Ep. 1698 - DEBUNKED: Exposing Every Lie In Ken Burns’ New Anti-American Documentary
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, as we head into Thanksgiving we are going to take a close look at a piece of sophisticated anti-American propaganda just released by PBS and the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. There is a neverending effort to make Americans embarrassed of their history, and to give credit for its achievements to people who don't deserve it. American history has been rewritten for this purpose. Today we will debunk the lies. Also, Pennsylvania just passed a law against hair discrimination. That sounds absurd, and it is, but it's even worse and more nefarious than you think.
Ep.1698
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Today, the Matt Wall Show, as we head into Thanksgiving, we're going to take a closer look at a piece of sophisticated anti-American propaganda just released by PBS and the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
There is a never-ending effort to make Americans embarrassed of their history, to give credit for its achievements to people who don't deserve it.
American history has been rewritten for this purpose.
Well, today we will debunk the lies.
Also, Pennsylvania just passed a law against hair discrimination, which sounds absurd and it is, but it's even worse and more defarious than you think.
We'll talk about all that today on The Matt Walsh Show.
Black Friday means our best deal of the year.
Daily Wire Plus is 50% off right now.
Go to dailywire.com/slash subscribe.
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Ken Burns is one of the most famous documentary filmmakers in the entire world.
You might know him as the creator of a very well-done documentary on the U.S. Civil War, which came out back in 1990.
And over the years, Burns has released several other successful documentaries covering topics from Prohibition to the Vietnam War to baseball.
His calling card, other than his undying commitment to historical accuracy, allegedly, is that his documentaries take a very long time to produce.
And in turn, they also take a very long time to watch.
Several of his films are more than 11 hours in length.
And thanks to his deal with PBS, they're often available for free to anyone who wants to watch them.
A Ken Burns documentary, in other words, is something of an event in the world of nonfiction filmmaking.
When Ken Burns comes out with something new, a lot of people pay attention.
And your tax dollars, which are distributed to Burns via PBS, a public broadcaster, give his films the impromature of a legitimate, important historical record.
But his most recent project, a six-episode 12-hour marathon called The American Revolution, is not, in fact, a legitimate or important historical record.
It is, in many respects, a very well-produced piece of propaganda.
Now, online, you may have seen some commentators dismiss the production as woke for one reason or another, but it's actually far more insidious than that.
If it was just another woke production, it'd be very easy to dismiss.
You know, when you think of a woke production, you think of a, you know, of rampant DEI casting, equity-focused writing, making the whole thing unwatchable.
You think of a show that you can just write off and forget about entirely.
When you think of a woke film about the American Revolution in particular, you imagine something where George Washington is portrayed as like a green-haired black bisexual, you know, something over-the-top and egregious, something that nobody would take seriously.
Well, that's not the case with the American Revolution.
Most of this documentary, I'd say around 70 to 80% of it, is actually quite good.
Even if you've read a lot of books about the Revolutionary War, you'll probably pick up a thing or two.
You get a bird's eye tactical view of major battles in the war, complete with graphics showing troop movements.
You get a lot of primary sources, including quotes from key figures, as well as a few interesting segments on the logistical challenges facing the combatants.
You'll learn about battles in the American South during the war, which most people don't know anything about.
The visuals and audio are pleasing enough.
So it's a very solid effort, 80% of the time.
And that makes the remaining 20% of this film worth talking about.
You know, the American Revolution by Ken Burns is a masterclass in propaganda because it weaves complete nonsense, and I mean total garbage, gibberish, into a very compelling and factually accurate narrative of the Revolutionary War.
So as best as I can, I'm going to go in order here through some of the more objectionable moments in the series.
And we'll start, of course, at the beginning, during the introduction of the very first episode.
This is the moment that sets the tone and makes it clear what Burns is going to attempt to do with this documentary.
Watch.
Long before 13 British colonies made themselves into the United States, the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk, had created a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee, a democracy that had flourished for centuries.
We heartily recommend union.
We are a powerful Confederacy.
And by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh strength and power.
Therefore, whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another.
In the spring of 1754, the celebrated scientist and writer Benjamin Franklin proposed that the British colonies form a similar union.
So you heard that correctly.
The six Indian tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, according to the narrator, were a thriving democracy.
And the founding fathers would go on to create a similar union.
So the implication is that Ben Franklin saw what the Iroquois had achieved.
