A Promise, Not a Fact — The Mythmaking Behind America's Symbols

We were taught to stand for the anthem, place a hand over our heart for the pledge, and treat July 4th as the day freedom began. But who wrote these symbols — and who were they actually written for?

In this hour-long special, we read the entire Declaration of Independence out loud, start to finish, before breaking down what it actually says, what got cut from early drafts, and who it left out entirely. Then we trace the same pattern through the national anthem's forgotten third verse, the surprising commercial origin of the Pledge of Allegiance, and the broader mythology built around America's founding. 

We look at the historical throughline — from the dispossession of Native nations to slavery to Jim Crow to the policies still shaping wealth and opportunity today — and we end with a real question: what would it take to build a version of American patriotism that finally includes everyone living under it?

This isn't a takedown of the country. It's an audit of the story we were handed, and an argument for a more honest one.
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Chapters:

🔗 Related Rethinking Freedom episodes:

Kyle T. Mays: https://youtu.be/bUPbWRXrcyo?si=SqDxTbmNCQR02S2D
Gerald Horne: https://youtu.be/YeTTCwtf13M?si=YtiffkJ8wAzRnxi7
Anthony P. Griffin: https://youtu.be/MycL94u5rlM?si=GmITui2woQtJ5XYI

#RethinkingFreedom #AmericanHistory #DeclarationOfIndependence #Juneteenth #CivicEducation #Patriotism #FourthOfJulyRethinking Freedom, 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Every day in classrooms across the country, children stand, place a hand over their heart, and recite 23 words that most of them have never been asked to examine with liberty and justice for all. We sing an anthem, or at least some of you sing an anthem, before ball games and before various events, without knowing its third verse exists, or even the circumstances surrounding the creation of the anthem, or when it was even adopted as the national anthem. We call the document written in 1776 the Birth Certificate of Freedom, the Declaration of Independence, without asking who would exclude it and who paid for it. Welcome to Rethinking Freedom. I am your host, Aya Fubari Nelly, and we are continuing with our summer series, The Other Side of History, the United States of America at 250. Just this past weekend, many of you probably participated in any variety of events to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States of America. Land of the brave, home of the free, or home of the brave, land of the whatever it is, right? Some of you may be actively wearing all the patriotic colors and showing how much you love America, and maybe others just happy to have a day off. This hour we're going to unpack some of the symbols of patriarchism in the United States of America. This is not an attack on America. It's an audit. We're going to do something that most shows like this skip entirely. We're going to hear the actual document. I'm going to read the entire Declaration of Independence. Start to finish, no cuts, and then we'll walk through what it meant, who it left out, and what a set of national symbols would look like, could look like if they finally included everyone living under them. I think what we're really suffering from is a paucity of imagination, just like an inability to imagine a different world. A world where you did not need to oppress someone else to feel like you were getting ahead. And what it would take to change that. So before we analyze the Declaration of Independence, I'm going to read everything word for word so we can hear this for ourselves and think through it together. In Congress, July 4th, 1776, the unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America. Important because it wasn't always 50 states, right? And I begin. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurptions, sorry, usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism. It is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. I have to pause here. Are we talking about the king of Great Britain or are we talking about the current president of the United States of America, the 34-time convicted felon? Oh, let me get back to the text. He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time after such dissolutions to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise. The state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within. He has endeavored to prevent the populations of the states for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of land. He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers. He has made judges dependent on his will alone and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation, for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us, for protecting them by a mock trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states, for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world, for imposing taxes on us without our consent, for depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury, for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses, for abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies, for taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governance, for suspending our own legislatures and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy, the head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. Oh, wait a second. You mean you were migrants to this land? Oh, let me continue. