Fourth Of July: San Diego Beachgoers Display Their Knowledge Of Independence Day [Video]
To commemorate the Fourth Of July, political activist and author Mark Dice tested the basic knowledge of some Americans at a San Diego beach about the meaning of Independence Day, the holiday that marks the 13 original colonies’ Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776 as adopted by the Continental Congress.
At least based on the on-camera interviews with the friendly, good-natured vacationers at the oceanfront pier (see above clip), the results weren’t exactly a cause for celebration.
“We celebrate the 4th of July as the day we overtook the South. And the Declaration of Independence was signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1964. Or was it 1984? Those were some of the things media analyst Mark Dice learned when he asked San Diego beachgoers about the holiday,” PJ Media summarized.
A tourist from Italy was the only person in the clip who knew the significance of July 4 in America and didn’t struggle coming up with an answer.
According to the internet, Mark Dice is a conspiracy theorist and 9/11 Truther. Parenthetically, whether the tight, sleeveless T-shirt is a good look is up to the reader to decide.
Dice filmed the same stunt in July 2013, with the same outcome.
The results of Dice’s pop history quiz perhaps should not be a big surprise. A 2010 Marist poll indicated that 26 percent of Americans were unaware that Great Britain was the country from which we separated.
In a survey of about 1,000 teens conducted by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, about 20 percent were unaware that Britain was our adversary, ABC News reported. “The survey reported that 15 percent of U.S. teens didn’t know the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776. A significant percentage of teens weren’t sure who was doing the declaring, either — 17 percent didn’t know there were 13 original colonies…More than a quarter of those surveyed didn’t know the two sides fighting in the Civil War.”
Prior to this year’s July 4th holiday, Dice made his way to the San Diego beach area to prank Obama supporters into signing a petition supporting a fictional preemptive nuclear attack on Russia. In another recent spoof, he pranked bystanders at a San Diego college into a signing a fake petition to replace the American flag. “I wanted to see if these politically correct millennials, basically, would ban the American flag,” the Washington Examiner quoted Dice as saying.
Do you think Mark Dice’s Independence Day video is properly representative of the average American’s knowledge or lack thereof of American history generally and the Fourth of July in particular?
