These Democrat Narratives Are a Lame Excuse for an Agenda

 

I’d like to talk about Democratic talking points. By that, I mean, these memes, these topics, these themes that they use. But they seem to be divorced from reality.

Take the Epstein files. Remember, Epstein files? Epstein files. Epstein files. Gotta have the Epstein files released. They all said that Trump was hiding things. And rational people said the Democratic administration had the files for four years. Given what they had done to Trump with lawfare, you would’ve thought that if there was anything incriminating, they would’ve released it.]

And then, of course, there were rumors that 80% to 90% of the people mentioned in the files were Democrats. And then there was also an investigation, through leaks, that Donald Trump ostracized Jeffrey Epstein—and here’s the key point—before he was convicted of sexual crime. So, there was nothing there. And yet, as soon as Trump comes in, Epstein files, Epstein files. Epstein files. So, he releases them. And what does it show? Exactly what everybody knew and what the Democrats, themselves, knew. Did they say, “We’re sorry, we cooked this all up, there was nothing in the files”? No. They went on right to Obamacare.

Affordable Care Act. Let’s shut down the government. Republicans will not give us all this money. Multi-billion-dollar subsidies. And then people said, “Well, come on, you guys. You publicize it as the new health care plan. Only 25 million Americans are in it. A small fraction. It doesn’t work. You, yourself, said that they needed subsidies. And you were willing to put a time limit on it. And the subsidies ran out. And they weren’t even enough.”

It’s just constant, constant, constant. This isn’t the issue. Yes, it is. Affordable Care Act. Affordable Care Act. That’s all that matters. Affordable care—and then the government was shut down, for the longest time in history. Forty days. And now it’s open. Has anybody heard anybody talk about the Affordable Care Act? I haven’t.

And then it was Trump’s health. Trump’s health. Trump’s health. He’s got spots on his arms. He has cankles. He’s limping. He looks bad. He’s losing his mind. Everybody said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You people hid the demonstrable cognitive decline of Joe Biden for four years with a very strange White House media conspiracy. Now you’re suggesting that Trump is non compos mentis? But he just took a health exam. An MRI body scan.” No, no, no, no. He’s cognitively declined. So then, he releases it. It shows that he is in perfect health for someone his age. Does anybody talk about Trump’s health? No. No. No.

And then it’s affordability. Affordability. Affordability. That’s what it’s all about. Affordability. Well, wait a minute. During the Biden administration, there was a cumulative inflation of 21%. That averages out to 5.2% per year. Per year. When Donald Trump came in, Jan. 20th, 2025, it had dipped to 3%. But given all the things that Trump has done, it’s still 3%. He has not increased inflation. He has brought in $10 trillion, at least, of foreign investment. There’s going to be enormous stimuli next year, as far as oil and gas production at record levels, the Big Beautiful Bill’s deregulation, tax cuts. And do we hear about affordability? Affordability? Affordability? Not really. I mean, there’s no real issue. The inflation rate is lower, this year, than in any year on average of the Biden administration. And it’s going get better next year.

So, what am I trying to get at? What’s going on? Why do they fixate on these themes, and then they just drive it, drive it, drive it? And the fact is, their acts of commission and omission, they feel that they can create chaos. They can make people angry. They can bomb Tesla dealerships. They can shut down the government. They can stop ICE. They can tell soldiers to disobey orders. But that’s a negative message. What is omitted? That’s the committed message.

But what is omitted? Do they say, “Here’s my alternate plan for immigration. I want one million, two million, three million illegal. I want to go back to the Biden [administration], two million illegal aliens a year”? No, nothing. “Obamacare: Here’s how we’re going to solve it so we don’t need subsidies. A, B, C.” Nothing.

Trump’s health: “We introduce legislation that every president has to have an annual physical, every year. And everything has to be transparent.” If that had been true, Biden would’ve been 25th Amendmented the first year of his term. Do they have a crime initiative? Do they have a foreign policy initiative? Do they have any initiative? No. So, what they try to do is: A, create chaos so we’ll all lay down in the fetal position, say, “Please stop it. I don’t want it.” Or they’re going to talk about affordability, affordability, affordability, without ever mentioning that under their auspices, the DEI, the ESG, The Green New Deal, it was all regulate, regulate, restrict, slow down. And we had 21% inflation. We had low GDP. Do we want to go back to that?

