The “Heritage America” Myth: How the Far-Right Hijacks American History

If you spend enough time scrolling online, you’ve probably seen the so-called Heritage Americans. They cherry-pick quotations from old documents, remove historical context, and act like they’ve uncovered a secret code proving America was explicitly built as a white ethno-state.

What’s wild about this ideology is how much it copies the radical Left. Both sides look at American history through a completely warped, revisionist lens.

The Left claims the Constitution was designed purely for oppression, so we should burn it in a “mostly peacefully” inferno. The ethno-nationalist, “post liberal” groypers look at those same historic flaws, nod in agreement, and say, "Yep, and that means the country belongs exclusively to us white people."

They’re doing the same exact bad reading of history, only drawing opposite conclusions. “Heritage America” is merely the 1619 Project for nihilistic, incel Nazis on Twitter.

And when the actual historical facts don't fit their narrative? They use the exact same anti-American backup plan: talk about burning the system to the ground, or at least “suspending" the Constitution to force their vision onto everyone else. Of course, the far right does this under the guise of the patriotic slogan “America First.” At least the far Left is honest about the fact they just plain hate America.

Let's break this down point-by-point, dig into the actual historical record, and dismantle this ethno-state nonsense line by line.

Lie number one: The phrase "our posterity" in the Constitution's Preamble was code for "white people."

The Fact: In 18th-century legal writing, "posterity" simply meant future generations—or inheritors of the body politic itself.

The Founders were building a lasting system of self-governance, and they explicitly viewed it as a model for individual human liberty as a whole, not a pathway to preserve ancestral bloodlines. They certainly did not believe preserving “race” was some sort of moral imperative, as many seem to suggest today.

Alexander Hamilton laid this out in Federalist No. 1 in 1787. He didn't frame the country as a victory for one specific “race”.

He wrote:

"It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force."

Hamilton saw the American experiment as a test case for human nature, not an “blood and soil” ethnic club.

To see how radically the Founders rejected ethnic or religious blood-and-soil nationalism, look at George Washington’s relationship with American Jews. In August 1790, Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island, where Moses Seixas, warden of the Touro Synagogue, wrote to him asking if Jewish Americans—who had been persecuted across Europe for centuries—would truly enjoy equal rights in this new nation.

Washington replied with a landmark letter that completely shatters the ethno-state argument. He explicitly rejected the European model of simple "toleration," where a dominant majority graciously tolerates a minority. Washington insisted that citizenship in America is based on natural rights, writing:

"The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

Washington did not view citizenship through tribal heritage. He added: "May the children of the Stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants... while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid." Washington's test for who belongs in America wasn't race or religion; it was good citizenship under the Constitution.

Lie number two: The Constitution itself was built as a racial contract.

The Fact: The delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 intentionally kept racial language out of the text. James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," explicitly fought to keep racial property concepts out of the document.

During the convention on August 25, 1787, Madison recorded his own principled stance:

"Mr. Madison thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men."

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass pointed out this exact strength in his 1860 speech in Glasgow:

"I undertake to declare that the National Constitution warrants no such conclusion. It so happens that no such words as 'African slave trade,' no such words as 'slave representation,' no such words as 'plantation,' no such words as 'negro,' no such words as 'property in man,' are to be found in that instrument... Its language is 'We the People'; not we the white people, not even we the citizens... If the Constitution were intended to be a white man's document... it would have been so expressed."

Lie number three: The Naturalization Act of 1790 proves America was founded strictly as an "Anglo-Saxon" nation.

The Fact: Conflating an early Congressional law with the Constitution is basic civics confusion. A statute passed by an early Congress is not the supreme law of the land, and statutes change over time.

Besides, the ethno-state crowd loves to slip in the term "Anglo-Saxon" here, but the historical text directly contradicts them. The 1790 act allowed naturalization for free immigrants from all over Europe—German, French, Dutch, Irish—groups that Anglo-Saxon nativists back then actually looked down on. In fact, Benjamin Franklin famously wrote essays complaining about non-Anglo German immigrants in Pennsylvania, proving that even early notions of "whiteness" were an unstable, shifting social construct rather than a unified founding design. It was never the basis for national identity.

On top of that, citizenship at the state level was already multi-racial at the time of the Founding. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis noted this historical fact in his dissent in the 1857 Dred Scott case:

"At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, all free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens."

Non-white citizens were voting and holding civic status in multiple states when the Constitution was ratified.

More broadly, while the early Republic contained glaring contradictions between its egalitarian principles and its daily realities—most obviously the horrors of chattel slavery—the constitutional architecture itself was designed with a trajectory pointing toward expanding liberty over time. The early body politic frequently failed to live up to its own standards, but the universal ideals enshrined in the Founding documents provided the precise legal and moral leverage used by subsequent generations to correct those failures. We see this same evolutionary trajectory in the history of religious freedom and civic inclusion.

At the Founding, several states maintained official state-sponsored churches and restricted public office to Protestants, effectively treating Catholics and Jewish Americans as second-class citizens. Yet, over the next few decades, the overwhelming momentum of the First Amendment’s principles dismantled these religious tests at the state level one by one. The story of American constitutionalism is not one of static, immediate perfection, but of a framework designed to continually pull the nation toward a broader, more consistent realization of its core principles.

When you strip away the bad memes and red arrows, the truth is simple: extremists on both sides hit the exact same wall. Real American history contradicts their goals.

The radical Left wants you to believe the Founding was irredeemably evil so they can tear it down. The radical Right wants you to believe it was a racial pact so they can exclude people.

Both are dead wrong, and both turn to the exact same anti-American playbook when they get called out. America isn't built on tribal identity or authoritarian power trips; it's built on a constitutional Republic dedicated to individual liberty.