Stop Trying to Save America’s Myths — They Are Killing Us

Democrats — and too many historians in their circles — need to wake up about the power of storytelling.

You cannot fight rising authoritarianism by polishing up the same nationalist myths the far right already owns. They are running the table on that story. If you jump on the same bandwagon — with your Constitution quotes, your flag appeals, your sanitized “founding principles” — you are helping them win.

The First Republic was not a democracy. It was a white ethnonationalist republic built on legal exploitation and dehumanization — designed by a narrow elite for their own power. And yet, over and over, modern liberals prop up these myths, trying to “save” them as if they were democratic all along.

They weren’t.

The far right knows that. They are simply more honest about what that founding really was — and more ruthless in how they weaponize it.

If you care about what happens now, you need to stop believing the system will save us. It won’t. It never has. The institutions you’re clinging to — the Constitution, the courts, the Founders — were designed to constrain popular power, not to guarantee freedom for all.

Every expansion of rights this country has seen — every one — came through resistance. Not permission. Not institutional benevolence. Resistance. People forced change from below. They forced power to adapt. That is the real history. That is the fight we are in now. And that is why I am writing A Resistance History of the United States.

I am not here for your party politics. I am not a Democrat. I am not a Republican. I am not a nationalist. I am not an institutionalist. I am here for truth vs lies, fact vs fiction, history vs mythology. And 99% of what I see posted — from both sides — is lies wrapped in myth.

If you think George Washington would be “rolling over in his grave,” you do not know Washington.

If you think the Constitution was written to save democracy, you do not know the Constitution.

If you think the founders are your heroes in this fight, ask yourself how they built a republic with 20% of the population enslaved — and called that freedom.

The minute you excuse that in your heroes, you make room for it in yourself.

Community is the basis of resistance — not the nation-state. The state won’t save you. The courts won’t save you. The myths won’t save you. People will. Resistance is what forces power to adapt. It always has been.