So, they don’t talk about it. So don’t pay any attention to Epstein files, Obamacare, Trump’s MRI, affordability. These are all just excuses for the absence of 51% on the issues. And a lack of a systematic, comprehensive, alternate agenda, that they can present to Donald Trump. That all this is absurd does not mean it doesn’t work. I mean, we have a candidate who, in Virginia, running for attorney general, said that he wanted his opponent dead and his children dead. And he won. He won. We had a candidate for the mayoral race who said he wanted to seize the means of production. And [Zohran] Mamdani won.

We have all these races where crazy things happen. But that doesn’t mean that we have to accept them, as not crazy. They’re crazy. And don’t pay any attention to them because it’s just an excuse for the lack of a serious agenda.

The Blue State Baby Bust

 

person 1: The last symptom that we want to talk about today, Victor, is fertility. And we know that the university and the rhetoric in the United States is—

Person 2: Yes, and climate too.

person 1:   Yeah, because of climate, we don’t want to have children. 

person 2: Didn’t [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] say that?

person 1: AOC said that the world was going to end in like 10 years or something.” I don’t know what it was. Who listens to her?  https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=THEDAILYSIGNAL9229032385

person 2: She said she wasn’t going to have kids and have more AOCs, and I thought, “Promises, promises.” [Editor’s Note: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said it is a “legitimate question” to ask if it’s OK to have children due to the climate crisis. She did not rule out having children of her own.]  That’s a problem. I’m not just being in jest. If you look at fertility in the 20 so-called blue states, it is about one point. We average everybody about 1.73. Just in 1999, we were 2.1. I’m talking about people who were born in the United States, the fertility rate. It was about 1.71. But in blue states, it’s about 1.4. And in red states, about 2.1. 

So what’s happening, all you people in Arizona, Florida, Wyoming, Utah, you’re having like two to three kids, and four million people a year are joining you. And you people in blue states, like where I am, we’re having about 1.4 kids and nobody’s coming here. Everybody’s leaving. Our congressional districts, we’re going to surrender unless we cheat like we’re trying to in California. And they’ve stopped Texas from trying to cheat for their conservatives. We’re going to lose all of our congressional districts, and our economies are going to be backward. But we’ve got to keep doing it. We’ve got to keep getting left, left, left, left. Climate, climate, climate. 

So, fertility is a big problem and Europe is worse. It’s not averaging 1.7. It’s averaging about 1.4. In some countries like Italy and Germany, I think it’s almost 1.2. And why is that? I have got to be very careful how I say that, but traditionally, declining fertility is commiserate not just with health. 

Childhood diseases killed most people. If you were in ancient Greece, a woman would have to be pregnant 10 times to deliver four births to have the three births be successful out of the four and to have two children survive puberty. Maybe 20 pregnancies later, but with the industrial revolution, modern sanitation, health care, that’s not true.

But usually it’s the emancipation of women that makes the fertility go down because they want to get in on the good life with men and have a say in things and child rearing for affluent people, men and women, but particularly women, because it puts more of a—I don’t want to use the word burden—but more responsibility to physically have children and to nurse them. It’s a drag, they think. That’s what they’re told in college.

If you went to college and you said, “Hi, I’m Suzy Smith. And I’m from Utah. And I just want to say in this class on American history that I’m here to do my patriotic part. I want to marry one of you guys in class. I want to get my B.A. in American Studies. And I plan on having three to four children and raise them up to be good old red-blooded patriotic Americans and law-abiding. And that’s my goal. And if I can do that, I made a wonderful contribution.”

