Matthew Mehan, author of “The American Book of Fables,” joins Bradley Devlin on a new episode of Signal Sitdown to discuss the “moral imagination” of the Founders and on the need during America 250 for the nation to have a “shared memory.” This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Bradley Devlin: Why did you write this book? Matthew Mehan: So I am a weird—I’m an odd duck in that I have both a lot of political training—political, philosophical, history, and civics training—but I also have literary training, and the two of those things kind of bounce back and forth, and so you start to think about what is the role of a man of letters in a republic. And it turns out that it’s a very sort of underpracticed art to give the right kinds of images that bring the right sort of ideas, habits, customs, principles, ways of being, and memory. That’s a major task that today’s poets don’t really do. And if they do it, they’re usually doing something wrong, or in error or deliberately subversive, which we can talk about later, I guess. But that just basically—I kind of wanted to come to the defense. Blood rushes to a wound, and this is something that needed doing, and so I did it. That’s the simple answer. And then A250, the Semiquincentennial—go big or go home for America’s 250th. I wanted to basically, you know, drop a major heirloom, a kind of celebratory monster coffee-table epic, on the American family. Bradley Devlin: Why fables? What’s important about a fable? Matthew Mehan: So one of the things I did to prep for this is I actually did study fables. I went to conferences like a good little nerd and read—you know, read up on—They have conferences— Bradley Devlin: On fables? Matthew Mehan: Very rarely. And sometimes you have to organize them yourself. But yes, I did. And then also I wrote for The Heritage Foundation, actually. I did a white paper on the founding imagination. What does the founding generation—what was in their imagination? And it turns out what’s in your imagination is very much the ingredients for whatever stew of a decision—i.e., your prudence. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna found a new nation? Are you going to have a revolution? What are you gonna do? And it turns out that what is in your imagination is a lot of what is the constituent parts of those acts. So if you have a poor imagination, you have an empty pantry, you will not cook a good dish, as Seneca says. So it turns out the founders and the founding generation—they had these incredible Caxton’s Fables, Avianus’ Fables, LaStrange. These were on the shelves. They would greedily buy copies of them. They read them and studied them. Why? Fables are not just—we think of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, right? Simple, straightforward—The Boy Who Cried Wolf. It’s basically if you lie, people don’t believe you, and then you get eaten by the wolf. Great, right? That’s a very good fable. But that is, in a certain sense, the exception to the rule. It’s known because it’s the most simple today, and we tend to be morally a little too simple. Most fables have a moral that’s basic, but then inside it, you feel that there is a lot more to think about—about how to be a good person and how to identify a bad person and how to react to evil so that you don’t become evil. There’s actually the moral technology of fable. It’s a very witty, wise genre that is meant for a free people. And so that’s why I really focused on fable. And why, even though there’s nursery rhymes and there’s short stories and there’s primary sources, there’s a lot going on here. The central core is this beat of American fables—retold, adapted, and told wholly new. Bradley Devlin: What’s the difference between mythology and fable? How does fable play into mythology and the relationship between those two things? Matthew Mehan: Fable starts with the ridiculous—talking animals. It doesn’t give you any kind of easy ramp to slowly agree that, yes, the trees should talk. And it’s a kind of just instant absurdity, and that gives you a sort of distance from it to think about it as a fun kind of a game, a moral play. Whereas myth is weaving history, the cosmos, angels and devils, gods and goddesses, naiads and dryads. You’re making a full cosmic claim for your country, your nation, your republic inside of a wider providence of Jupiter or of God himself. You know—like it’s a much sort of bolder statement. And myths can be true and myths can be false, right? They can be misleading and need purification. I mean, I think that’s Homer’s job—there are all these wacky myths in Greece at the time, and he’s like, “OK, I’m gonna—all the crazy ones, I’m gonna have this guy who’s crazy save them, and then we’re gonna put him in his place and tell a new one,” right? So he was trying to purify the myths of Greece to make the godhead of Olympus more reasonable. Now, as a Christian, we might go, “Yeah, that’s also bad,” but it was certainly philosophically better. So myth, to my mind, when you get to that level of complexity, it presents real dangers. But it’s fundamentally—every city, every founding, every country needs one, and so it better be really good and really true. Bradley Devlin: America 250—you could have written a political book. Why not a political book? Why not a philosophical treatise? Why not another deep dive into the history of the Declaration? Matthew Mehan: For a number of reasons. One very