On Our 250th Anniversary: The History Jefferson Warned Us Not to Forget

A Fourth of July reflection on what every American should study.

Note: For the 250th anniversary of the nation, the following are unfiltered thoughts. No sources, no AI (except in the banner image).

A few months ago, my sixth-grade son asked me what the most important subject to study in school was.

I worked in Big Tech almost all of my adult life. Every so often, I’d meet an engineer with a deep interest in philosophy or the liberal arts, but they were the exception. Big Tech is a highly multicultural environment where English is often a second language, and our typical reading naturally centered on technical material. CJ Date was my own go-to tech binge reading.

So the answer I would have given my son almost all my life would have been “Math.” Without reservation.

Except in early 2025, my life was upended as simply pointing out a few federal spending NGOs was enough to get me cancelled. And I was not the only one; DOGE employees one after another received this treatment, and random people had their Teslas firebombed. Democratic officials, far from condemning this violence, were actually financing the Tesla Takedown protests as discovered by @AsraNomani.

When I traced this money - the nonprofits behind those early riots all had something in common. They all advocated and promoted “democracy.”

Every MAGA voter has known for a long time that the word “democracy” is overused. “Threat to democracy” elicits a kneejerk eyeroll. But the actual meaning of why “democracy” groups were cheering on firebombing of innocent people’s cars was, to me, a big mystery.

The only reason it was a big mystery is because I was not taught history.

History: The Subject Not Taught In Schools

Now, I thought I was taught history. I aced AP History and SAT subject test. History was my favorite non-technical subject in college. During the dotcom crash when it looked like the software development field was dead, I briefly considered pursuing a PhD in history.

I was taught that “democracy” in the United States means a Constitutional republic with three branches of the government, and if I wanted to change things, I just needed to vote harder and respect the outcome of elections.

But…

I wasn’t taught about the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace or Rockefeller Foundation, or how they were staffed with federal government officials, or that they sought to engineer an universal peace from top down.

I wasn’t taught about Ford Foundation commissioning the Gaither Report in the late 1940s and concluded that it had to position itself as an intermeditary to transfer sovereignty to the nascent United Nations in pursuit of democratic universalism -- even as Ford Foundation served as a revolving door for State Department officials.

I wasn’t taught that the great foundations and CIA co-existed in each other’s orbits from their very genesis, hand in hand.

I wasn’t taught that there were dynasties of American families, such as the Rockefellers and Pritzkers, informing foreign policy and also treating domestic policy as a subset of foreign policy.

I wasn’t taught that “pluralism” in democracy meant a credentialed network of public-private partnerships.

And the most damning of all:

I wasn’t taught that this whole system functioned only when a small, select class of technocrats truly understood how it all worked. This wasn’t an accident. The Trilateral Commission, after all, said that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”

The Study of History is The Study of Power

Congress is merely downstream of what is vaguely referred to as “the institutions” - a credentialed network of public and private organizations, showered in billions of taxpayer dollars and philanthropic foundations that had long blurred the line between government spending and private activity. There is no puppetmaster, but they do eat at each other’s tables, attend each other’s conferences, and reward each other’s bloviations with grants and partnerships.

As leading democracy scholar Rachel Kleinfeld demo-splained to me, “That’s what pluralistic democracy is about. There are 330 million Americans. We don’t agree on many things. Where we agree, we are allowed to come together and form organizations to do the things we agree on.”

In other words, “democracy” isn’t voting. Democracy is NGOs. Laid bare by the world’s foremost democracy scholar.

And furthermore, these NGOs have no output that says “perhaps there should be fewer NGOs.” Every dissent is re-coded not as viable feedback but into dangerous populism, into a threat against democracy itself. Karl Popper had proposed what he called “piece-meal engineering” to put in brakes to government overreach. But he did not account for the failure condition where this would produce an infinitely expanding class of “piece-meal engineers,” all gatekept in a circular credentialing loop, until the process of management by “neutral institutions” itself had reached tyranny.

And so the answer I give to my son today is: History. But not the “history” they teach in schools. Real history that can be found in no textbook.

The Study of History is the Prescription of Thomas Jefferson

As turns out, learning history is also the prescription of Thomas Jefferson:

“History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe their minds must be improved to a certain degree.”

Read that again.

“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.”

Does this sound familiar? We live inside a government where the appropriate response to cutting frivolous grants is firebombing Teslas, according to the twisted logic of our ruling NGOs. Our last Democratic President in a televised speech called MAGA Republicans a threat to the foundations of this Republic. Disinformation and censorship dollars are exploding everywhere, all the while that hostile governments are re-igniting the flames of Communist revolution.

But there is no day like today to improve your own mind, to safeguard against tyranny. And it can look like this:

• Do you know the NGOs in your own local community?

• Can you spare the time to run for a local office?

• Do you know who finances the materials and toolkits that your public school curriculum uses?

• Do you understand the foreign influence in your city governments (there will be some for every major city)?

There won’t be a glorious triumph to any of this. Our only reward for fighting for freedom is that our country and freedom exists for another day, and we get to fight again tomorrow. And, with it, the hope that enough of those tomorrows will add up to another 250 years.