I’m not mocking that. That is a noble thing to say, and that person will be demonized and told, “Get out of here.” If you said, “Hello, I’m Samantha Joan. You know, I’m just here because of the patriarchy. It’s so oppressive. And after six or seven boyfriends this year, I was so upset at them. They were just losers, and you know that my women’s studies professors have suggested that because Donald Trump is going to try to take abortion away from us, I have to be very careful. And I’m considering transitioning, but I haven’t decided Firyet.” That’s the alternative. It’s kind of like the difference between Karine Jean-Pierre at the podium and Karoline Leavitt, you know what I mean? It’s Miss Sunshine bouncy happy and has already had one baby and probably will have two more. 

person 1: And super smart and right on top of it and responsive to the press. 

person 2: Yeah. To get serious for change, I mean I’m serious, but I was too mocking. It is the barometer of a healthy society. When Rome had its greatest problems in the first century AD and the third century AD and you look at the Italian birth rate, it really plummeted. And you can see glimpses in the description of women in Plautus and Terence, but especially, as I said, in first century BC and AD literature that there’s not an emphasis on the Italian agrarian model of kids and family and all that anymore. It’s just not, and the same thing happened in Greece. And I think all of us just think, wow. 

My grandmother was one of 11 children. My grandfather was one of three boys, my maternal. My paternal grandfather was one of four boys. I don’t know about my paternal grandmother, because she died before I was born, but I think she had four sisters. 

My parents had three of us. One child was lost, my sister, at an early age. And then my aunt and that family had two. Then my other family, my parents had my mom who had four deliveries, three survived to adulthood. And then her sister had two and her other sister was crippled and couldn’t have children. So that’s the story. Each generation gets smaller children. And then we say, “Well, we’re going to have immigration. That’ll keep up for two.” It would be energizing if it was, as I said, diverse and legal and integrated and assimilated and skilled. 

Why Gen Z Men Are Struggling

 

The current generation “Z”—those now roughly between 13 and 28 years old—is becoming our 21st-century version of the “Lost Generation.” Members of Gen Z are often nicknamed “Zoomers,” a term used to describe young adults who came of age in the era of smartphones, social media, and rapid cultural upheaval.

Males in their teens and 20s are prolonging their adolescence—rarely marrying, not buying a home, not having children, and often not working full-time.

The negative stereotype of a Zoomer is a shiftless man, who plays too many video games. He is too coddled by parents and too afraid to strike out on his own.

Zoomers rarely date supposedly out of fear that they would have to grow up, take charge, and head a household.

Yet the opposite, sympathetic generalization of Gen Z seems more accurate.

All through K-12, young men, particularly white males, have been demonized for their “toxic masculinity” that draws accusations of sexism, racism, and homophobia.

In college, the majority of students are female. In contrast, white males—9% to 10% of admittees in recent years at elite schools like Stanford and the Ivy League—are of no interest to college admission officers.

So they are tagged not as unique individuals but as superfluous losers of the “wrong” race, gender, or sexual orientation.

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Gen Z men saw themselves scapegoated by professors and society for the sins of past generations—and on the wrong side of the preposterous reductionist binary of oppressors and the oppressed.

Traditional pathways to adulthood—affordable homes, upwardly mobile and secure jobs, and safe and secure city and suburban living—had mostly vanished amid overregulation, overtaxation, and underpolicing.

Orthodox and loud student advocates on campus—climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Palestinians—had little to do with getting a job, raising a family, or buying a house.

During the Joe Biden years, white males mostly stopped enlisting in the military in their accustomed overrepresented numbers.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, they had died in frontline combat units at twice their percentages for the demographic. No matter—prior Pentagon DEI commissars still slandered them as suspects likely to form racist cabals.

Gen Z males seemed bewildered by women and sex—and often withdrew from dating.
Never has popular culture so promoted sexually provocative fashions, semi-nudity, and freewheeling lifestyles, and careers of supposedly empowered single women.

And never had the rules of dating and sexuality become more retrograde Victorian.

Casual consensual sex was flashed as cool everywhere on social media. And when it naturally proved in the real world to be selfish, callous, and empty, males were almost always exclusively blamed as if they were not proper Edwardian gentlemen.

Soon, young men feared sexual hookups and promiscuity as avenues to post facto and one-sided charges of harassment—or worse.

For the half of Generation Z who went to college, tuition had soared, rising faster than the rate of inflation. Administrators were often more numerous than faculty. Obsessive fixations with race determined everything from dorm selections to graduation ceremonies.

Zoomers were mired in enormous student debt.

Yet they soon learned that their gut social science and “studies” degrees proved nearly worthless. Employers saw such certificates as neither proof of traditional knowledge nor of any needed specialized skill set.