practical. First, not everyone is very patriotic. And if you actually want the entire country to be formed with a common memory of the principles and goodness of Judeo-Christian, Western, Greco-Roman—you can pick your hyphenated way of talking about what we have as a culture and as a people, right? You need to find a way to attract them that isn’t only for those who are already kind of inclined in your direction, which is why there’s all these beautiful discourses on nature and the national parks and the ecology. Because even people who aren’t very patriotic still love the national park system. They like backpacking. They like the buffalo. They want to protect nature. So, in one sense, we have to always be struggling for a national book, right? For a national dialogue, a national memory—or we’re gonna tear apart, right? That’s gonna happen. And this is part of what I’m trying to do: give the country a shared memory again. And then through that, they come to know some of the things that we sort of—more patriotic, more kind of conservative, whatever term you want—that care about these things: the morals of fables, right, the moralists, which I’m all about. One thing I learned is the Founding Fathers were so—and the founding generation—their moral imagination was so much more intense than ours. Everything was moralized. But it was actually joyful. It wasn’t this sort of frowning misery of, like, lectures. It was this hilarious wit and wisdom that was downright funny. But they could judge very carefully … … The American founding is different. It’s all written down. Like, we have the letters. We know what the—Numa, the king of Rome, wasn’t, like, magically talking with a nymph, and we don’t really know what happened there, right? Like, these are letters between Abigail Adams and John Adams, and then between Jefferson and Washington and Adams. Like, we know what happened in a funny way, and we’re also from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the droit écrit, the written law. So we actually like to write things down. We like things to be clear, which presents a challenge for myth, because we’re not going to accept some fake godhead. I think we love The Song of Hiawatha, and I have a kind of nod to it. But we rejected a lot of what Longfellow was doing with this strange sort of foreign gods, new mythology for America—Hiawatha on the mountain with these … No, we’re Christian, right? We’re Western. We’re sort of rational. And so humanity winds up having a lot of primary sources in history, and the mythos winds up being a kind of true mythos of the moral wit and wisdom of the people. And the mystery of the myth actually is the numinous reason of the American people. Like, we are a mysterious thing, right? And it’s amazing that we produced what we produced, yes, through our representatives. But I try to get past—yes, the Founding Fathers. I focus on them. I raise them up as heroes and show some of their strengths and even some of their weaknesses, such that we can even learn from their mistakes. But also I try to get past that to the American people and the settlement of the country, which is why the book doesn’t just do the founding and the Revolution. It does that, interspersed with an account of the settlement and all these other sort of very moving lesser biographies and stories of the settling of the country.

I testified in Congress today, and I can’t help but feel like I was doing the job of Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s therapist. The House Judiciary Committee invited me to speak on the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Democrats on the committee didn’t exactly like that. The Democrats spent their time defending the poor, sweet, little innocent SPLC from that big mean Trump administration. Most of the Democrats didn’t even try to address the thorny issue of who belongs on the SPLC’s “hate map.” Obviously, it’s slander for the SPLC to put mainstream conservative and Christian groups like the Family Research Council and Turning Point USA on a map with Klan chapters—a map the SPLC says exposes “the infrastructure upholding white supremacy.” The Democrat witness, Maya Wiley, refused to even address the truth or falsehood of the SPLC’s attacks against my co-witnesses, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and civil rights expert Carol Swain. Crockett deigned to actually discuss specific groups on the “hate map,” but her questions left much to be desired. Crockett and the Proud Boys She began her allotted five minutes by asking each of us whether we considered the Proud Boys to be “white supremacist.” I’m not particularly a fan of the Proud Boys—they’re a bit aggressive for my taste. They define themselves as opposing Antifa, and they got into many clashes with Antifa. It’s quite revealing that the SPLC condemns the Proud Boys but doesn’t condemn Antifa. I don’t know if the Proud Boys belong on the “hate map.” What I do know, for certain, is that they’re not “white supremacist.” How do I know this? Because the Proud Boys sued the SPLC for defamation, and I read the lawsuit. The Proud Boys made some very excellent arguments against the claim that they’re “white supremacist,” among them noting the fact that the Proud Boys’ leader—Enrique Tarrio—is of Afro-Cuban descent. The bylaws also explicitly bar white supremacists from joining. I don’t support the Proud Boys, but I took an oath to tell the truth, and when