Conservatives want to defund NPR over article on racist issues with Declaration of Independence

Conservatives and critics feud on Twitter after founding document read out with historical context for 4 July holiday

NPR radio received criticism for a contextual reading of the Declaration of Independence (Shutterstock / DCStockPhotography)

Conservatives are calling for NPR to be defunded after the station explained racism within the Declaration of Independence.

In a reading on Sunday, the public radio station issued a Twitter thread on the founding document — as is tradition for 4th July — with a series of footnotes detailing the racial references to enslaved Black people in it.

NPR explained that “after last summer’s [anti-racism] protests and our national reckoning on race, the words in the document land differently” for this 4th July.

Both an article and the Twitter thread noted that the Declaration of Independence says “all men are created equal”, but that “women, enslaved people, Indigenous people and many others were not held as equal at the time.”

It was the first time NPR had critiqued the founding document for the 4th July holiday, and immediately faced criticism from conservatives for doing so — many of whom called for the pubic radio station to be defunded.

However, supporters of the station hit back.

Travis DeCoster, wrote: “They [NPR] literally just retweeted the entire Declaration. If you think that counts as ‘denouncing’ you got issues.”

NPR (National Public Radio), was founded in 1970 as a nonprofit station for the US, and receives a small percentage of its funding from the US federal government — attracting more than 32 million listeners weekly.

The Independent has approached NPR for comment.