Unemployed or half-employed Zoomers then ended up with unsustainable five-figure student loans, and the insidious interest on them. Their affluent, left-wing tenured profs, who had once demonized them as oppressors, could have cared less about their dismal fates.

Add it all up, and Zoomers puzzled their parents. And they found scant guidance from the campus.

Instead, they sought needed spiritual inspiration from a Jordan Peterson, entertainment and pragmatic advice from a Joe Rogan, but sometimes toxic venting from a demagogic, antisemitic Nick Fuentes.

What would shock the lost generation back into the mainstream, barring a war, depression, or natural catastrophe?

One, an end to DEI hectoring and blame-gaming, and a return to class rather than race determining “privilege.”

Two, some sanity in the war between the sexes. When women represent nearly 60% of undergraduates, why does gender still assure an advantage in admissions and hiring?

Three, the federal government needs to stop funding $1.7 trillion in student debt, often for worthless degrees, and wasting away one’s prime 20s and 30s.

Let universities pledge their endowments to guarantee their own loans. They should graduate students in four years. And they must slash the parasitical class of toxic administrative busybodies who cannot teach but can hector and bully.

Four, society needs to stop granting status on the basis of increasingly meaningless letters and titles after a name.

Skilled tradesmen like electricians and mechanics are noble professionals. And their status and compensation should reflect their value to society—far more so than a bachelor’s degree in a- studies major or years vaporized in off-and-on college.

Finally, incentivize building homes, rather than overregulating and zoning them into unaffordability.
If the lost Gen Z is not found soon, the result for everyone will not be pretty.

America’s About to Have a ‘Rendezvous’ With Europe’s Immigration Disaster

 

I’d like to talk about immigration, legal and illegal. Under President Joe Biden, we let in an estimated 2 million illegal immigrants and about 1 million legal immigrants. We’re starting to see some of the consequences that happen when you don’t vet people at the border.

We have, over the years, a massive Somali expatriate population in Minnesota. Now we are learning that during the COVID-19 period, when there were not audits and scrutiny, as there should have been, a lot of Somali expatriates, both legal citizens and green card holders and illegal aliens, ran a massive fraud against their adopted country, perhaps multibillion.

And Rep. Ilhan Omar, the self-appointed representative and the elected representative of the Somali community, has denied anything was wrong. Tim Walz, who is the governor of Minnesota, doesn’t wanna talk about it. That entire community abused the hospitality that was accorded to them.

Now we hear that an Afghan refugee who came in, largely unvetted, they say he was militarily vetted, but that doesn’t—that’s not the same criteria for someone that we want to bring in and accord enormous generosity to: give him a subsidized apartment, let him, his wife, and five children have access to it and subsidies with it ahead of normal U.S. citizens.

And he repays that gratitude with what? He drives across the country and executes a young National Guardsman from West Virginia and almost fatally wounds—seriously wounds—his companion. Murders one and tries the murder of the other, who’s in critical condition. As what? Thanks for the generosity that was accorded to them?

Almost daily, we hear of an illegal alien who is involved in a DUI and kills innocents on the road. We hear about murders. And we’re kind of tired of it, and we’re reexamining immigration.

We all understand that illegal immigration is clearly wrong. You cannot come into the country without legal authorization, and if you are here illegally, then you should return to your home. I think all Americans agree with that. They may disagree about the tactics of finding illegal immigrants. It’s much easier to destroy the border and allow 10,000 people to come across a day than it is the hard work of finding them and then rounding them up when they don’t wanna go back home, and then having the Left champion them as if they’re saviors or heroes or something for breaking the U.S. immigration law.

But I want to get back to just a larger issue of immigration. Something is wrong with all of this because we are not inculcating immigration—talking about it in the way that we used to talk about it. We’re talking about it in the salad bowl, not the melting pot.

We’re assuming that people that come in here, when—the moment they arrive, they have grievances against this country. They’ve been victims of oppression. We don’t really audit them legally. We don’t say to them, “We want you to know English. We want you to respect our laws. We want you to be acquainted with our traditions and customs and history, and we insist that you acculturate, you integrate, and you assimilate and do full American citizenship.” We don’t do that.