Jasmine Crockett asked me a question I knew the answer to, I wasn’t about to lie. Crockett, however, blew up. Crockett’s Outburst “Oh my gosh, let me be clear: Proud Boys are freaking white supremacists,” the honorable Democrat gentlelady from Texas began lecturing me. You can’t quite tell from the video, but Crockett was looking directly at me for the next three minutes of her tirade. I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of her tirade—you can watch it for yourself. I do, however, wish to respond to some of the disgusting insinuations she made about me and my fellow witnesses. Crockett said, “I’m sure some of y’all would struggle with whether or not the enslavement of black people was good or bad—I’m not even going to go there and ask you the question.” For the record, as if it even needed to be said, I oppose race-based chattel slavery. My opinions about the Civil War are hardly a secret. She also claimed that recent mass shootings involved “white supremacists who were empowered by the Republican Party’s racist rhetoric and policies,” and said the GOP “wants to drag us back to the Jim Crow era.” Such a claim is absurd, and Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas, demonstrated as much brilliantly when he contrasted photos of actual Jim Crow with photos of Americans today presenting ID to vote. WATCHOnce and for all, @WesleyHuntTX explained the night-and-day differences between the true ugliness of Jim Crow and the voter ID laws Democrats now call "Jim Crow." Seriously, his remarks were chilling (as a reminder of the evil) and fantastic (in telling the truth). pic.twitter.com/HXEZFWknuT— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 20, 2026 History Books Perhaps the most disgusting part of her rant came toward the end of the hearing. “Some of y’all need to read up on your history books, the very same ones that the Republicans have decided that people should not hear about because you don’t want real history taught in our schools because you’re afraid that it’s going to hurt people’s feelings to know that their ancestors were so savage that they would enslave black folk,” Crockett said. “You want them to be ignorant so that they can sit up here and be your token for your mission.” That “token” line appeared to be a reference to Carol Swain, who is a serious scholar and expert on civil rights matters. As for me, I do want kids to read history books, but I want them to present the facts fairly and to be tailored to specific grade levels. I don’t want a third-grader reading books tainted by critical race theory—the notion that America is systemically racist such that blacks are inherently oppressed and whites are inherently oppressors. I want kids to learn about slavery, but I also want them to learn why America’s values led to its eventual abolition. Of course, Crockett’s whole point wasn’t to “educate” me or to get me to change my mind. She likely knows that I don’t support slavery and that Republicans aren’t really trying to bring back Jim Crow. The whole event felt more like a therapy session, where a good therapist just sits back as the patient vents her feelings. As a witness, it wasn’t my job to educate her. It was my job to listen, and to weigh in with my expertise when I had the opportunity. I understand Jasmine Crockett must be going through a lot right now. Perhaps she’ll let me explain why things aren’t quite so bad as she thinks they are—but that will have to wait for our next session. You can't see from this video, but Jasmine Crockett was starting directly at me for most of her tirade. She clearly took offense when I stated the truth that the Proud Boys (led by an Afro-Cuban) aren't white supremacist. I wasn't defending them, just stating facts.She… pic.twitter.com/omkOFsDsbM— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 20, 2026

If you have any friends in Virginia that still have their “Vote YES” yard signs on display, be kind to them; it’s been a tough couple of weeks. The hardest hit may have been delivered on Tuesday when Gov. Abigail Spanberger vetoed the Marijuana Marketplace bills (House Bill 642 and Senate Bill 542). Most figured this was a “slam dunk.” “C’mon!” You might hear them shout, “It’s an all-Democrat government and we DON’T have legal weed sales?” Understandable, but we should consider the governor’s reasoning. No, not her future presidential bids. The statement she issued along with the veto stated: “It is critical that we incorporate lessons learned by other states and ensure that our regulatory framework is fully prepared to provide strong oversight from day one.” Lessons learned in other states? Let’s dig into that. Colorado is more than 12 years into recreational cannabis sales, the longest run in the country, and issues keep cropping up, involving everything from public consumption to tax policies. In 2012 and 2013, before they underlined the “high” in “Rocky Mountain High,” Coloradans were promised windfall tax revenue ($70 million) from marijuana sales taxes. Those numbers were never achieved. In the first year, they collected $44 million. Since legalization in 2014, Colorado’s marijuana tax revenue has been tracked monthly by the Colorado Department of Revenue. While early years saw strong collections—peaking in 2021 at about $423 million—totals have declined sharply. By 2025, annual collections were about $236 million, and in early 2026 they were roughly $38 million, according