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind. Enemies in war, in peace, friends. We therefore, we therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in general congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do in the name and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved. And that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Signed by John Hancock, President Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton, and it goes on. There are a bunch of colonies and different names, and I'm not going to take the time to recite all of them. Before I go any further, can you see the absolute hypocrisy in migrating and settling on somebody else's land, dispossessing them, committing genocide, and in your declaration of independence, leveling charges against another government for disregarding your rights, you cannot see the contradiction, the absolute hypocrisy in the fact that you came to these lands where there were other nations already living and you killed them, chased their mouth, and in your declaration of independence, have labeled them savages. While you disregarded every law they had in place and have decided this land is yours by divine providence. Hope you guys are following along and thinking through this yourself. Well, let's continue. Fifty-six white men of means signed their names to that document, most of them knowing it was an act of treason punishable by death if the revolution failed. The philosophy in that second paragraph, all men are created equal, on alienable rights, consent of the governed. We could argue it was genuinely radical for 1776, but that's only if you're only paying attention to Western culture. Because when you study the history and the cultures of indigenous peoples across the world, they had components, if not all of these things, embedded in their ways of knowing and that and how they operated. But let me continue. No Western government before had organized itself around the idea that authority flows from the people rather than a monarch answering to God. But there were indigenous communities that believed that. But notice also what you heard. Let me read it again. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguishable destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. Projecting much, you actually destroyed them and then kidnapped people from their land and used them for their labor and bred them and murdered them. That line is not just a stray insult, it's the founding document of American liberty describing Native nations as an instrument of terror to be complained about, not people to be included or respected. In the following century, that framing became policy. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Trail of Tears, here in Texas, the Plum Creek War, and so many other wars, actually, right this space, this land on which I am sitting right now talking to you because all Indian territory. A series of broken treaties. Just about every treaty the United States of America has signed with indigenous people of this land has been broken by the United States of America. And here's a sentence you didn't hear because it isn't there. Jefferson's original draft included a passage blaming the king for the slave trade, an early hedging that acknowledged that slavery was a moral problem. But the Continental Congress cut it out before the final vote because delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, who were making their living off of the bodies of black people, of enslaved Africans, wouldn't sign a document that threatened the institution of slavery. And northern merchants, profiting from the slave trade, weren't eager to fight them on. It either because cash rules everything around me. Cream, get the money, dollar dollar, bill, y'all. Okay, some of you don't know that reference, and to be honest with you, I'm no rap connoisseurs. That song I didn't know about. All right, the men who wrote all men are created equal. The man who wrote all men are created equal enslaved over 600 human beings in his lifetime. As the young folk will say, make it make sense. Of course, this included Sally Hemings. And maybe the beginning of what we now know as the Epstein Files, because she wasn't of age. But he legally owned her from, I believe, when she was six, she became his property. And he eventually fathered children, multiple children with her. You can go look up that history. The declaration wasn't a description of America in 1776. Most are arguing. Well, many are arguing. They're saying it was a promise. And like most promises made by people who benefit from not keeping them, it was written with an asterisk, kind of, that everyone in the room understood and nobody wrote down. So you've heard it described as it was aspirational. Until you talk to people like Clarence Thomas or Sam Alito, and if those names don't ring a bell, they are Supreme Court justices who absolutely I think want to take us back to the time before the United States Civil War. 11 years later, that asterisk, that group of people in the room, but not mentioned. Actually, there are lots of people in the room not mentioned, right? Or should I say their ghosts were in the room? That would include you, white women, that would include all enslaved people, all people of African descent. That would include any, that would of course include indigenous people. That would include any non-white male. And one and and you even when you're a white male, you have to have property. But let's let's keep reading here. 11 years later, we got a much more um, would I say, in-your-face understanding of who was kept out of that declaration of independence, and that would be the three-fifths compromise that just kind of made it very clear. It counted enslaved Africans as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of inflating slave-holding states' power in Congress. So you can count my ancestors as three-fifths of a person to consolidate power, but we were not fully human and of course had no votes, right? Had no voice according to you, and yet all men are created equal. Understand this that women who were half the population appear nowhere in that document either. In fact, history shows that Abigail Adams asked her husband John Adams, one of the architects of the Declaration of Independence, to remember the ladies, in quotes. She wasn't speaking of any ladies besides white women. He laughed it off in his reply. And guess what? White women wouldn't gain the constitutional right to vote for another 144 years. For black women, we had to wait till 1965. So, what do we do with a document that contains genuinely