And like a typical white colonialist demon, he cribbed their work for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Our system of government is based on the appropriation of marginalized people.
That's the idea.
We owe our democracy to the Indians, basically.
So this is the opening argument of this documentary.
Now, never mind the fact that the Iroquois didn't even have a written language.
Never mind the fact that they didn't hold any kind of election at all to choose their leaders.
Never mind the fact that Klan mothers, the Indian elders who actually selected the leaders, obtained their power because of hereditary right, meaning their bloodline.
Never mind the fact that there wasn't anything like a Western democracy in any Indian tribe anywhere in the hemisphere.
Despite all this, we're supposed to conclude that because a bunch of tribes were able to band together and form a primitive confederacy, Ben Franklin was sitting there taking notes and ultimately created a similar union based on theirs.
Now, notably, Burns does not tell you what he's basing this claim on, which will become a running theme as we go through here, because the claim is obviously ridiculous.
So I'll tell you.
I'll give you the one piece of evidence, the only piece of evidence that he's relying on to make this absurd and remarkable argument.
I mean, if this was true that our democracy was based on Indian tribes, that's big news.
So, you know, extraordinary claim, extraordinary evidence, as we're told.
So what's the extraordinary evidence to support this claim?
Well, it's this letter, which was sent by Ben Franklin to a man named James Parker in 1751, more than 24 years before the American Revolution.
And here's what the letter says.
Quote, it would be a very strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble, and yet that a like union should be impracticable for 10 or a dozen English colonies to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interests.
Okay, so Franklin is not talking about war with Britain or establishing an independent nation or anything like that.
Remember, this is decades before the American Revolution.
And Franklin certainly isn't praising any thriving democracy in the Iroquois Confederacy because there is not one.
Instead, he's talking about a straightforward plan to unite the colonies so that they function more like a political unit rather than 13 completely separate entities.
And he's saying, you know, if these savages can form a confederacy to function as a unit, then obviously we can too.
So it's a bit like coming across a pack of dogs on the street and seeing how they're all very quiet and, you know, well-behaved.
And then you turn to your children and say, well, if those dogs can behave, then you can too.
And when you say that, you're not telling your children that the dogs invented the concept of good behavior or made you realize what good behavior looks like.
You're not modeling your parenting off of the dogs.
You're not saying that your kids should model their entire lives after the dogs.
You're saying that if extremely primitive creatures can do something right, then we, as much more advanced creatures, have no excuse for failing in that regard.
That's what he's saying.
As Rich Lowry writes in the New York Post, there are other major problems with the logic here as well.
Quote, the Iroquois have no role in our constitutional history.
The scholar Robert Nadelson has noted the Iroquois don't show up as a model in the 34-volume journals of the Continental Congress, the three-volume collection, the records of the Federal Convention, in other words, the Constitutional Convention, or the more than 40-volume documentary history of the ratification of the Constitution.
In other words, Burns deliberately left the viewer with the impression that the Indians, despite being illiterate savages, by Ben Franklin's own testimony, had somehow influenced Ben Franklin and the founding fathers and laid the groundwork for our system of government.
In reality, the Iroquois had created a loose confederacy, which was vaguely similar to many other similar confederacies throughout history, including the confederacy called the Delean League, which the Greeks established to resist the Persian Empire, except the Greeks actually had a written language and great philosophers, which the Iroquois obviously didn't.
And Franklin, decades before the Revolution, was just blowing off steam in a letter to a friend.
And so that's the story here.
That's the whole story.
But we should move on because the documentary only gets worse from here.
But it's bad often in a subtle way.
So you have to take a little bit of time to decode the propaganda, which is what makes the propaganda so effective.
For example, see if you notice anything odd about this moment from the first episode.
This is about 20 minutes in.
Watch.
Slavery was legal everywhere, from New Hampshire to Georgia.
Many of the black people living in the colonies had been born there or in the Caribbean.
But tens of thousands were from West Africa, captured from what is now Senegal, Gambia, and Gabon, Angola, Congo, and the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana.
Now, when you're trying to sniff out propaganda, what you have to look for is the passive voice.
And anytime you hear the passive voice, you should ask yourself, who's the subject of this sentence?
Now, think of it this way.
If you hear somebody say, John was stabbed to death, your first question is going to be, well, who did it?
Be a lot more straightforward and clear if the sentence said, Bob stabbed John to death.