And so, we have truck drivers who are here both legally and illegally who don’t speak English, they don’t read English. And yet, out of our kindness, our naivete, or stupidity, we give them driver’s licenses. And the result is they’re killing people on American freeways. And yet, we can’t object because we feel that we’re going to be illiberal.

So, what is the solution? The solution is to rethink legal immigration. It should be much smaller, maybe 200,000 or 300,000, a number that we feel we can comfortably and easily assimilate. They must come in with knowledge of the English language. They should have some skill sets, so they do not become wards of the local, state, or federal government.

And most importantly, we have to have a civic education program in K-12 and outreach to them that explains, “You wanted to come to our country. We don’t wanna go to your country. You made the decision. You said that you wanted to give up your homeland, your customs, everything about it, and transfer across the ocean to the United States. If you wanted to do that, then we can accommodate you, but it’s going to be brutal. You’re going to be an American citizen first and a Somali or an Indian or a Mexican or a Guatemalan second. You’ll be fully assimilated. But don’t come over here and then congregate in a community where you speak your native language and you break our laws, and you feel that you can do so with impunity, as if you’re some victim on a Marxist binary of victim/victimizer, oppressed/oppressor. It’s not gonna work.”

Yes, we are a nation of immigrants*. We’re a nation of legal immigrants whose first mission upon arrival in America was to be a better American than a native-born American. And many millions were. I don’t think that is the case now, and the fault is not just with the immigrant, it’s with us.

We ask nothing of the immigrant. So little confidence, perhaps, we had in our own culture and civilization, we were derelict. And it’s the 11th hour, and if we don’t change rapidly in our approaches to legal immigration, we’re gonna end up and have a rendezvous with the European disaster and tragedy.

Democrats Want to Distract You From This Before Midterms

 

The November 2026 elections will be determined, fairly or not, largely on the status of the economy. The Left knows that.

They know two things. One, the enormous, projected gain in oil and natural gas production. Two, the deregulation and tax cuts involved in the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that will kick in in full in 2026 and some $10 trillion in foreign investment, even if that’s maybe only half of what’s promised, but that’s an enormous amount, seven or eight times more than President Joe Biden received in his last year of office.

You add all of that up: An economy right now that is doing well, and Black Friday, following Thanksgiving, had almost $11 billion in online sales. That was a record, not just better than last year at this time under the Biden administration, but better than in any time in history.

So, the economy is already strong, and you can imagine that these catalysts and this stimuli that are coming—deregulation, tax reduction, massive foreign investment, expelling 2 million people from the United States per year who were probably on social assistance, involved in many cases of crime. You can see what’s going to happen. The economy is going to boom in 2026, and the Left knows that.

So, what is their strategy?

Don’t talk about the Trump economy.

And we’ve seen what? Go after Tesla. Firebomb Tesla dealerships. Drive Tesla automobiles off the road because Elon Musk was the prince of darkness, and he was involved in the Department of Government Efficiency. Demonize DOGE.

Go after Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Have street theater. Have riots. Call them Gestapo. Say they’re worse than Hitler.

Go after the National Guard that has cleaned up Washington, D.C. Encourage massive resistance. Call it illegal.

Shut down the government. Shut down the government for longer than any period in history—40 days. Shut it down for no purpose. It gained nothing. Supposedly, it gained nothing. Shut it down.

Have major senators on the Democratic side and representatives cut a video. Have them tell the American soldiers, all 1.3 million active-duty strong, you don’t have to obey an order. If, in your legal wisdom, your vast knowledge of jurisprudence, if you’re a private and he says, “Go over that hill,” I don’t have to do it. It’s illegal.

Create disruption.

And the piece of resistance, the Epstein files.

You had the Epstein files for four years under Joe Biden, Democrats. You knew that President Donald Trump expelled him from his circle of friends before he was convicted of anything.

But there are about 80% or 90% of people in the so-called Epstein files—these are emails. These are text messages. These are transcripts from court proceedings. These may be IRS files. But 80% to 90% are Democrats. That’s why it was not released during the Democratic administration.

But no matter, just say, “Epstein files, Epstein files, Epstein files, Epstein files.” And so, Donald Trump finally says, “OK, they’re released.” And what do we hear? Crickets. Maybe a little bit about Larry Summers, Democrat, but silence.