radical ideas for the Western Hemisphere about human equality written and signed by white men who did not believe it or apply it to most of the people living under it? Do we throw it out? Perhaps not. Perhaps what we do, to the extent that we all live in this nation at this time, if we can call it that, call it country, is that we stop treating it as a finished statement of fact. And we start reading it as what it actually is. An unfinished argument that abolitionists, suffragists, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement that started on the blacks, let's just be clear, of enslaved Africans and then other groups built on that, you right? Um, all of these groups have spent 250 plus years trying to force this country to actually live up to the ideals in this Declaration of Independence. And that fight continues. And so I share all of this with you today as you celebrate America at 250. To say, will you just fall back, be overcome with apathy, wring your hands in despair as you see the felon in chief and all those propping him up, which would be many of the citizens of the United States of America? Will we just allow this person and all those propping him up continue to disregard everything that you claim you're about? Or will you fight to hold America accountable to what was stated in that declaration of independence, even if it was not initially extended to everyone? Or do you want to just let it burn? Y'all want to blow up your house? Blow it up. Questions to think about. But we have so much more to cover, and we only have an hour, so let's move on. Let's talk about the national anthem. Every American, or at least most, can hum the first verse of the Star Spangled Banner. All right. Francis Scott Key wrote the poem in 1814. 1776, 1814. He wrote the poem in 1814, watching the British bombard Fort McHenry from a ship in Baltimore Harbor. Francis Scott Key was a slaveholding attorney. Imagine that. Justice for all, but you enslave others. I digress, or maybe I don't. He was a slave-holding attorney who, in his career, prosecuted abolitionists for distributing anti-slavery literature and referred to black people as an inferior race. Now, what does the third verse of the Star Spangled Banner anthem say? I quote, and I encourage all of you to go read all the stanzas, all the verses of this song. It says, No refuge could save the hireling enslaved from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave. Now, you know, some historians want to quibble and go back and forth on the precise target of that line. Um research indicates that the colonial marines formerly enslaved black men who escaped to fight for the British in exchange for their freedom. That's who he was referring to. He was celebrating their deaths in battle. Let me look at this again. So it's okay when you say give me liberty or give me death, and you charge the king of Great Britain with all of these charges, right? And you use that as justification to fight for and break away for your freedom. But when an enslaved African says, I too am human and I will fight for my freedom, now you create a poem that says, No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave. And then you turn around and try to shame the descendants of those enslaved Africans if they decide not to stand up and honor that anthem and the spirit in which it was written. The song wasn't even the official national anthem until. If you're watching this, I'd love to know if you know when the Star Spangled Banner became the anthem for the United States of America. It was in 1931, 117 years after it was written. It was adopted by a Congress at a time of intense nativist and segregationist politics, kind of like where we are now. And this is why Colin Kapanek's 2016 protest, wow, it's been eight, no, four, ten, ten years already. That protest wasn't really about the song, was it? Now it was about policing and racial violence. And what it should have done for us is to reopen a century-old question: what are we actually being asked to stand for? I'm not saying don't sing the anthem, I'm not saying don't stand for it. But what does it mean? And what are you really standing for? And shouldn't this nation want its symbols to unify rather than exclude or to have some people just swallow their oppression just to make others feel good and comfortable and patriotic? You should at least know what you're being asked to sing. Now let's talk about the pledge and its manufactured unity. The Pledge of Allegiance history is almost comically obscure. It wasn't written by a founder or a statesman or a stateswoman to the extent that we eventually had any. And who was he? He was a Christian socialist minister. And what he was trying to do was he was trying to sell flags for a magazine called The Youth's Companion. He wrote the pledge as a marketing campaign to sell flags to public schools. Here in the state of Texas, Greg Abbott and the white nationalist MAGA Colt in the legislature have just passed a bill requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in Texas. Now it's being litigated, it has been challenged. But I wonder who's getting that um that bid? Who's getting that contract? Was this yet another marketing campaign ploy? Because they certainly aren't following the Ten Commandments. Okay, let's get back to this. Let's get back to this pledge. The original wording of the pledge did not have under God. That phrase was added in 1954 during the Cold War, specifically to distinguish the United States from communism. And the fact that, or the the notion that they were atheists. And it was added to the pledge at the urging of the Knights of Columbus and President Eisenhower. It is a twentieth century political addition, not a founding era commitment. And would you believe this? The way school children originally recited the pledge involved extending the right arm, palm up towards the flag. It was called the Bellamy Salute. By the late 1930s, as fascism rose in Europe, Americans looked at photos of their own children and watched them performing this gesture and compared it to