Then you wouldn't need to ask the question.
Now, Ken Burns knows that.
He's a good filmmaker.
He's an experienced writer.
He's intentionally omitting the subject of the sentence.
He's willing to tell the viewers that tens of thousands of blacks were captured as part of the slave trade, but he doesn't tell you who did the capturing.
It's certainly an odd omission when you're talking about this act of extreme human cruelty.
He's completely omitting the identity of the people who captured millions of innocent black men, women, and children and put them in chains and sold them.
So why would he do that?
The reason is pretty clear, actually.
Ken Burns knows that these black people were enslaved by other black people.
The Africans were enslaved by Africans.
That's the dirty little secret you're not supposed to talk about.
The white colonists needed labor because they were living in a vast new continent, and they bought slaves who had been captured by African kings.
Now, in some cases, the African kings sent ships as far away as Iceland and Ireland to capture white slaves too.
But at this particular time period, for the most part, they were selling Africans to the colonists.
Now, you might be inclined to give Burns the benefit of the doubt here.
Maybe he just wrote the sentence poorly for some inexplicable reason.
But the problem is that he keeps doing it.
He keeps making the same, quote, mistake.
This is another sequence from later on in that same episode, about an hour in.
Watch.
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate, was snatched from Afric's fancied happy seat.
What pangs excruciating must molest.
What sorrows labor in my parents' breast.
Stealed was that soul, and by no misery moved, that from a father seized his babe beloved.
Such, such my case.
And can I then but pray others may never feel tyrannic sway.
Phyllis Wheatley.
Phyllis Wheatley, who was stolen from Senegambia in West Africa and taken to Massachusetts as a young girl, was renamed for the slave ship, the Phyllis, that brought her and the Wheatley family that bought her.
Well, wait a second.
Who stole this woman from West Africa?
Why aren't we entitled to that information?
Again, it's the passive voice.
We're only told that Phyllis Wheatley was stolen from West Africa and sent to Massachusetts.
It's as if a ghost just snatched her up out of nowhere.
But as it turns out, ghosts did not snatch her up.
In fact, African villagers enslaved her.
And they enslaved her when she was seven years old.
And then they sold her.
And Ken Burns knows that.
But Burns also knows that he's not allowed to say that out loud.
He's certainly not allowed to say that if she had remained in West Africa with the savages who enslaved her, Phyllis Wheatley would not have become a published poet.
She would not have been surrounded by kind-hearted Bostonians who taught her how to read and write and how to read Latin and Greek, how to interpret the most complicated passages in the Holy Bible.
And Burns also isn't allowed to say that if she had stayed in West Africa, Phyllis Wheatley would not have received praise from George Washington himself and become a national celebrity.
None of that would have happened.
Put simply, being sold to an American family was by almost every measure the best thing that could have ever happened to Phyllis Wheatley because it separated her from the people who enslaved her and introduced her to civilization.
And she became a person that she would not have had the opportunity to become.
But all of that history is lost in this documentary.
Instead, you're simply told that someone, some unidentified person, stole this woman from West Africa.
And the only credit the Americans get in this whole story from Ken Burns is that they looked after her education.
So it's a total crock, in other words.
And now, again, I'm only showing you the worst parts of this documentary.
You have to imagine that in between these lies, there's some genuine good history here.
But then out of nowhere, I'd say it happens every like 30 minutes or so.
You just get hit with a massive woke bomb out of nowhere.
And some of them are so absurd that you can only conclude they were added in post-production on a dare or something like that.
This is probably the worst moment in that regard.
Watch this.
Crisis changes people and it gave women different ideas about what they should be doing.
Women were the main consumers in colonial society and they were the ones who made sure the boycotts worked.
Women stopped drinking tea.
Women started making their own fabric.
Women started making toys for their children.
And they didn't just stop buying British things and start making their own things.
They publicized it.
And reporters would report, the ladies of Boston, the ladies of New York are the most patriotic.
They are at the forefront of this protest movement.
If women hadn't done that, the protest movement and eventually the revolution would have gone nowhere.
So as you catch that, if women had not stopped buying things constantly as a form of protest, then the American Revolution would not have gotten off the ground.
So really, the women are the heroes of the American Revolution.
Forget the men who, you know, got shot and died.
Sure, that's a significant sacrifice by any measure, but it's nothing compared to the pain that colonial women had to endure by not buying things.
