Defining Core American Values

Welcome back to Newsgirls. We have a very special guest joining us today. It's Heather Cox Richardson. You all definitely know her from her very successful substack letters from an American or her YouTube or podcast. And she's a political historian who looks at today's politics through a historical lens. So we thought she would be the perfect person to talk to ahead of America's two hundred fiftieth anniversary . So Heather, thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited to do this . Yay . So first let's start with how Trump has made America two hundred fifty a huge spectacle. Obviously from the UFC fight, Mabel and I actually went to that. That was just insane. And then he's doing this great American fair. In August, he's doing an F one race around DC because that has somehow something to do with America two hundred and fifty. And he's also intertwined these celebrations with himself , like combining it with his birthday. He's putting his face on coins and national parks passes . And obviously these events reflect values that he cares a lot about and a lot of them are actually enriching some of his allies and himself . So just to set the scene, how unusual is this? Have other presidents used national anniversaries to elevate themselves or is this something we've never seen? I'm going to go with never seen. I mean, occasionally in the past, you would have a president trying to be out in front and it's something like this because of course it's good PR , but this attempt to sort of personalize the United States of America so it equals him is pretty much unprecedented. Although it's not unheard of for a political party to try and associate itself with the nation to say we're the loyal ones and those are the disloyal ones. But that tends to be a political party and not a person. Now I'm curious and I will talk more about the stuff that Trump has done because the money is key here . But what was the UFC fight like ? It was like yeah, I felt very dystopian Ren and I were saying like storms were kind of coming into DC and just a bunch of people in UFC maga shirts were all walking towards these country music stages and UFC wighings and pushup contests. It was kind of crazy. It was a lot of aggressive macho energy, like eighty percent men, a lot of white men just like really rallied up. And when we try to get political, some of them would be like, yeah, we love Trump. And then a lot of them were like, this isn't about politics. We just love the UFC . So it kind of shows what the part y line is like some are still like publicly Mega and then some are still trying to be like diplomatic almost . Especially at something like that, that's really interesting . Yeah So the part of what's going on and my real objection to the UFC fight aside from the what the White House is supposed to represent and all that, which is important and we could talk about that is the branding that went on there and the money that changed hands. And of course the UFC believed it was at least they said that they believed it was going to be one of the ultimate marketing opportunities for them and was going to make , you know , gazillions of dollars. And the use of our country as a brand for a private corporation or a private company, to me is stomach turning. It also happens to be illegal , but at this point, you know, there's going to be doing we're going to have to do a lot of catch up later on . But one of the things about the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is that ten years ago Congress put together a pocket of money, I think it was about one hundred fifty million dollars and a bipartisan organization called America two hundred and fifty to give out grants across the country for people to do things surrounding the anniversary . And when Trump came into office, he first tried to take that over, but when that wasn't as successful as he had hoped . He started his own freedom two hundred fifty and took most of the money from that . So in addition to that money that is now not available for some local parade or something or ex hibit of the things that mattered in that town or in that state for the two hundred fiftieth . He's also been using things like the UFC fight for donations and the that That donations to him, by the way, not donations to, you know, the Smithsonian . And that combination of using himself as the figurehead of the United States and using it as yet another grift is interesting not only because of what it does for our understanding of what the country is supposed to be, but one of the things you're really seeing growing right now is opposition to the extraordinary corruption of this administration and watching basically people handing cash to the president for events that are supposed to be celebrating , you know, we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal is I think you know sort of I think of it in water terms and it feels because I live on the ocean and I feel like we're in this really choppy time when the tide is turning and the wind is blowing from a couple of different directions, and we're sort of bouncing through a really rough time. No, it's it's such a good point. It's also been surprising when we went to the UFC and like Ren said , many people were hesitant to equate that to politics when we started posting all of these clips to social media of us at the UFC and they did so well. So many of the comments were just kind of saying