the gesture of the newsreels from the Nazis salute. And I guess some were concerned about the resemblance. Why? The Nazis actually learned to do what of much of what they did from looking at the United States of America and how it had treated the descendants of enslaved Africans. And then in 1954, they added under God. And the phrase at the center of the pledge, liberty and justice for all. Listen, I wish I was making this up, but this is American history. The pledge, the the the words at the center of the pledge, liberty and justice for all, was written in the same year Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in a white-only rail car in Louisiana. A case that became Plessy v. Ferguson. And in 1896, the Supreme Court made that decision separate but equal, the law of the land for the next 58 years. With liberty and justice for all, was added to sorry, was written and then adopted as the Pledge of Allegiance the same year that the highest court in the land ruled that we were actually not all created equal, and that they would hide behind the notion of separate but equal when they knew there was nothing equal about what was being meted out to the descendants of enslaved Africans in this country. And that was the law of the land for 58 years. So when people say I didn't own any slaves, we didn't have anything to do with this, shut your mouth. Because the sins of this country began way before its declaration of independence, but has continued. Many of you are complicit with the statutes and the laws and your behaviors even till the present. In other words, even the court at the height of World War II understood that forced patriotism isn't patriotism at all. It's compliance. And yet, what are we doing today? All right. Can't go through everything, but I am going to spend a little bit of the time that we have left talking about the flag. Now understand, these are all entry points. What I'm hoping is that you go and you research and you have conversations and you bring your young ones along and you talk about these things and you really begin to critically question the things that you do because we are not robots and we should not allow ourselves to be manipulated. All right, so let's talk about the flag, the founders, and the myth of the golden age, which apparently, according to the felon in chief, we are in the golden age. Aren't you winning? Are you winning? All right. So beyond the documents in the song, American patriotism runs in a set of images. The flag on the courthouse, lawn, marble statues of the founding fathers, the phrase founding fathers intended. But let's talk about what all that iconography leaves out. Oh my gosh, I'm picturing right now the courthouse, the old courthouse in Belton, Texas, Belton, Texas. That's the city in which I dwell currently. And as you approach the courthouse, this oh, what is that? What are we southeast? Well, on one side, there's a statue of Bell, whom Bell County is named after, I believe. And then in another corner, there's a statue of a Confederate soldier that was erected decades after the Civil War, was lost, by the way, and was strategically positioned to face in the direction where a majority of the descendants of enslaved Africans lived in the city at that time. But let's get back to this iconography and what it leaves out. The United States as a continental nation exists because of a sustained centuries-long process of displacement and violence against indigenous nations. Go back and listen to the interview that I had with Kyle T. Mays on Afro-Indigenous History here in the United States of America. By the end of the so-called Indian wars and forced removals, the native population had collapsed through disease, war, and displacement. Go and research pictures with heaps of buffalo bones, which the settlers, white settlers who would turn around and call Native American savages, intentionally targeted and killed just so they could control the indigenous people. Actually, starve them to death because so much of their lives revolved around the buffalo. Over 370 treaties were signed by the federal government and then broken almost without exception. Whenever the land that the indigenous people, the Native Americans, were finally forced to, whenever their land became valuable, there it was again. Your word means nothing. Understand that slavery is not a regional footnote. It was the engine that built America. American capital today is based on the blood, the flesh, the tears, the sweat of enslaved Africans. By 1860, the monetary value of enslaved Africans in the United States exceeded the combined value of every railroad and factory in the country. This is not ancient history because today there are people living today. In fact, I just interviewed Anthony Paul Griffin, who lives in Galveston, Texas. Again, check, I'll try to link all of these for those of you who go over to the YouTube section. You can see that I'm going to try and link these interviews in the description. Anthony Pete Griffin is alive today, and he met his grandparents who were enslaved. This is not ancient history. After emancipation, so-called emancipation, United States of America did not choose repair. It chose black codes, convict leasing, and 80 years of Jim Crow enforced through law and terror. The GI Bill, one of the greatest wealth-building programs in American history, was administered in ways that systematically excluded black veterans from benefits white veterans received and their children continue enjoying today. Join me next week for a conversation with Richard Rothstein as we talk about the color of law. Redlining maps were drawn by a federal agency in the 1930s, and it shaped mortgage access for decades, and their effects on black home ownership and generational wealth can be traced today. They're measurable today. We will go more into that again next week. So when people say, Oh, that was a long time ago, um, what are you complaining about? We're in the present, you know, pull yourselves up by the brute straps. The honest response is you're ignorant as hell. Oh no, let me