They bravely put down their visa credit cards, and in doing so, they single-handedly created America.
Now, what's great about this segment is that no one at any point in this 5,000-hour documentary comes back to this claim.
They don't support this claim in any way.
It's just hanging there in the middle of the first episode.
And we're supposed to take it at face value, I guess, even though it makes no sense whatsoever.
Again, that's probably the most overt, ridiculous moment in the whole series.
Most of the propaganda is more subtle.
So take this moment, for example, from episode two.
For the most part, this is a good episode about the Battle of Bunker Hill.
It tells the story of that battle in a neutral, even-handed, factual way.
It also talks about George Washington.
And although it keeps mentioning that he owns slaves every now and then, nothing too crazy is going on.
And then you get this moment.
Watch.
George Washington made his Cambridge headquarters in the handsome home of a loyalist who had fled to England.
One morning, not long after he had moved in, he noticed a six-year-old African-American named Darby Vassal swinging on the gate.
Vassal remembered saying he had been born in the house and his parents had worked there.
Washington urged him to come inside and get something to eat.
He had plenty of chores for him to do.
When Darby asked what sort of wages he could expect, Washington thought the question impertinent and unreasonable.
Darby Vassal lived to be a very old man.
And when asked, he liked to say that in his experience, George Washington was no gentleman, since he'd expected a boy to work for free.
Washington was also shocked to see black soldiers encamped alongside their white neighbors.
Unconvinced they could ever make good soldiers, Washington persuaded the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to enlist no more of them, though dozens had fought on Breed's Hill.
Now, when I saw this, admittedly, I had never heard of this story before, but my first thought was, even if it's true, and it's probably not, this has to be the single lamest attack on George Washington that anyone could possibly make.
They're trying to find some way to smear our first president, a founding father, and one of the most consequential men to ever live anywhere in world history.
And the best hit they can come up with, apparently, is that a black kid said that George Washington was rude to him.
Now, even if it's true that Washington was indeed rude to this random six-year-old black kid in 1775 and suggested that he do some chores without pay, there's no possible way to express in the English language how little any sane person would possibly care.
It's like saying that George Washington jaywalked once.
And then you have the big intimidating voice of God narrator trying to sell it in this super serious voice.
Well, actually, no, I don't care if George Washington jaywalked, and I don't care if he was rude to a random kid.
This is not even worth mentioning in a documentary on the subject.
But just out of curiosity, I decided to look into this particular claim.
And it turns out, as you might have guessed, that it's complete nonsense.
Now, supposedly this incident happened in 1775, but the story didn't appear in print in any form until the 1870s, a century later.
And it appeared in some kind of romanticized history of the vassal estate.
And here's the kicker.
The first time it appeared in print, the boy was a guy named Tony Vassal, who was Darby's father.
But that didn't make sense because Tony would have been in his 60s in 1775, so he definitely wasn't a boy swinging on a gate.
So they revised it after the fact and said Darby was swinging on the gate.
So this whole narrative is about as credible as any other modern race hoax, except there's about a million more reasons to doubt it.
But Ken Burns doesn't mention any of those problems with the narrative.
He makes it seem like it happened definitively.
And the lame hits on Washington did not end there.
They kept coming.
Watch.
The first enslaved person to escape Mount Vernon was named Harry Washington.
Born somewhere near the Gambia River in West Africa, he was captured, carried across the ocean, and in 1763, purchased by George Washington.
Freedom was never far from his mind.
In 1771, he had tried to escape, but was caught and brought back.
Four years later, he saw his chance.
Now, again, we have the passive voice saying the slave was captured without saying who did it.
Burns really doesn't want to use the active voice for some reason.
And then we learned that a black slave fled Washington's estate because George Washington was a horrible person who had slaves like everybody else at that time.
Across the world, slavery was an established and accepted institution everywhere, especially in Africa.
But what we didn't learn from Ken Burns, strangely enough, is that Washington also employed a lot of white indentured servants, many of whom also ran away.
And it's a shame Ken Burns left that out because it's actually a fascinating piece of history that no one ever talks about.
This is a paragraph from NPR of all places.
It's from a transcript of a 2008 interview from historian Michael Walsh.
Quote, just on the week of Lexington, the beginning of your War of Independence, the Revolutionary War, there were ads in the Virginia Gazette for runaways.