the same that this isn't corruption, this is the UFC , this is sports. This is bringing the country together. This has nothing to do with politics. So I think Trump kind of encroaching his agenda within something that seems so sports. That brings everyone together was smart because so many people did buy that and didn't see all the corruption behind it. You know, from what I've read, it seemed like some people did buy that. And there are people who are very unhappy about that having been held at the White House because it's a blood sport or because of any of the things that they disagree with about that. And we can talk about that because the White House is supposed to represent the simplicity of a democracy and the fact that the president is supposed to represent all the people and so on. And I actually think there's a legitimate debate to be held there . But the corruption and the sheer amount of money being poured into that really isn't debatable. I mean, there's nobody has pushed back and said, No, this isn't happening. And you looked at the branding, the bud light and all that all over the White House and you couldn't say that wasn't happening . Now there is, I think, in one of one of the things you just identified, that sort of attempt of the MAGA Republicans to turn everything into a struggle over macho versus wimpiness that you see in Texas right now for example where Ken Paxton who',s running for Senate as a Republican of Texas is trying to portray James Talerico, the Democrat , you know, gay or transgender or a Vegas. He's giving him all these code words that say this isn't a man. And you know, when you're thinking about politics, that's just a weird way to think about politics. And that, you know, this is manliness in if you're on our team, you're a man and those people are the other . I think was very much at play in the UFC fight and in a lot of stuff that the administration does. And it's indicative of a time when or not just a time of any kind of political party that tries to rise by saying we're the good guys and they're the bad guys. And I got the impression that that was all over the UFC fight as well . It definitely was. We also were thinking about so both like Trump obviously a sexual assault allegations against him, Dana White , there's video of him slapping his wife on the face and like we actually went on Don Lemmon the day after this and that was the core thing he wanted to talk about was what message does this send to women like the disrespect that these two are going to be celebrated by all of these men come out and like worshiped on the White House. And we'd love to hear more about what the White House is intended to be when it was built because that really stuck with us that like the what values are being celebrated in Trump's America . So one of the reasons that the original White House is small and it is small. I mean it's, have you been there ? Yeah . So you get it . It's like it's the weirdest place in a way for somebody like me because to me so much of Washington is historical . That is like when you walk into the White House, for me, I feel like John Quincy Adams is there and you know, like all these like there's a past to it it feels old. It's small rooms, high ceilings, dark at the same time that it's also a modern day office building . And it just feels so weird because you're sort of in the past and the future and the present all at once. And that so that always jumps out to me, but it was designed to be small and it was designed not to be pretentious because of the idea that the chief executive of the executive branch of course that they call them the chief executive, the president is supposed to come from the people and return to the people and not supposed to have any of the trappings of royalties. So one of the things that my friend Joanne Freeman, who's a historian of the early Republic talks about, one of my favorite stories she talks about is that George Washington when he was first president and recognized that he was setting a precedent for everything that came afterward was really careful not only to try and act like he still was the leader of a strong country. He loved his uniform, for example. He loved his carriage . He would walk out into the streets every day, walk out, not ride a horse. He would walk into the streets. And remember the streets are full of you know, horse stuff and people spitting and this is the days before we understood German theory. That's not going to come until the eighteen eighties. So people were throwing their slops in the street and slops or the chamber pots and the refuse from their kitchens and all that into the streets . He would walk into the streets and look very ostentatiously sort of look around and walk back so that it was clear he was a man of the people . And the White House when, they built the White House, and John Quincy Adams was the first president to live there , they were very careful to make it clear that this was the house of the person of the people. It is known as the people's house. So it's not supposed to have gilded stuff in it. It's not supposed to be fancy. It's a little bit run down, right? Because it's supposed to look like you're just going over to , you know, the local magistrates' house . And that's one of the things that Trump has pretty clearly changed both with his gold hoopla all over the oval office . And I've always been of the opinion somebody could have the oval office however they