This year’s Independence Day was marred for many of us by anti-American protests right here at home. President Donald Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore was a bracing antidote to the sound and fury of the “tear it all down” crowd.

Here are excerpts from that speech along with reactions from a veteran patriot, Newt Gingrich, and a proud immigrant, Liel Leibovitz, senior writer for Tablet Magazine.

President Trump: 

No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the United States of America. And no people have done more to promote human progress than the citizens of our great nation.

… In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.

Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.

Newt Gingrich: 

President Donald Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore may be the most important and historic speech of his career.

… President Trump [has placed himself] squarely in the middle of the cultural war on the side of America. He is fighting against those like Joe Biden, whose July 4th statement was the most anti-American of any presidential candidate in our history. Where Biden in a recent tweet said he did not want to rebuild America but transform it, President Trump clearly believes America is a country worth saving and rebuilding. The gap could not be wider.

… We are fortunate that President Trump has the courage to say and do what he believes without regard to his critics. It’s exactly what American needs.

Liel Leibovitz:

What to this immigrant is the 4th of July? It’s America’s birthday, but it’s also, in a sense, mine. It’s a confirmation of my choice to leave behind other scenes and other cultures and reinvent myself anew on these shores, and an affirmation of all the virtues that drew me here.

… The president may not be your favorite messenger, and you may be excused for doubting his commitment to much beyond his own appetites and ambitions. That’s fine. But as a statement of America’s founding principles, Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech was as eloquent and powerful a speech as any elected official has made in a long, long while, precisely because it contained, at its core, the emotional truth every immigrant holds to be self-evident: Knowing that it’s here and only here that accidents of birth can be transcended with relative ease and the full bloom of one’s genius allowed to flourish precisely because the cultural soil is so rich and so varied and contains multitudes.