Why doesn’t the Left demand that every single name be released? Because they have more Democratic donors than Trump has Republican donors that are mentioned in it.

So, the Epstein files, like the shutdown, like the street theater, like all the videos, like all the smuddy language, they were designed for one point, one reason, one goal: Keep your mind off the economy. Create a word called “affordability.” The real message is: We Democrats raised prices by 21% when we were in power, 5.2% per year. We had enormous budget deficits. We ran the debt up by $8 trillion. We had a $1.1 trillion deficit. Don’t talk about that. Just say that Donald Trump, in 10 months, has a 3% inflation rate, the same as when he entered office, and therefore, he’s responsible for the 21% that we ran up, and we’ll call it affordability.

My message to the Trump administration and all of you listening is: Tune out all of the street theater, all the pornography, all the smuddy language, all the insurrectionary activity, and just focus on the economy and talk two points. Two points: how much better it is already than the average of the four years prior, but more importantly, demonstrate why it’s going to be booming in 2026 and why the Democrats don’t want you to think about that.

The Fallacy at the Heart of Ken Burns’ ‘American Revolution’ Documentary

 

person 1: rote a long critique and a somewhat harsh critique of Ken Burns’ new documentary on the American Revolution. I’ve not seen it, and maybe I’ll get to it eventually, although I’ve come a long way from being a fan of Ken Burns. His original Civil War series was terrific and everything since is quite woke. But Dan’s headline for his article, I’m not going to read anything from it, is “Ken Burns ‘American Revolution’ woke series overemphasizes Iroquois, the Indians, influence.” I thought that we were about the Founding Fathers and Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin. And I guess it was the upstate Iroquois Indians that we have to thank for our democracy. Anyway, Victor, your thoughts on this. 

person 2: Well, I should say that I know Ken Burns. I’ve known him for 10 years. He’s a friend. And I see him each year. And I disagree with him on a lot of things. And I do say, I think I said it to him, the Civil War documentary was a work of genius. I have not seen this [new documentary], so I don’t feel qualified. All I know is I’ve read two or three reviews about it, and there was this one issue that’s dear to my heart, and that is this myth that the Iroquois Six Nations tribes created the democratic model, at least one of the major ones, for the Founding Fathers.

That is based on an early line in Benjamin Franklin’s corpus of quotations that he mentions the Six Nations. And I think it’s in the Federalist, I don’t know if it’s [Federalist No.] 8, 9, or 10 or what, but there’s a mention. But here’s the point. 

If you collate in the Federalist Papers the work of [Alexander] Hamilton or [John] Adams, and the intellectual pedigree of our Constitution, and you count up the references to this is what Cicero says, this is what the Greeks did, this is what the Roman Republic was like, this is the later influence of the Magna Carta, all of that, the Glorious Revolution, all that stuff, and you compare it to a reference to the Iroquois, it’s about 99 % to one. It really is.

And if you look at our Constitution and you compare it with two different alternatives, here’s a bunch of people who have different tribes and the tribes say, “Well, what do you think? Well, what do you think? Well, what do you think?” And you say, “Well, vote on it.” That’s not democracy or constitutional republics. I’m sorry. 

I think Plato has a part when he’s talking about democracy in bastardized form, and he says, when people rob a bank and they want to split up the loot, they vote by majority vote. So, five guys, they all rob a bank and they say, “Well, how are we going to split it up? Let’s just split it up in five parts and we’ll vote on it.” Oh, they’re models for the Constitution. No. So, the Iroquois did something that was practical. Not all of them did it, and they should be commended for it, but it had very little, if any, influence on the Founding Fathers.

And what were the influential texts? It was not even passages in Thucydides or Plato, especially not Plato, but a little bit in Aristotle, but most of it, almost all of it in the ancient world came from Cicero’s De Legibus and philosophical works and then the Magna Carta, the idea of everybody has particular rights versus the monarchy. But most of all, the French thinkers and the British enlightenment, John Locke, but also people like Montesquieu who really took the ancient idea of checks and balances and said, I’ve got the spirit of laws. There should be a judicial. There should be an executive and there should be a legislative and they should each have equal power so that power cannot be aggrandized.