to the Department of Revenue. However, that’s just part of the issues that states allowing open sales of what is still listed as a Schedule I narcotic by the federal government have found. Crash rates spiked with the legalization of recreational marijuana use and retail sales in California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, studies by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the affiliated Highway Loss Data Institute show. Another unforeseen consequence Spanberger might be referring to is that illicit marketplaces don’t go away when weed is legalized. From The Denver Gazette just last month: “A top regulator for Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division acknowledged in a private meeting with industry representatives that the amount of chemically converted hemp being illegally sold as marijuana is far greater than the agency has publicly disclosed.” Law enforcement points to lower costs and limited access to “the legal stuff.” Take New York state, for example, which has only 180 licensed dispensaries for 20 million people. They say you can have it, but now you can’t get it. Who ya’ gonna call? This governor said in her statement, “It is my responsibility as Governor to make sure all new laws can be successfully implemented.” There seems to be mounting evidence that, given the stated goals of “decriminalization,” that doesn’t look possible. At least the owner of the Cannabis Outlet in Portsmouth (State Senator Louise Lucas) can focus on her legal issues and not how to roll out a whole new line of products. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Communist China is producing a real horror show. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., recently convened a special session of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China and solicited stunning testimony from experts and eyewitnesses on the horrific practice of live organ harvesting—hearts, livers, lungs, kidneys, corneas—in Communist China. The unlucky cohort of living “donors”—men and women murdered for their body parts—is comprised of various dissidents as well as politically persecuted ethnic and religious minorities. This latest congressional inquiry follows in the wake of the Heritage Foundation’s public conference on the topic, which featured Jan Jekielek, author of the New York Times best seller, “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary.”Jekielek also appeared as a witness before the commission’s panel. In his opening remarks, Rep. Smith noted a hot mic exchange between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping where the two autocrats were casually discussing the potential of organ donation contributing to greater longevity, with Xi speculating that humans this century could possibly live as long as 150 years. Ethical organ transplantation, Smith emphasized, is “noble and lifesaving … But forced organ harvesting is not healing. It is murder masquerading as medicine.” This horrific practice, notes Smith, is a logical consequence of the Orwellian assumptions underlying communism: “a system where human beings are reduced to commodities, and the state controls the body as well as the mind.” Ethan Gutmann, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told the commission that, as early as 2013, government agents started to come into people’s homes and draw blood from those deemed to be at odds with China’s Communist regime. Those found guilty of practicing an “unsanctioned faith” were arrested, imprisoned, often tortured, kept in harsh conditions in cells and internment camps. Based on camp medical files in 2017, Gutmann said, a red check mark next to a blood sample meant that the person had been “pre-selected” for harvesting. Gutman says that when youths ripen to an average age of 28, prison guards drag them—whether kicking and screaming or resigned and hopeless—to a transplant hospital where, under anesthesia, organ removal occurs. They start removing different organs, one after another, until they excise the heart. Religious Persecution The target populations for this practice have been expanding. Originally, the victims were death row prisoners. Today, the enlarged “donor” class includes the practitioners of Falun Gong—mostly virtuous contemplatives—but also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians. Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., observed that the “targeting of Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs reflects … a broader campaign of religious persecution that includes Christians in China, ethnic repression, and dehumanization carried out by the PRC (People’s Republic of China).” Jekielek told the commission that the Communist regime has launched an aggressive propaganda campaign against certain minorities, painting them as “black classes.” Jekielek said that this enables the regime to designate them as subhuman so that the Chinese people, assuming they become aware of it, are “psychologically prepared for the atrocities against the target group.” Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback reminded the commission that China’s totalitarian regime, regardless of any of its protestations to the contrary, cannot and will not tolerate genuine religious liberty. For the Communist regime, religious liberty is the equivalent of “kryptonite,” and they fear such liberty more than they fear our aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons.” A Global Problem There is a growing global demand for organs, especially among wealthy Middle Eastern patients. China’s Communist regime can profit from such a lucrative international market. The policy question for the U.S. and its allies is how to ensure that medical researchers, practitioners, and medical institutions in the West are not complicit in this unethical practice. During his testimony before the commission, Gutmann specifically called for an investigation of Thermo Fisher Scientific, a company that supplied DNA testing used on millions of Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Likewise, Jekielek called for oversight over American institutions training practitioners as transplant surgeons who return to Communist China. There is bipartisan interest in tackling the problem. Rep. Smith’s bill, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025 (H.R.1503), would criminalize trafficking in forcibly donated organs and impose penalties of up to 20 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines for knowing complicity with this unethical practice. “Tyrants will continue to seek immortality,” said Smith, “but not with our expertise or money. Not with a dollar of American complicity.” The House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 406 to 1. The Senate has yet to act. Curiously, the Chinese Communist Party’s organ harvesting program is another case of life imitating art. In 1978, Michael Crichton directed “Coma”, a high-class horror film starring a young Michael Douglas and the beautiful Geneviève Bujold. Bujold’s character, a young surgeon, discovers that hospital patients are being induced into a coma and their bodies are being transported to a remote location for live organ harvesting. Initially, her colleagues are skeptical. In the movie, the culprit is a sophisticated transnational criminal organization. In real life, it still is.

After Maryland announced an error within a massive shipment of more than 500,000 mail-in ballots, Rep. Greg Murphy had a one-word description. “Oops,” the North Carolina Republican said during a hearing Wednesday of the House Administration Subcommittee on Elections. “What’s the deal going on with Maryland?” Murphy asked Don Palmer, a former chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. “It’s a very, it’s a huge mistake. Obviously, you can point at the vendor and say, well, the vendor made this mistake, but the buck stops with the election officials,” Palmer, now a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told the House panel. The Maryland State Board of Elections announced Friday that a portion of mail ballots for the June 23 party primaries went to voters of the wrong party. The board said it would be resending all 565,000 mail ballots, which should arrive at voters’ addresses by May 29. Palmer, a former Florida elections director, said he has sympathy for election officials and their responsibility, but said, “it’s that type of thing that hurts confidence.” On Monday, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, “In Maryland, they sent out 500,000 illegal mail-in ballots, and they got caught!” The Maryland State Board of Elections did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal on Tuesday or Wednesday about the ballots. State Administrator of Elections Jared DeMarinis posted on X that “no fake OR illegal mail-in ballots were distributed.” He added, “The wording in President Trump’s continued posts about Maryland’s elections creates an environment of misinformation on a voting right. Mail-in voting is not a partisan issue. Mail-in voting is legal.” It bears repeating that no fake OR illegal mail-in ballots were distributed. The wording in President Trump's continued posts about Maryland's elections creates an environment of misinformation on a voting right. Mail-in voting is not a partisan issue. Mail-in voting is legal.— Jared DeMarinis (@JaredDeMarinis) May 19, 2026 During Wednesday’s hearing, Palmer noted bipartisan concern from members of Congress and outside groups about the security of voter registration systems. “Even more so, there have been documented instances of vulnerabilities being identified and those vulnerabilities being exploited,” Palmer said. “Most of the breaches of a voter registration system don’t necessarily mean results are going to be changed. But the impact on the public confidence could be very negative.” Murphy later asked current Election Assistance Commission Chairman Thomas Hicks during the hearing how much the federal government should pay to cover the cost of elections. “Elections overall cost $6 billion. I think two years ago for Congress to appropriate $15 million is not enough,” Hicks said. “So, if I had my druthers, I’d say the federal government should pay 100% of federal elections. But that’s not for me to decide.” Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., asked Hicks what the Election Assistance Commission is doing to ensure noncitizens aren’t voting. “States run the elections and it’s illegal for noncitizens to vote. We don’t play an active role in who can and can’t vote,” Hicks said. “EAC does not run elections. We cannot do anything to stop that. That’s a state issue.” Miller responded, “If you want the federal government to pick up the tab for elections, then maybe the federal government could say you have to have a photo ID and you have to be a U.S. citizen [to vote].”