wanted it. And because it's your office space, if you want a picture of, you know, if you want something gold leaf on the wall, go for it. And some of my friends who studied the early republic say the opposite that no this is about showing that you are a man of the people or a woman of the people . So that's the history behind it. And I think for me there's for me it's a corruption. I care a lot about money. But for other people, it's like this is not the way the White House is supposed to be . And I have to say, I think they've got a really good point. What do you think? That is really interesting. I mean, it's just in so many ways, Trump is exactly diametrically opposed to the values that the founding fathers wanted the president to have . And that seems like a really glaring one. Now that we know the history, Mabel, what do you think? No, I mean, that's why it was such a big story. Obviously, when he was guilding the White House and how he wants to, you know, create this ballroom and use taxpayer money to do it. It's just how do you continue to expand what you own and make it in your image? And that's why everyone has a problem with it , which I think is totally fair. Well, it's interesting to me that Herbert Hoover, who was the president during the Depression, one of the things he did was he tried to convince everybody that everything was just docky despite the fact that the depression had hit and people were living in packing boxes and not being able to eat and you know things were not good . And he tried to say everything's fine and to demonstrate that by having these sumptuous dinners at the White House and by having trumpeters go when he when he walked into the room and really tried to make everything look fabulous . And when FDR and his wife Eleanor came in, Eleanor was like, that is not happening because what you are saying is , you know, Hoover quite deliberately said this is to cheer everybody up to convince them everything's fine and Eleanor came in and said, That ain't happening. We need to show people that we feel their pain and that we're living the same way they do. And she insisted that meals at the White House were similar to the meals that people were eating outside the White House and lunch was so bad at FDR's White House that people didn't want to go to lunch at the White House. It was like, you know, it was like a hash house and the food was so bad. People were like, Oh, thanks, thanks. Franklin, we'll meet you you later, know ? But people loved it. People loved it because they felt he was on their side. Yeah, I mean, that makes so much sense. Trump, we've been talking about this a lot with the economy that's been doing so poorly. Something like a strategy of his is to always act like everything is fine. Actually, the economy is great and grocery prices are normal and everything is so cheap. Like he kind of likes to dismiss the worries in order to convince people that they're not actually living this life . It seems like such an interesting strategy since no one is going to believe you, we know that grocery prices are more expensive . Well, so I wonder about this and I wonder what you think about it because in a way you could kind of get away with that we had social media. That is, imagine you're living in the depression and my kids asked me this once, if you lived in the depression, did you know how bad it was? And I had to think a lot about that because my guess is that if you were really hard hit by it and it had been decently off before, so if you were like a new white collar worker who finally had some money and all of a sudden you lost it, you probably got it. But if all the magazines were saying to you, oh, you know, the president had a six course meal and I made that up. I don't know if he had a six course meal, but the president is doing great and there's, you know, all these film stars you know, this is the way the American Americans live, you might look at that and say , Oh, it's not the system. It's me . And the fact that we can now compare gas prices across the country instantly or take a look at instantly how many jobs are being lost or instantly how expensive it is to live somewhere . And I wonder if that makes a difference in political conversations because I think about it in terms of resistance movements. Like if you were living in the American South in eighteen eighty or eighteen seventy five , and the KKK was in town , you didn't know there were other people who could stand with you. By the time that the KKK had done its work and left town, it was too late to get your neighbors. Whereas in Minneapolis , everybody could text and say, this is it. They're in such and such a place and people could show up. And I wonder, I think that's really helped resistance to the rise of authoritarianism, but I wonder if it also makes it really hard to convince people there was a vandal at the reflecting pool when we know there are cameras on it all the time or convince people that in fact it's going to be really easy to get a job when you've been unemployed for that long. And then it turns out that there are thousands of other people who have also been unemployed. I just wonder about effect of instantaneous media on being able to sell a political lie . And I think that we wouldn't have countries like Russia cracking down on who can see what if that weren't a real threat. I don't know, it's your world, not mine. What do you think? No, it's so you raised so many good