be more um polished. The honest response is the policies that followed slavery and dispossession of the indigenous people are within living memory, and their economic effects are the current balance sheet. They show up in the economic disparity, the wealth gap, the education gap, they show up in the health gap, they show up in the incarceration rates, they show up in the cancer rates. Come on. Now, before you get all your pants in a bunch, your so-called founding fathers, because I don't call them my fathers, because if you did not even acknowledge my humanity, what in the world? Why should I not have enough self-respect not to call you my father? But the founders of this nation, I wouldn't say accomplished nothing. Certainly, they created this nation, and to the extent that you can use the Declaration of Independence as a document to guide this nation to actually be a humane nation, a nation that recognizes and celebrates the humanity and protects the humanity of all people. Certainly, that is something to be embraced. But if we are to do that, we must be honest with ourselves. What it meant, what this country has continued to mean, the policies that have continued to be passed, and where we currently are today. Now, some of you may want to treat everything I've listed so far as unrelated flaws. In fact, we had a reading of Frederick Douglass's What to the Slave is the 4th of July. And in the beginning, it seemed like he was extolling the virtues of the so-called Founding Fathers. I won't. Recently, um, President Barack Obama was saying, you know, I guess George Washington was a great man. And no, he wasn't. Not to me. If you cannot acknowledge my humanity, if you are going to treat me like chattel, nah, I don't see your greatness. The two things don't coexist for me. What I'm trying to say is that this is not about a fringe group, this is not about unrelated flaws, this is about a pattern. American patriotic symbolism was largely built to describe an idealized group, which is free white male property owning, while using universal language that later generations could invoke to demand inclusion. But the initial people that they were referring to were free white male property owning, not the rest of us. So Frederick Douglass gave a speech in 1852 asking what the Fourth of July meant to enslaved to an enslaved person. Again, check our channel for a reading of that speech by an intergenerational group of people? He argued that the declaration's principles were saving principles precisely because the nation claimed to believe them, which meant it could be held to them. I don't know. Looking at how we're voting, looking at what we're passing, looking at who is in the White House, does America really believe in these saving principles? But what Frederick Douglass did was use the Declaration's own words against the hypocrisy of the nation that wrote them. And then Martin Luther King did the same thing in 1963, describing the Declaration and Constitution as a promissory note that America had defaulted on for its black citizens. And Susan B. Anthony and the suffragists rewrote the Declaration itself in 1876, using its own structure to indebt the nation for excluding women from all men are created equal. Every major expansion of American freedom, whether it's abolition, suffrage, labor rights, civil rights, marriage equality, was won by people who took the country's founding language more seriously than the country itself has. And these are the people that I would consider the real patriots because they are forcing America to live up to what, at least in writing, it claimed it believed. But the gap between what America claims and what America has done and continues to do is exactly the space where every major American freedom movement has moved and pushed. And it's the space, one of the spaces, where we here at Rethinking Freedom are asking you all to come along and to rethink this thing, this freedom that you claim that you have. This is not an argument for cynicism about the symbols, it's an argument for using them the way the people excluded by them always have, as leverage, not as decoration. So where does this leave us? I'm not saying burn flags, I'm not saying bad anthems. It leaves us with the question: what would it look like for American patriotism to describe a country that's actually here instead of the country that only ever existed for some people in it? So, one, you could tell the whole story, not a curated one. And for Abbott and Buckley and all the rest of you who voted not to tell the true history in Texas schools, shame on you. You can make repair, not just remembrance, part of the civic story. You can let symbols be plural, not singular. You can judge the country by outcomes, not just oaths. Let's look at those incarceration rates, the wealth gaps, the gaps by rates, the maternal mortality rate, whose votes get counted. Let's look at what we're doing in terms of voter suppression and racially gerrymandering this country, and that's what we judge this country by. Keep the words, change who it's written for. I open today by sharing the whole declaration, start to finish, the philosophy and the grievances, the promises and the blind spots together. And here's where I'm landing. And you decide where you want to land. And please, if you're on the YouTube part, like, subscribe, and leave us a comment. Tell us what you're thinking. The declaration, the anthem, the pledge, none of them were finished documents. I might even go even further. Throw that anthem in the trash. That's me personally. They were opening arguments written by cruel men. That generations of enslaved people, indigenous nations, women, workers, and immigrants have spent 250 years forcing this country to actually come to terms with expanding freedom and equality and justice for all. The fight isn't over. And it was never going to be finished by the founders. It was always going to be finished or not by us. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support for Rethinking Freedom. We look forward to seeing you same time next week.