And I think there were that week, there were something like 11 for white runaways and three for black runaways.
And two of the 11 white runaways were being advertised for by George Washington.
So yes, the week of the Revolutionary War began, that it began, the newspaper of Virginia had 11 ads seeking the return of white runaways and three ads for black runaways.
Did you know that?
Did you have any idea that white indentured servants who were treated worse than slaves in many cases because they weren't permanent investments?
It's a little bit like how people, you know, treat their cars, that they rental cars from enterprise as opposed to ones they buy.
But did you know that that was happening, that you had these white indentured servants fleeing George Washington's estate?
That's the kind of thing that would be interesting to talk about, but it goes unmentioned.
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In the next episode of this documentary, I'll be honest, I began paying less attention to the interesting history and started looking for the lies that Ken Burns would try to slip in without anyone noticing.
Became something of a game.
And with that in mind, this moment stuck out to me.
Watch.
Margaret Corbyn, a Pennsylvania artilleryman's wife, was standing near her husband when he was mortally wounded.
She stepped in and kept up such deadly fire that her position became a target for Hessian guns.
Grape shot eventually hit her jaw and breast and rendered her left arm useless.
Three years later, she would become the first woman to receive a lifetime disability pension, but at half the rate wounded men received.
This is one of those claims that as far as I knew was accurate.
I had never heard of this woman before or her alleged act of heroism or her pension, but the little sassy factoid they add at the end about how the wounded woman only received half a pension, presumably because she's a woman and the Americans are misogynists who don't believe in equal pay.
That didn't seem right to me.
It seemed a lot like Ken Burns' attempt to shoehorn a modern grievance into the narrative, which he does throughout the entire series, constantly.
Now, if you think about it, it's a strange claim.
For one thing, even if they only gave her half a pension for life, it's still quite a generous handout.
She was not a member of the military when she was wounded.
She was there for the love of the game, essentially.
They didn't owe her anything.
And they voluntarily awarded her a very reasonable wage for the rest of her life.
And on top of that, there are reasons to doubt what Ken Burns is saying.
Once again, he didn't provide any explanation for why she might receive only half pay, which got me thinking that once again, he was trying to lie by omission.
He wanted us to fill in the blanks and conclude that America's founders simply hated women, even women who risked their lives on the battlefield.
So I looked into it.
And here's what I found, unsurprisingly enough.
This was passed by the Continental Congress in 1776, quote, resolved that every commissioned officer, non-commissioned officer, and private soldier who shall lose a limb in any engagement or be so disabled in the service of the United States of America as to render him incapable afterwards of getting a livelihood, shall receive during his life of the continuance of such disability, the one half monthly pay from and after the time that his pay as an officer or soldier ceases.
So in other words, all wounded officers, including the men, received a pension equivalent to one half of their regular pay.
And that appears to be what Margaret Corbyn received.
I checked a variety of sources, including the National Museum of the U.S. Army, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Wikipedia, the Lerman Institute of American History.
None of them claimed that Margaret Corbyn had been snubbed or had her pension cut in half because she was a woman.
They didn't mention anything like that.
In fact, here's what Congress did in 1779.
They issued this resolution, quote, resolved that Margaret Corbyn, who was wounded and disabled in the attack on Fort Washington, do receive during her natural life or the continuance of said disability, the one half of the monthly pay drawn by a soldier in the service of these states, and that she now receive out of public stores one complete suit of clothes.
So in other words, she gets new clothes, plus she gets one half the pay of an active duty soldier, which in turn is the same pay that every disabled soldier gets.
Now, as far as I can tell, Ken Burns derived his claim that this woman was given half the pension of a wounded soldier from this throwaway line from the website of the National Women's History Museum, which stated, quote, in July 6, 1779, the Continental Congress, in recognition of her brave service, awarded her with a lifelong pension equivalent to half that of male combatants.
But that appears to be false.
It contradicts the primary source, which is what the Congress actually said, which I just quoted.
So what's going on here?
Is Ken Burns just quoting random lines from web pages now?
What's the support for his claim?
He doesn't say.
The documentary just moves on.
Now, I really cannot emphasize enough how insidious and evil this kind of behavior is.
A historian, especially one who's paid with our tax dollars, is not supposed to lie to us.
When he presents extremely dubious claims, he shouldn't do so with confidence.