points. We talk about this all the time because being able to see what's happening in all parts of not only our country, but the world has like democratized information in like such a new way and who has a voice and like trends, like if one person can get on, start telling their story, it becomes a trend. Everyone's getting on telling the same story and we've never had that before. But so there's so many benefits of this information, but then because it's so easy to spread things, then misinformation can also get out there and how can you validate what you're seeing? That's something like Mabel and I talk a lot about being independent and I'm sure you think about this too, but you have such a robust like you built such a robust platform. Like we still think ourselves as just starting, how do we prove we're credible to people? Because anyone can get on the internet now and speak. So it seems like such a double edged sword and I don't know where it nets out yet . I would love to see I'm a hundred percent believer in the First Amendment . So I don't want the government , any government to crack in the United States or elsewhere, but I'm just talking about the U. S. to crack down on any kind of expression in the media. But what I would love to see is regulation of the algorithms that artificially inflate false voices . And I think we should have to label bots , trolls, and information from other countries. And NAI, of course . And we're not there yet, but I think that would make such a difference. Because how many times have you just seen the internet flooded with or social media flooded with something and you're thinking, Oh, wow, I had no idea this was this big a deal. And then later on you find it's like three people in a bot farm . And that really shifts the way people think. If you think you're the only person who thinks something because you're swarmed with other worlds, it goes back to the idea of whether or not people knew they were in part of a whole bunch of people suffering in the depression or if they were just by themselves because if they were bombarded with oh everything's great, maybe they're like, oh crap, I'm the only one who can't find a job . Yeah. And that was something this concept of misinformation. We saw how dangerous it really was , especially with the start of the war with the Iran war because that was obviously something that everyone was talking about. Did we actually hit that fighter jet? Is the White House ly ing to us? I guess how do you think it is historically common and prevalent for presidents to kind of shape information during war for the public's benefit? And now we're just kind of being able to combat it, or do you think they're taking it to such new lengths, especially with the war and everything that we're dealing with right now? That's a really good question, and it's got a really interesting answer in that public figures have always skewed information . I mean, it's spin. That's just the in every party everybody . And sometimes they do it extraordinarily maliciously as somebody like Richard Nixon did, but one of my favorite stories about the early republic is that one of the ways you could really screw over your opponents. Remember, no photographs, no videos or anything, is you could just tell the newspapers he was dead. I'm sorry. I think that's hilarious because how do you I mean, obviously I shouldn't say that. It wasn't hilarious to them and it wasn't good for the system and all that, but like how do you prove you're alive in a time when there are no photographs and no videos, right? You have to have everybody write to the newspaper and go No, I just saw him. He was alive, you know, I had breakfast with him, whatever. That's so funny. I'm sorry, I think it's hilarious. But so there's always been spin and obviously that's on the more malicious level of spin and that's always happened . But then there's the question of war time and then in that case, yes, there too, there has been the repression of information that reflects badly on a president or badly on a on a cause versus the stuff that looks good . So that really often gets suppressed during wartime and always has been. Now the question is is that suppressed because it's actually something that's important for executing the war or is it important because it's something that the administration is doing because they're really lying to you . And that's a that's a really malleable line if you think about it. But you know, certainly during the Vietnam War, the American people simply weren't presented with what was actually happening in Vietnam or in Cambodia or in Laos. And I just learned the other day , Norman Rockwell, who did all those early illustrations that were sort of family oriented and there's a reason they call it Norman Rockwell's America, right? It's all very sort of prettied up . He ended up getting more and more political as he got older and one of his latest later painting s in the later in his career was one in which he actually put himself and it was in nineteen sixty eight and it's all these people , all different walks of life standing at the steering is a crowd like crowded up against this desk and the desk has an empty chair in it and it is the idea is we have a right to transparency. The painting is called right to know and it's right when Nixon is lying to everybody . And that , I think, is such a powerful image, the idea that we don't need necessarily to dig into single blow of