Writer Douglas MacKinnon has a clear message for Independence Day: Don’t take your freedom for granted.

MacKinnon: The five-alarm-fire wake-up call to defend and honor the 56 signers of our Declaration of Independence came to me quite shockingly, on July 4th last year.

It was then, on the very day we celebrate the birth of our nation, that I witnessed example after example of those from the left and the far-left––be they in the mainstream media, activists, or anarchists––calling for not only the “canceling” of the Fourth of July, and the American flag, but the continued smearing, censorship, and canceling of our founding fathers. As I did, one overriding thought filled my mind: Those who believe such totalitarian censorship could never come to be in the United States of America, need only review how quickly and brutally many on the left were able to create the woke cancel culture to silence those they oppose.

Now some on the left openly declare they are coming for Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Franklin, and others who courageously signed the Declaration of Independence.

Just this past week, woke school board members in California were calling for the Fourth of July to be “boycotted” and not celebrated. It was and is these collective declared acts of censorship, targeting the Fourth of July and the 56 men who signed our Declaration of Independence which galvanized me to write a book in their defense.

That document and those men created our history. The history of which should never be bent, twisted, censored, or banned to fit any ideological narrative. As I stress in “The 56”, if our history is bad, let us condemn it and learn from it. If it is good, let us praise it and build upon it. But let us never twist, censor, or cancel our shared American history.

Such are the acts of cowardly totalitarians who — as Jefferson stressed almost 250 years ago — fear the people. And yet, since the left and far-left does control a majority of the media, academia, entertainment, science, and medicine…who is to stop them?

As I highlight in my book, each of us can still instill the lessons of liberty handed down from those who put their very lives on the line to sign the Declaration of Independence.

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As these 56 men knew, unless and until those who push tyranny imprison us or take our lives, they cannot silence our individual voices. They can’t stop us from passing along the truth from one American patriot to the next.

And yet, sadly, as a new Fox News poll out this week has just indicated, pride in the United States of America is down significantly. One reason for that is because the far-left has managed to take away our voices via their control of those five megaphones…

In my book, while I do highlight, honor, and seek to protect all 56 signers of the declaration via the small chapters on each, I also spotlight the fact that the authoritarian dictates silencing the voices of the people in 1776 dangerously parallel the tyrannies of today.