Actor Kelsey Grammer used an appearance on "Planet Tyrus" to warn that Americans who never learn the sacrifices behind the nation's founding are leaving themselves open to manipulation, and he called for a full overhaul of the education system.
Grammer, best known for decades-long runs on "Cheers" and "Frasier," has spent recent years turning his attention to American history on screen. He recently starred in the film "Young Washington" and hosted a six-episode Fox Nation series called "The Patriot War," which traces key turning points in the American Revolution ahead of the nation's 250th anniversary. His comments on Tuesday's episode of the show hosted by Tyrus went further than promoting a project, they amounted to a blunt indictment of what he sees as a generation taught to dismiss the country's origins.
The core of Grammer's argument was simple and direct. As Fox News Digital reported, Grammer told Tyrus:
"If you don't know where you come from, you don't know who you are. If you don't know who you are, you can be controlled."
That line captures the stakes as Grammer frames them. Forget the founding, and you hand power to whoever fills the vacuum. It is a warning aimed less at politicians than at the institutions, schools, universities, cultural gatekeepers, that decide what young Americans learn about their own country.
Grammer did not limit himself to generalities. He called the current state of American education broken enough to require a wholesale rebuild.
"There's a whole bunch of things that just have got to stop with our educational system, and we got to retool it. There's no question."
He did not name specific curricula or policies. But the context of his remarks made clear he was pushing back against a trend he sees in classrooms and popular culture: reducing the Founding Fathers to caricatures defined by race and appearance rather than by what they wrote, risked, and built.
"Yeah, I'm pretty tired of the old White guy in [a] wig thing."
Grammer's frustration with that dismissal is not abstract. He pointed to Thomas Jefferson's age when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, a fact that undercuts the "old men in wigs" framing on its face.
"I mean Thomas Jefferson was 33 when he wrote what is arguably the most important political document in the history of man."
Jefferson was younger than many graduate students today. Grammer's point lands without elaboration: if the image people carry of the founders is a row of elderly, irrelevant aristocrats, the image is wrong, and the error is not accidental.
Grammer went on to reframe the American founding as an idea, not an identity. He rejected the notion that the founders' legacy belongs to any racial or demographic category.
"It never had anything to do with the way you looked. It had everything to do with the way you thought and the way you dreamed, and that's all America."
He described the country as a perpetual work in progress, a place defined not by having arrived at perfection but by moving toward it.
"The land of the possible. Yeah, absolutely. It's always [going to] fall a little short, but that's just it. It's the world of becoming. We're becoming a more perfect union, always, rather than we just are one."
That language echoes the Constitution's own preamble. And it draws a line between two competing views of American history: one that treats the founding as a completed failure to be judged and discarded, and one that treats it as an ongoing project whose principles still bind and still inspire.
Grammer reserved his sharpest remarks for the personal cost borne by the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence. He argued that most of them "ended in ruin" for putting their names on the document, a claim he illustrated with graphic specifics.
"Some of their children were murdered, some of their wives were raped."
Grammer did not cite a specific historical source for those claims during the interview, and Fox News Digital's coverage did not independently verify the individual fates he described. But his broader point, that signing the Declaration was not a ceremonial gesture but a personal gamble with devastating consequences for many signers and their families, is consistent with the historical record that scholars have documented for generations.
He connected those sacrifices to a character he believes still runs through the country.
"They paid the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate one. And they would probably do it again. And I think that sort of character is what still is in most of us. I believe in America that way."
Grammer's interest in the founding generation is not new. Back in 2003, he portrayed George Washington in the historical drama "Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor." More recently, he starred in "Young Washington," a film focused on the nation's first president. And his six-episode Fox Nation series "The Patriot War" narrates pivotal moments of the Revolution for a modern audience approaching the country's 250th birthday.
Taken together, the projects suggest a sustained effort, not a publicity stop. Grammer has spent years putting founding-era stories on screen at a time when many in Hollywood treat that period as either irrelevant or embarrassing. His willingness to defend those stories publicly, and to name the educational failures he believes have eroded public knowledge of them, sets him apart from most actors who keep their politics vague enough to protect their next deal.
Whether Grammer's call to "retool" American education gains any policy traction is an open question. He offered no legislative blueprint, no specific curriculum reform, no target beyond the broad conviction that something fundamental has gone wrong in what schools teach about the country's origins. The open questions are real: Which standards? Which grades? Whose version of the founding story?
But Grammer's core warning does not require a policy white paper to land. A country that teaches its young to sneer at the people who built it, or worse, never teaches them about those people at all, is a country that has handed someone else the power to define what it means. That is not a Hollywood talking point. It is a civic fact, and it ought to worry anyone who still believes the founding principles are worth defending.