He shouldn't pretend it's obviously true.
He should show his work.
And if it's not certain that something is true, then you need to say that.
And if you're just giving your theory about something, then you should say that it's your theory.
But the reason he doesn't show his work is that he's a propagandist.
Ken Burns has become a Trump-obsessed weirdo who's desperate to include racial politics in everything he does, which, by the way, is how we got interviews like this one in his latest documentary watch.
I think it's easy to underestimate the sheer diversity and variety in the colonies.
Close to the majority of the population in the southern colonies are African.
They're French Huguenots.
They're Germans.
They're Scots.
They're Scots-Irish.
They're native people, not just on the frontiers, but actually living in the heart of the 13 colonies.
You are not going to have an American revolution unless you have Virginia on board.
And the leaders of Massachusetts understood this.
It was not going to be easy.
There were deep prejudices between the two regions because of the differences in their ethnic mix and in the nature of their cultures.
And they hadn't previously had any kind of trust for one another.
Now, it's not hard to see what this historian, quote unquote, is doing here or what Ken Burns is trying to do by featuring this interview.
He wants you to think that this nation was founded on diversity, which is a modern buzzword that connotes multiculturalism, open borders, DEI, affirmative action, all that.
And he wants you to think that because the colonists were supposedly diverse.
But the colonists were not diverse in the sense that modern leftists use the word, and Ken Burns knows that.
The colonists were overwhelmingly white and British.
The fact that Indians were present on the continent or the fact that 3% of slaves from the transatlantic slave trade ended up in this country does not mean that the colonists themselves were diverse in the way that we would say New York City or Minneapolis are diverse today.
The colonists, unlike the residents of Minneapolis and New York, spoke the same language, shared similar ancestry.
They were almost all the same race.
Now, they might not have the same religion or the same country of origin, although most did, but they still had far, far more in common with one another than the typical modern-day American has in common with the so-called newcomers that are flooding our cities at the moment.
And again, Burns knows that.
He knows that a Dutch or German colonist had much more in common with an English-born colonist than a Somali asylum seeker has in common with an American today.
But we're supposed to lump all this together using the buzzword of diversity, which in Ken Burns' world is a universal good.
Now, we'll end with just one more clip from episode four.
This is one final lie that, all things considered, may be one of the most egregious.
Watch.
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no God.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Most of the revolutionaries belonged to Protestant denominations.
But there were Catholics and Jews among them too, as well as Muslims whose faith had crossed the Atlantic on slave ships.
Central to the philosophy of some of the most influential creators of the United States was their belief in a supreme being, but one who did not interfere in the affairs of men or distinguish between faiths.
They were deists, and they believed it was each individual's responsibility to lead a virtuous life, which could only come from tolerance and a lifetime of learning, the pursuit of happiness.
This is one of those claims that you'll hear again and again, predominantly from Marxists and agitators who want to undermine our Christian tradition.
They'll tell you that the United States was founded by men who believe that God is totally indifferent to America's success or failure, and that we should believe the same lie.
But in this case, Burns is pretty obvious about his intentions.
He starts talking about all the Muslim influence on our founding and how tolerance is a foundational virtue, almost as if he's being extremely lazy and applying 2025 leftist talking points to 18th century history, which is what he's doing.
The problem is that, in fact, America was not founded by deists.
You will not find a single reference to deism in a single colonial law or charter.
What you will find if you do any amount of research, which many organizations, including the Christian Heritage Fellowship, have done, is that the founders explicitly rejected the idea of an absent God again and again.
Ben Franklin presided over the state constitutional convention in Pennsylvania in 1776, during which members affirmed that, quote, I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.
The Massachusetts Constitution, which was drafted by John Adams, states that the good order and preservation of civil government essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality and cannot be generally discussed through a community but by the institution of the public worship of God.
Then there's the fact that as the Christian Heritage Fellowship found during the Second Continental Congress, as well as the Confederation Congress, which took place after the war ended, members of Congress issued a grand total of 16 spiritual proclamations, which, quote, ask the states to fast, pray, and give thanks to God.
That's not deism, by the way.
What Ken Burns and PBS are counting on, of course, is that you won't look into any of these claims.
His narrator delivers every line from the accurate, interesting factoids to the flagrant lies and everything in between with an equal degree of self-confidence.
And that is a deliberate tactic.
It's how history is taught now in every context, whether you're talking about public schools or the media.