everything . And I'm running into this problem right now as I'm trying to write about the Iran negotiations because you know, they change minute to minute. How much do people really need to know in the scheme of things? Like how much more is important is this than spending your time getting your car fixed and the big picture is really important, but how little does the picture have to get before it becomes just noise really ? So I think that's a really good question. Now the thing about the Trump administration that's a little different than both of those things is that they're not just spinning . Like they're fabricating things that are not true . And this has been demonstrable since Trump first took office in twenty seventeen when he insisted that his inaugural crowds were bigger than those of Barack Obama's. You could look at the pictures and that was not true . And his lies have gotten more and more unhinged and more and more outrageous . And there are a bunch of yes men around him and we're women, but who insists that what is false is true . And what that has done in a way that I don't think we have ever seen so completely before is it's made it so that you can't trust anything that comes out of the White House. And that makes it very difficult for people to know where they stand because literally at this point any time they say something has happened, I wait to see if there is confirmation from somebody that I consider more trustworthy . And man, you didn't I've never had to do that before . Like you've always had to skim through the spin like I say , but you could look at a set of figures and say, this is as good as this department can produce. Now, what do I think they say? In this case , you know, when you have the president up there insisting that somebody took a box cutter to the floor of the reflecting pool and put a two hundred fifty and three hundred to fifty foot and slash in it . When you know that didn't happen , like that means we look at what's happening in Iran and we have to do the same thing. What really has happened there? And fortunately, there's a lot of eyes on a lot of what's happening. But it's going to be very difficult, I think, for people to rebuild trust in the government. But I also think there's just no way Trump is ever going to regain any kind of trust from the American people because, you know, fool me once, shame on what is it? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me . And I think people see that now and increasingly those people who insist what he says is true look like they're just cult members we can look here and be like, you know, actually there does not appear to be somebody with a box cutter wading through two hundred fifty feet of the reflecting pool. That's just bonkers, right? Yeah . It's also funny because he had said when it was being painted that there's no way like anyone can disrupt it. This is going to be solid. And then now he's using that exact opposite argument that someone just did this , but of course we're all just desensitized to when he lies like this. But we shouldn't be. I mean, we wouldn't be like if you knew somebody, I suspect you have known people, I've known people who are pathological liars . You're not necessarily mean to them , but you're not going to hire them to be on your team and you're not and when they tell you something happened , you're going to say, Oh yeah, great, that's great, you know? And then you're going to go find out what really happened. And the fact that we're just taking so much that is crazy stuff and being like, oh yeah, whatever. Yesterday, I don't know when this is going to air, but you know, the on june twenty first first , a story came out in the Washington Post about the parallels between now former Director of National Intelligence. This is the person who oversees all U. S. intelligence, which used to be the best in the world and is designed to keep the American people safe from terrorism . That a cult leader appears to have been communicating with her and her behavior paralleled demands that this figure appeared to be making on her. And I'm hedging that a lot, although it's a very, very good story by John Swain in the Washington Post . Yeah . And it was like a blip. And I'm like, this is America's intelligence overseen by somebody who appears to be in a cult and taking orders from a cult leader. And we are just so overwhelmed . Yeah . People are acknowledging it , but this would have been a scandal that would have taken down any administration in American history until Donald Trump . Oh yeah, that was we haven't even talked about that on our show, so I'm glad that you brought that up. So we've hit how Trump has utterly defiled decorum and the spread of information. I want to make sure that we get to the third in this triifecta, which is the corruption because I find myself asking all the time, like how is this legal when he does things? Like how is this legal? Like how did the founding fathers not foresee this? Like since you want to have such a better understanding than we do about what the founders actually envision for the presidency , did they envision did they want a president to have this much power and be this powerful ? Or are we living through a stress test that basically exposes weaknesses that they couldn't have anticipated . Or a third, we're living through a stress test that they did anticipate and that we neglected on our route to this moment, which is I think where we