of the equality of men and, yet, holds others as chattel or resigns them to second-class status. ...The principle and the practice cannot coexist without contradictions, and to hold them together, as if they can, is a form of madness."

Speaking of "mythology," which black Americans are presently being held as chattel in this country? If patriotic Americans are accused of denial of America's past, the Glaudes of the world can be charged with a denial of the American present. They cannot accept the contradiction that we've made progress and we no longer have chattel slavery, and black Americans have full voting rights.

Glaude appeared on Velshi's program to suggest the people celebrating this anniversary are racists exploiting the notion of patriotism: "White nationalists have seized control over the federal government, and they're trying to put forward, they've made their choice, the double consciousness that you talked about at the beginning, that America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic."

Glaude asserted the Left has been "ushering in a multi-racial democracy," and Team Trump is tearing it down, both through detaining illegal immigrants at Delaney Hall in New Jersey and "disenfranchisement of black folk over there. It's all one and the same."

MS NOW will claim any laments over the mass importation of immigrants distorting democracy constitute a "conspiracy theory," but it's somehow not a conspiracy theory to say all of America's happy patriots are historic echoes of Klansmen, out to eviscerate black and Latino voting rights.

Glaude claimed: "Fundamentally, you have people who assume that this country must be and must remain a white nation, and they will do anything, even destroy the basic foundations of democracy to make it so."

This is how MS NOW distorts Independence Day into an anti-Juneteenth -- a holiday only celebrated by white supremacists. That's a ludicrous argument.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.