You know, it's enough to make me think that in the near future, I should make my own true history series where I tell you what the Ken Burns types are leaving out.
It wouldn't be especially difficult.
All I'd have to do in order to destroy Ken Burns' documentary is tell the truth.
But there's a clear need for a project like this because obviously no one in the mainstream media is willing to do it.
If there's anything we've learned from the past decade or so in American politics, it's that the national media is willing to lie to us about everything, even things we can observe with our own eyes.
They lie to us about Russia Gate and climate change and gender ideology and so on and so on and so on.
The list continues.
If these lies could be effective in the 21st century, then imagine how many lies they've been telling us about ancient history.
Imagine how many lies they've been telling us about slavery, the Revolutionary War.
Imagine how many lies have been telling us about the Civil War or about the Indians or about Nixon or about civil rights or anything else.
Well, my goal is that very soon, you won't have to ask these questions anymore.
You'll get the truth about our history, not the passive-aggressive innuendo of delusional activists like Ken Burns, but the actual truth.
And if Ken Burns accomplished one thing with this bloated mess of a documentary in the American Revolution, he's demonstrated probably more than any other living person the need for exactly that.
So my two-word message for you on the eve of Thanksgiving Day is simply this.
Stay tuned.
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I decided to spend most of the show debunking anti-American propaganda, which seems like a worthy subject anytime, but particularly during Thanksgiving week.
So with the final few minutes of the show, we're going to skip ahead to the daily cancellation and cover something of much less importance, you know, as is customary for this segment.
Although there is, when you get to the bottom of it, there is something important going on, which we'll talk about.
So a couple of months ago, a poll of voters in Pennsylvania was conducted to find out how they feel about the general state of affairs in the state.
A sizable majority of respondents, 60% said they did not believe Pennsylvania was on the right track.
They cited cost of living, the economy, high taxes, crime as their top concerns.
70% said they were dissatisfied with their local school district.
60% said they would give the school system statewide a C, D, or F grade.
70% said their utility electricity prices had gone up.
54% said it was a bad time to find a job in the state.
So in other words, the people of Pennsylvania, like the people of every other state, have practical real-world concerns, and they feel overwhelmingly that the political leadership of the state is failing to address those concerns.
So what have the state legislators and the governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro, decided to do?
How will they right the ship?
Well, as it turns out, they'll address these concerns by not addressing any of them at all.
Instead, Shapiro just signed into law a new bill that bans, quote unquote, hair discrimination.
Now, before we talk about the ludicrous concept of hair discrimination, you'll already notice that hair discrimination was not on the list of top concerns among Pennsylvania residents.
When they were asked, what are you most worried about?
Precisely zero of them responded, well, my biggest fear is that I'll suffer hair discrimination.
No, when the people of Pennsylvania think about what causes them the most anxiety in life, none of them are thinking about their hair or anything to do with it.
And yet Governor Shapiro and the brave legislators of Pennsylvania are thinking about hair.
And that's why they just passed something called the Crown Act.
Watch.
Today, when I sign the Crown Act into law, that will be the next step in making good on that promise of bringing about real freedom for all Pennsylvanians.
This public policy campaign is my brainchild.
In a nationwide effort I have led since 2018, determining it was necessary to change the law to help redress the long-standing and problematic practice of racial discrimination in the form of hair discrimination.
I subsequently developed the national legislative, social impact, and coalition building strategies for this movement.
Because for too long, a myopic notion of professionalism and Eurocentric standards of beauty have perpetuated racial inequity and exclusion.
Too many black children have been suspended and missed what should be valuable instruction time because their hair, worn in ways that are aligned with their racial identity, have been deemed a violation of school rules.
So the lady with the hoop earrings, the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, says that she's been on a single-minded crusade for eight years to defeat hair discrimination.
And Josh Shapiro says that he's making good on his promise to ban hair discrimination, which is a promise that nobody in the state knew he had made or asked him to make.
And yet here we are.
So what is hair discrimination then?
And what does this law actually say?
Well, I looked up the text of the bill, and all I can say is that if you expected this legislation to be completely retarded, you were right.
It is.
So here's what House Bill 439 says.
And to their law banning racial discrimination, which is already on the books, they added an amendment.
And the amendment says in part the following.
Quote, the term race includes traits historically associated with the individual's race, including hair texture and protective hairstyles.
