Instead of celebrating America's 250th birthday, progressive group helping organize it plans on sabotaging it

As someone privileged to graduate high school in the year of our nation’s Bicentennial — 1976 — I looked forward with anticipation to celebrating America's 250th birthday next year. Sadly, it now appears that radical leftist organizations are working to hijack this historic milestone, turning what should be a celebration of American greatness into yet another exercise in national self-criticism.

In 1976, our celebration was joyful and unifying. At Enrico Fermi High School in Enfield, Connecticut, we created “Fermi ‘76,” a nationally recognized model for high school Bicentennial celebrations. We were even honored with an invitation to Washington, D.C., including a trip to the White House. Though young and politically naïve at the time, I now realize how truly fortunate I was to experience such patriotic pride.

Fast-forward 49 years: President Trump has promised a grand, patriotic celebration for America’s 250th birthday. But troubling reports reveal that the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission — also known as America 250 — is veering sharply off course. According to The Federalist, the Commission has embraced programming heavily influenced by the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), a nonprofit pushing a progressive, critical view of American history.

AASLH’s own president, John Dichtl, described the 250th anniversary not as a moment to celebrate America's achievements, but as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to critically engage with our nation’s history," emphasizing "our faults, past and present" and calling for "changes we need to make now to move toward justice."

Their official "field guide" for the celebration is filled with far-left themes:

• Unfinished Revolutions
   
• Power of Place
   
• We the People
   
• American Experiment
   
• Doing History
   

These themes are not intended to inspire patriotic pride. Instead, they seek to reframe American history primarily through the lens of grievance and exclusion.

For example, while our Fermi ‘76 program celebrated America's “endless revolution” — the idea of a dynamic, growing nation born from courage and sacrifice — AASLH’s "Unfinished Revolutions" focuses on so-called "revolutionary moments" that supposedly expose America's failures. “We the People” invites debates about who has been "excluded" from democracy rather than honoring the incredible bravery of the farmers, blacksmiths, and merchants who fought the most powerful empire in the world.

As The Federalist notes, these themes redirect attention from the Revolution’s founding ideals toward divisive contemporary political debates, such as expanding the vote to non-citizens or criticizing our criminal justice system.

The AASLH even questions whether the American Revolution was truly “revolutionary,” implying that its outcomes were incomplete or unjust, rather than world-changing and historic. Their theme "Doing History" focuses not on celebrating those who built the nation but on amplifying grievances about who was "silenced" in traditional historical narratives.

Let us be clear:
America is not, and has never been, a perfect nation. But it is the greatest nation in the world — a beacon of liberty, founded on principles that have inspired billions across the globe. Over 360,000 Union soldiers gave their lives to end slavery. President Abraham Lincoln paid the ultimate price to preserve the union and end injustice. Yet, instead of celebrating that sacrifice, the radical left continues to smear America as irredeemably racist, echoing the poisonous ideology behind The 1619 Project.

Worse still, even conservative states like Texas and Idaho have, perhaps unwittingly, adopted AASLH’s programming because of the widespread distribution of their materials — over 20,000 copies of their guide already in circulation among historians, scholars, and educators.

In 1976, after the wounds of Vietnam and Watergate, our nation needed a reminder of what made it great. The Bicentennial gave us that. Now, in 2026, we face another crossroads. America needs unity, not division. Celebration, not deconstruction.

We cannot allow far-left activists to hijack our Semiquincentennial.
We must stand firm and celebrate 250 years of liberty, sacrifice, achievement, and enduring hope.

God Bless America