The level of basic cultural and historical illiteracy among America’s leftist elites is really something to behold.

Speaker Pelosi issued her letter calling for a “9/11-type Commission” to find out who stole her laptop. Not really what 9/11-type commissions are for, but okay. At the beginning of it, she quotes a dead white patriarch.

George Washington was the patriarch of our country, who with his courage, fought for and won our independence at great odds; who with his wisdom, then established our democracy – the greatest that the world would ever see – and who with his prescience, cautioned against political parties at war with their own government, warning that through parties, “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”

Patriarch? Like… patriarchy? 

Does Pelosi even understand the words she’s using. Maybe not, but it doesn’t matter because she’s part of a faction that switches up its rhetoric and positions whenever convenient. Democrats in California are tearing down George Washington even as Nan deploys him to attack Republicans.

And Nan doesn’t know what she’s quoting.

George Washington didn’t “establish” a democracy. There’s almost as many things wrong with that phrase as with a Sean Penn tweet. But, specifically, Washington was cautioning against political parties.

The  Farewell Address, which she’s quoting, has Washington (and Hamilton) warns that parties would put in “place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Washington opposed factionalism. But that was inevitable. The specific faction he was opposing was the faction that would eventually become the Democrat Party. The one with Jefferson, Burr, and eventually Jackson, Pelosi’s party.

If Pelosi thinks George made a good argument, then she’s welcome to begin the process of dismantling the Democrat Party. His critique, that the Democrats represent “a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community” is truer than ever of the leftists who run the Democrats.