Transcription
America 250 is approaching. Very exciting stuff. Except for Democrats who are divided between whether to rip the founders or proclaim that they were communist revolutionaries. Alexander Okaziocortez is trying to grab hold of that American flag by claiming that actually the American founders were Marxists of some sort at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. My goodness, she brought the average IQ at Chicago down by at least 20 points here. The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time. And we are declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and power and the state that the voices of everyday people did not exist.
I mean, I have some bad news for her. The founding fathers were pretty rich comparatively speaking and also were rebelling against the expropriation of property by the government. That's literally the thing they were rebelling against. So there's that. But you know, you don't have to be bright to be in democratic politics. Apparently, you don't even have to be particularly well-versed in order to teach history.
At Boston College, there's a woman named Heather Cox Richardson. She has the top politics Substack newsletter in the country, something like 3 million subscribers. Here she was in conversation with one David Rubenstein on C-SPAN talking about the founding fathers. Oh, I think he couldn't have written it unless he was a slave owner, which sounds weird, but that's the very contradiction at the heart of who we are as Americans. When those men looked out at their fields full of enslaved people and said, "We are all created equal," they were writing out of we all the people that didn't look like them, uh, didn't sound like them, didn't have the same kind of money they did. And by getting rid of the vast majority of humanity, women, people of color, black Americans, and so on, they could say, "Oh yeah, we're all created equal."
But the genius of our age from their declaration of that to the present and I hope beyond is recognizing that those principles, even though they had limits on them, don't have to have limits on them for us. And that's exactly what happened. As soon as the declaration comes out, you have people like Phyllis Wheatley, the black poet from Boston, writing to an indigenous preacher saying, "Those are great principles and we feel the same way." And that's what we've been doing ever since. That's what America is. And her idea is that Thomas Jefferson didn't know what he was writing about when he said, "All men are created equal." That is a complete flattening of Thomas Jefferson as a political character. Yes, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. And yes, Thomas Jefferson also particularly in this period was fully aware of the conflict between his own slaveolding and the principles of the declaration. This idea that the the founders had to write out vast swaths of humanity to come up with all men are created equal. That is that is not correct.