And we took the name Senate from the Latin senatus, the older. And that’s why we said you had to be 30 years old. I don’t know if it was originally 35 or 30, but it was older than the House, which is 25, I think, and you get a longer term. That was modeled after both the earlier Greek, the Gerousia, which in Latin became the Senate, and they had special privileges over the assembly. And then there was an executive, an archon in Greece and two consuls. And then there was a judiciary.

There was the ephorate in Sparta and then there were tribal court jurisdictions in, I shouldn’t say tribal, but there were judicial councils and judges, prefects and legates and things like that. My point is that the tripartite system came from the ancient world. It was refined by Montesquieu and the Founders read vociferously in European literature. And that’s where we got our system. 

To the extent that people said, “Hey, Native Americans, this isn’t that weird. They kind of vote.” Well, that was just mentioned in passing. But under the DEI aegis, all of a sudden, the exception, the insignificant anecdote became canonized. “We owe Native Americans everything because, you know, they created democracy.” No, it’s not true. We have democracy every day in our lives, you know what I mean? You out on the playground and you say, “Let’s choose teams. Well, let’s vote on how we should choose the team.” That’s not democracy. It’s just a way of settling a dispute. And democracy involves a written constitution and checks and balances and a tripartite government and a constitutional republic, more so. They had none of that. 

Anybody who says that that it was a prime influence on Alexander Hamilton or John Adams or James Madison or George Washington or Thomas Jefferson is sorely mistaken. 

person 1: Well, Ken Burns is a man of the left, yes? 

person 2: Yes, well, he gave a talk at Stanford graduation that was pretty fiery. The graduation, not too long ago. And I know him. I mean, I respect his work. I always really respect his work because I think the Civil War that he did was the finest documentary I’ve ever seen produced in America. And that’s pretty high praise. 

person 1: Yeah, I would agree with that. But it’s just that, you know, historians of the Left thinking about our founding. 

We’re not going to say America is 1776, it’s 1619 and it’s evil. And in this case—again, I haven’t seen it either—but we are sure as h— not going to take the … PBS, the official government entity, is going to produce something related to America 250. But what we’re going to say is not going to recognize a bunch of old white men. We’re going to talk about some upstate New York Indians. 

person 2: Yes, and they get in very tricky territory, though. And this is what the Left can’t figure out, because I followed this “Iroquois created the founding” for 30 years. It came in during the Bill Bennett, Saul Bellow, University of Chicago, all that fight under [Ronald] Reagan. 

person 1: Excuse me, could you just say what it is, the Iroquois Nations, just so that everybody knows? 

person 2: The Iroquois Nations were Indigenous people in, I guess you’d say, the Atlantic northern states. And there were six versions of them, or tribes, subgroups. And they had a council, a federation, in which they adjudicated common concerns by assembling. 

And each of the six nations then were not autocratically told what to do, but each member then weighed in, and they supposedly voted under an executive. And what I’m saying is that that had been known to the Founders. And as I said earlier, and I’m quoting by memory now, but Benjamin Franklin compiled a book years before where he mentioned famous quotes about consensual government and he said then the Indians also had the Iroquois Nations. And then in the Federalist Papers, when they are talking about all the different [consensual governments], what they’re trying to say is what we are doing is the right tradition in history and other people have fought for their liberty. 

And here’s what happened in Greece, which they knew, in Rome. And here’s what happened in England. And here were the philosophers. And that’s about 99 % of the reference. And then, I think in two or three places, they said even the Iroquois Nations had a conference where people voted. And somehow that got into, “Wow, that gave them the idea.” No, it didn’t. It did not. It did not. It was just a few passing remarks to find support for this radical idea of constitutional government that they were introducing against a monarch.

And the irony is that the Left can’t decide whether the foundation of this country was purely evil or it was wonderful, but it wasn’t a bunch of white men. It was Native Americans who invented our system. Well, if they invented our system, then are you going to continue and say, “Well, Native Americans had slaves and they tortured people. So Guantanamo Bay is a legacy of the Iroquois because they tortured people. And a lot of indigenous people had servile practices and serfs and slaves. So I guess slavery came from the Iroquois, didn’t it? 

No, they only pick and choose a certain thing. And I think what they basically said, “This was an evil country, but it could have been good because we had originally a Native American idea of democracy.”