are. So now you know the answer to that. The framers of the Constitution terrified of the rise of a dictator. I mean, the tyranny, right? Everywhere. Remember in fourth grade, everywhere in the in the textbook tyranny, we can have tyranny. This person's a tyrant. This is, you know, they were terrified of what they call the demagogue or a tyrant rising and taking over the country. And of course they just fought a war against King George III , who had far less power by the way right now than Trump is claiming . But he too had episodes of mental instability . And so this is something they're all over . But what they did is really interesting. They set up a system and the Constitution is I remember teaching it and it seems kind of heavy lifting at , but it's actually a really elegant sort of system of trip wires . They spread power among the major two branches of government. By the time they got to the judiciary it was time for lunch, clearly and they, were just like , let's have a judiciary. We're out of here, right? So much of the judiciary was actually shaped by Congress, not in the Constitution. That's Article three . But in Article one, which is Congress and Article two, which is the executive, the power is very clearly spread . So that ultimately what the framers expected was that if you got a president who tried to grab too much power , the senators especially would be protective of their own power so they would take that president down . And that's why we have impeachment which is from the House of Representatives. They can say, I don't trust you. Impeachment is not a crime. It just says I don't trust you. Whatever you're doing is not what we thought you were going to do. And I just like to make the point that you could be impeached for sitting in the White House playing video games all day, which is absolutely not a crime, but it does say essentially you're not doing the job and you can be fired . So they set up impeachment in the House of Representatives and then they wanted the Senate to act like a trial and decide whether or not the charges that the House said the president was doing were right or not. Are they going to convict or are they going to acquit ? But what they didn't foresee in those days was the rise of political parties. They literally did not think the U. S. would have political parties. And I'm going to jump forward here to the present, what we have seen really since the fall of the Soviet Union in nineteen ninety one, although you could put it earlier than that if you wanted to , is the Republican Party becoming a vehicle where party matters more than country . And one of the huge surprises for me in Trump's second term is I truly thought that the Republican senators would do what the framers expected, not because they were necessarily saying, I'm feeling my James Madison today, but because own power matter to them. And so they should say, no, we're not going to approve a Robert Kennedy Jr. We're not going to approve, you know, Pam Bondi at the head of the Department of Justice. And instead , they have basically rubber stamped all the people that Trump has put in power to dismantle the U. S. government . And so we're absolutely in an unprecedented moment and Trump is the figurehead for that in many ways. Remember, the dude is eighty years old and he is not in good shape mentally or physically . But he is because of the rubber stamping of the Republican senators , he has been able to put in place a group of young men, almost overwhelmingly men and white men, of course , who are in the process of dismantling our intelligence agencies, our health agencies, our legal system, you know, all of those pieces for various reasons of their own . And so we're in a crisis , but it's not necessarily one that the framers didn't foresee. It's one that the Republican Party has, which is not the traditional Republican Party and we don't have time to go into that, but it's been taken over by this really small group of radical extremists that they are empowered because the Republican Party itself simply said we got to stay in power because we don't trust the Democrats. The Democrats are going to do stuff like raise taxes and have regulations and they're going to push for stuff like health care . We simply cannot let them take office. And if that means we have to allow somebody like Donald Trump to take power, we will. At one point, one of the lead ing Republican advisers said all we need is somebody with enough working digits to hold a pen as president. Oh my God . It really puts things perspective. I mean, it is what you just said. It really shows how fragile, like we always make this point these huge institutions and concepts are. You think of democracy as something that is forever, but I know you've made the point that it isn't. It can be chipped away slowly and it is really scary that in a term of presidency in this two hundred and fifty years we're already seeing that change and erode so much . So we do want to kind of end this conversation going back to two hundred and fifty as independence day is obviously just next week. And we want to talk about patriotism because you kind of made this point in our conversation and it's something you talk about a lot, but it's striking to realize now that everyone kind of claims to be the real defenders of America and its values . Every side kind of thinks that they get to define what the country stands for and what it means . But from your research, do