Jeff Utsch, constitutional scholar and president of Heirs of the Republic, said America has drifted so far from its founding principles that most citizens no longer understand what liberty means or why the Revolution was fought, and warned that without a dramatic reawakening rooted in constitutional education, the republic cannot survive.
“We fought a revolutionary war about no taxation without representation,” Utsch said on the Restoration Spotlight Podcast by Restoration News. “That didn’t mean just taxation. It really meant no executive abuse of one person mandating upon the citizens what they specifically wanted them to do without having input. If we even had one governor convene an emergency legislative session and ask the state representatives to go out and meet with their constituency — if we even had one governor do that, what an example of what it means to really be an American.”
Utsch said America’s founders staked everything on liberty as the nation’s highest principle and warned that COVID proved how completely that principle has been forgotten.
“Give me liberty or give me death,” he said. “That propelled liberty to our highest principle. Over COVID, we were willing to sacrifice just about all of our liberties for just a tiny bit of safety. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams both said that if a people are willing to give up their liberties for safety, they deserve neither.”
Utsch said the founders were able to compromise because they shared a common vision and warned that without that shared vision, America is headed for an irreconcilable split.
“The Federalist and anti-federalist disagreed on how they’d get there, but they agreed on the vision,” he said. “Today, our problem is we don’t have a common vision. And if the wife wants to go to Miami and the kids want to go to Bangor, Maine, there’s going to be fights over the wheel.”
Utsch said a stunning failure of basic historical knowledge is fueling the left’s false narrative that Thomas Jefferson never intended all men to be created equal.
“When I teach groups, I ask how many of you believe that Thomas Jefferson really meant all men when he said all men, or was he just talking about the white man?” he said. “At most, I’ve gotten 5% of people to raise their hands. The rest don’t know.”
More than 70 percent of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz covering topics like the three branches of government and the number of Supreme Court justices, and just 25 percent say they are confident they could explain how the U.S. system of government works, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation survey.
Utsch said the 1619 Project is not just historically wrong but follows the exact same pattern of false narrative that led directly to the Civil War.
“The 1619 Project teaches that we were founded as a slavocracy, that we fought the revolution to keep our slaves,” he said. “Those false narratives in turn caused a civil war because the southern slaveholders had drummed out all debate on the question. Today, we need to correct false narratives. It is the largest thing that could tear us apart.”
The 1619 Project’s curricular materials reached approximately 4,500 classrooms, and at least five school systems adopted it district-wide, including Chicago Public Schools and District of Columbia Public Schools, according to the Pulitzer Center.
Utsch said America’s current generation has become the very slaveholders it claims to oppose by mortgaging its children’s future to fund its own comfort.
“The definition of slavery is when one man consistently eats the bread of another man’s labor without his or her consent,” he said. “Who are the slaveholders now? We are. Because we’re enslaving our children. We’re spending them into obliteration and eating 30 to 40% of their production of the next generation.”
The U.S. national debt surpassed $36 trillion in 2025, meaning every American child born today inherits approximately $107,000 in government debt before drawing a single breath, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
Utsch said the homeschool and classical Christian school revolution is the most important counterattack against a generation of deliberate miseducation.
“When we outsource the responsibilities we should be taking — educating our kids, church worship, understanding our own history — we leave it in somebody else’s hands,” he said. “We know that the enemies of liberty have taken over. We need to recognize we cannot outsource what is most precious to us, and that’s our children and the next generation.”
Utsch is a constitutional scholar and president of Heirs of the Republic, based in Tucson, Arizona. A University of Arizona aerospace engineering graduate, former U.S. National Team swimmer, and two-decade veteran trainer of Navy SEALs and special operations forces, he leads a monthly constitution study group and serves as a regular constitutional expert on the James T. Harris Show on 104.1 The Truth FM in Tucson.
Restoration News is an investigative outlet affiliated with Restoration of America, covering cultural issues, political funding, and border policy for conservative readers, with an emphasis on stories it says receive limited mainstream media coverage.