The term protective hairstyles includes, but is not limited to, such hairstyles as locks, braids, twists, coils, bant two knots, afros, and extensions.
So according to this law, an institution like a business or a school may not discriminate based on protected characteristics like race, which we already knew, but the law now stipulates that the term race includes hairstyles.
If a hairstyle is historically associated with a certain race, then the hairstyle is legally protected and an employer may not bar their employees from styling their hair in that way on the job.
That's what the law says.
And it is, in a word, madness, absolute madness.
What does it even mean for a hairstyle to be historically associated with a particular race?
How far back does the historical association have to go?
If a rapper wears his hair a certain way in a music video that came out last Tuesday, and then now it's popular among black people, does that count as in historical association?
And more importantly, what if a hairstyle is historically associated with every race on the planet?
Does that mean that employers can or can't prevent their employees from wearing it?
Or does it mean that only some races can be prevented while others can't?
Now, the bill lists braids and dreadlocks as protected because of their historical racial association.
But that's a problem because braids have been worn by all races of people for as long as people have existed.
As long as there have been people with hair, there have been braids everywhere on the planet.
Black people did not invent the concept of wearing braids, nor did they popularize it, nor did they innovate it in any way at all.
As for dreadlocks, Nordic people were wearing their hair in that fashion a thousand years ago.
The Vikings wore dreadlocks.
Actually, there are depictions of Europeans wearing dreadlocks all the way back in the Bronze Age.
So are dreadlocks protected for white people too?
Or just black people?
Now, you might think that, well, at least the Afro is a hairstyle that we can all agree is historically owned by black people.
But the problem is that, first of all, no style can be owned by anyone, much less any race of people.
Styles are not objects that a person or group can claim ownership of.
A style is an abstract concept.
It's one which is by definition shared and spread around and adopted and changed and adapted and so on.
Second, actually, the Afro is not unique to black people historically or originated by them.
Now, obviously, the name Afro has black origins, but the style of hair, very tight curls, which form a rounded silhouette, which is what an Afro is, well, that was worn by Europeans in the Victorian age.
That was worn by Greeks and Romans thousands of years before that.
So as it turns out, none of the protected racial hairstyles are racial.
None of them are historically unique to black people.
In fact, it's plausible that many of these historic black hairstyles were worn by ancient Europeans before they were worn by ancient Africans.
At the very least, it's a tie.
It's a wash.
Unlike dreadlocks, which cannot be washed, which is why you shouldn't be allowed to wear them if you work in the food industry or the medical industry or any industry that involves food or people.
That's why certain hairstyles aren't discriminated against because they're unsanitary or unkempt or unsightly, because they look slovenly or ridiculous.
The law has not protected anyone from actual racial discrimination, which is already illegal, but it has protected them from the most basic standards of hygiene and professionalism.
Like, I want you to think about the levels of narcissism and pettiness that are involved here.
If you work at a restaurant and your boss says you can't wear dreadlocks, the assumption is that if you're a black person, the rule is specifically targeted at you for no other reason than to cramp your style and persecute you.
And this assumption is built on an underlying assumption that your race invented dreadlocks and has unique ownership over them.
All of these assumptions right down the line are false.
They are all examples of the worst kind of racial main character syndrome.
You know, the actual reason you can't wear dreadlocks while you cook my steak is that you haven't washed them since last February.
And it's disgusting.
And this is the basic concept that the lady with the hoop earrings pretends not to understand.
Speaking of which, are hoop earrings protected?
I mean, what about jewelry and clothing and other accessories that are historically associated with certain races?
Now, black people did not invent hoop earrings, but if we're giving them credit for braids, then I guess we give them credit for earrings too.
So, how far does this go?
Now, the answer is that it goes as far as the race hustlers can take it.
I mean, if it seems like they're trying to make it so that racial minorities are not required to follow any rules or meet any standards or do anything they don't feel like doing ever, well, that's because that's exactly what they're trying to do.
Which is why, although this is the dumbest law ever written in the history of laws, it is also incredibly sinister.
And that is why the concept of hair discrimination and anyone who pushes it is today canceled.
That'll do it for the show today and this week.
Have a beautiful and blessed Thanksgiving.
I'll talk to you on Monday.
godspeed hey there i'm daily wire executive editor john bickley And I'm Georgia Howe, and we're the hosts of Morning Wire.
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