you think that there are certain values that throughout the two hundred and fifty years are indisputably American that we can kind of say this is actually what history has taught us. This is what the country should stand for now. Absolutely. And I do want to point out that one of the things that when we're here, one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you too today is that when you think of with the people that used to be called the founding fathers, right or the framers of the Constitution , I think somehow because they powdered their heads, everybody thinks they were old . They were very young people . Yeah. And that matters because young people, I think, have a different kind of stake in a country than you know, if you're ninety two and honest to God at ninety two, why are you making rules for the future? I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but I actually think that matters . So when I think about the two hundred fiftieth, which is the two hundred fiftiet andh anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. We're not going to get a Constitution for a while . When I think about what it means to be an American is what's in that document , which of course was very limited by the men who wrote it in their own prejudices and so on . But they laid out natural rules under which human beings live . And they said, We hold these truths to be self evident . That is we're not going to argue about this. This is our bedrock. That everybody's created equal , and that people have the right to have a say in their government. That's in the declaration as well, and they have a right to equal access to resources so they can create the lives that they believe will lead them to happiness , life , liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How you define that happiness, of course, can be different for everybody , but at least it usually involves having enough to live on roof over your head, food , now access to healthcare and education and so on. And if you think about our country bedrock principles, the right to be treated equally before the law, the right to have a say in your government, the right to have equal access to resources have always been the defining features of what it meant to be an American. And our history has always been the story of people who were excluded from that as they were from the beginning , saying, Hey, those sound really good. What about me ? Or those sound really good? What about them . And that expansion of those concepts to include more and more people has always been the United States of America at its best. So that's what you're seeing with Abraham Lincoln, for example, when the elite southern slavers said, you know, this whole equal thing is ridiculous. We're going to put together a country that's smarter than that and we won't have people be equal. We'll have people be unequal . And Lincoln said, Well, if you're going to tear, if you're going to do that, let's just tear up the Declaration of Independence. And when that happened, a whole bunch of white guys because they're the only ones who could vote at the time said, Okay , we actually don't like black Americans , but we actually like this idea that we're all created equal. So we're going to stand for the Declaration . And that idea expands in the late nineteenth century with people like WB oys you know, people like Teddy Roosevelt comes on board and even people like Red Cloud and Sittingbull talking about how they too should be included in this definition. And then we get the Progressive Era. And then we get FDR and then we get Eisenhower and we get people who increasingly say this is what America should be. And that to me is the story of America. And that's the thing we're highlighting in those short videos about America, the two hundred fifty to two hundred the fifty and series my team is doing is America has always been a struggle and it is always going to be a struggle because people are gonna people , right? But that fundamental idea that there are natural laws , not suggestions, not whatever. And they come from the universe and however you define the universe, not from the Bible or the Kuran or whatever. Those ideas that those are laws and that human beings adhere to those laws unless they are stopped from doing it strikes me as being the central theme of the United States and why I have hoped that we can fix the situation we're in now by adhering to those laws again . And that's why I'm actually quite excited about the two hundred fiftieth because we have so much opportunity to bring in new voices and new ideas and new arts and new literature and new ways of looking at the world and new innovations to continue to expand that idea that's set out in the Declaration. And so when I think about the two hundred fiftieth and I think about patriotism , it's about the people who defend those principles both at home and abroad , not those people who come in and say, let's tear up the Declaration and say that this country belongs to white people or let's tear up the Declaration and say that I should be a trillionaire and you should work three jobs to put food on the table. It's those people who are saying we want to live by these natural laws that say that we are all created equal and have a right to be treated equally before the laws. We have a right to have a say in our government and we have a right to have equal access to resources. Laid out two hundred and fifty years ago