So, what did we say that fine day?
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
This means they don’t have to be proved. They are like the sky being blue. You can argue if you like, but no American will accept any argument that these truths are not self evidently true.
that all men are created equal,
This is a dogma much like the Christian dogma of the Trinity (though on a lower level, of course). You can’t prove it. In fact, you can easily find evidence that while we are created equal, we are not actually equal. Not in physical ability, not in intellectual capacity and so on. But we hold that all men – though in 2025 we would write it “all people” – are created equal because this is the only way to justify a government by consent. We’re either equal and thus can only be governed at our consent, or we are unequal and our superior masters shall rule over us.
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
We are endowed with the rights. That word is very important. Government doesn’t grant us our rights, we are endowed with them from the moment we are created. And these rights cannot be taken away – not even by our voluntary agreement. They exist outside of human reference. God or Nature – take your pick based on your beliefs – endowed us with them by the simple fact of our being human. Why do we assert this as self-evident? Because like our being created equal, it is the only way to justify the sort of government we have. If our rights are contingent upon agreement or law, then it is not self evident that we are created equal and the whole edifice collapses.
–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
Another key part: we institute government simply to secure our rights. Anything else governments do at the behest of the people is all fine and dandy, but the purpose of government is to secure our rights. It is the only thing the government must do. We might want government to pay us all money out of the Treasury…but we demand that government secure our rights.
–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
No government is permanent. Not even our sublime Constitution. Humanity is Fallen. We sin. We err. We get greedy and stupid. We forget what we’re doing here. When that happens, we have the right to alter or to abolish that form of government which failed and try again with a new form of government.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.
We can and will put up with a lot, but when our form of government starts to abuse us and usurp our rights, it is our duty to alter or abolish the government. Jefferson wasn’t letting us off the hook. The United States was founded on the dogmas listed above and subscription to those dogmas – a requirement for any person who wishes to have the title of American citizen – lays upon us the duty to change things when they’ve gone wrong. We are not to wait upon the boss to tell us – we tell him what we’re doing, and if we have to fight, so be it.
There is nothing like the United States. Nothing like our Declaration. Nothing like our Constitution. And there never will be another like it unless we Americans simply try to make what was done in 1776 better. Other nations – other peoples – are incapable of this form of government and our concepts of liberties and rights. We don’t know what magic of the universe – what interventions by God – made us what we are and gave us our Founders, but however it came to be, it was and remains unique. Other people do approach our ideals of government and liberty, but they always fall short…too fearful from long habits of servility of actually taking that final step to full, adult and human responsibility. Only we have said – and as far as we can tell, only we will say – “I am an adult human being with Rights and they will be respected”. Everyone else always places a “but” in there somewhere…some escape hatch which allows the adult to hide and allow some form of Master to take charge and order things to their liking.
And it is hard, my friends. We already know that some substantial portion of our own people have been so ruthlessly propagandized that they are eager to surrender their rights in return for a government subsidy. But it was hard in 1776, too. In fact, it is said that only about one in three of the Founding generation were active participants in creating our nation. Such is how is was, is and always will be: most people are afraid of taking any sort of responsibility. But true Americans never shy away from it – we eagerly demand to be given the choice, and we choose liberty at all costs and hazards. Outside of our varied faiths in God, nothing is more important to an American than being free and equal under God.
Look back upon that generation, now nearly 250 years past. They are long gone but they remain our standard. Do we measure up to them? Are we as brave as they were? If we have but a tenth of their courage, we shall remain free.
Blogs For Victory 
I got in a lengthy email discussion with my son-in-law back early in the Biden Administration. He and my daughter were vehemently anti-Trump to the point where they believed that anything not Trump was better, or at least couldn’t possibly be worse. He eventually stopped the conversation, but I kept writing as thoughts came to me. I’ve put my entire rant on a thumb drive and in an envelope along with my will addressed to him after I’m gone.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY EVERYONE!
Love that Spook, well said … happy Fourth of July y’all. America the Beautiful
I think we all know that the kind of reasonable, history-based, rational arguments you have made to your son-in-law will fall on deaf ears. That is because their “political” alliance is not based on reason or history or rationality.
I know you read Dr. Malone’s newsletter, so have probably read his essays on psy ops. The biggest and most effective psy-ops in history has been the Left’s nudging of political thought from actual analysis to pure emotion-based reactionary impulses, directed either toward or away from PEOPLE. Not ideas, not ideology, not analysis of the best blueprint for governing the nation, but pure raw unthinking emotion. This simple shift from thinking to feeling has literally changed the arc of history and of our own nation.
We have seen it change millions of black Americans from believers in the message and philosophy of their once-revered Reverend Doctor King to the rejection of those messages and the conviction that to adopt them is to be a white supremacist. It has led to the placement of people like AOC and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in Congress. It enabled the election frauds of 2020 and still counted for millions of votes in 2024, not FOR Harris but AGAINST Trump. It accounts for the violence against ICE, because these people are really expressing their hatred of Trump, not necessarily of support of illegal immigration. It will, if unchecked, result in the destruction of this country.
I am sure that your son-in-law, if asked, cannot come up with a coherent political philosophy that supports his Leftist allegiance. He even admitted that it is based on hatred of Trump, and I’m sure that he feels this so deeply that he is unaware of the fact that this is really the most shallow, superficial and illegitimate reason there is for voting against the welfare of the nation and even his own self-interests.
This is why when I am in a discussion with a Leftist I never, EVER, argue issues or people. I just don’t, because it is not only not productive it is counterproductive because it only further entrenches the irrational commitment to those issues and feelings about those people. One time, back before I developed my little mantra about the two real choices we have in this country and was just talking to a wildly Lib brother about how people now have the freedom to move to a state that does not force them into health insurance plans, he said yes, but not everyone can AFFORD to move, so it is only FAIR to have everything the same everywhere. And as he said it, I could see in his eyes that he started to get it, that what he called FAIR was the erosion of freedom. He broke off the discussion at that point because he could see where it was going and he didn’t want to follow it to its inevitable conclusion.
But since I developed my little mantra—that the choice is between a federal government restricted in its size, scope and power with most authority left to the states or to the people, or a federal government with unlimited power to expand to create a massively powerful Central Authority, in which power is consolidated in the hands of a few, with very little left to the states or to the people—aside from a couple of people who immediately got very twitchy because they could see where this was heading, most have agreed with the first concept. But the thing is, it is not emotional, and it has nothing to do with any specific issues or people. I wonder which side your son-in-law would come down on.
We’ll get a lot farther talking about the concepts behind the 10th Amendment than we ever will arguing the virtues of any issue or the defects of any other, or defending any PEOPLE. This is what has brought people like Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley over toward the Right—not declaring allegiance to the Republican Party, but defending the Constitutional precepts upon which it was founded and is supposed to still represent. And herein lies the true genius of the Left—it sucks at government, but excels at emotional manipulation, which lets them screw around with government.
Somewhere in our discussion, when we were still going back and forth, my son-in-law made the comment that we were all eventually going to end up in a gulag; it was inevitable, and there was nothing we could do about it. He further commented that, to a great extent, his existence in the corporate rat race (he’s high up in the IT structure of a Fortune 100 company where he’s under a tremendous amount of stress) is equivalent to being in a gulag, but he’s too addicted to the money to make a change. He’s in his mid-50s, and he’s probably going to kill himself before he retires, not commit suicide, but work himself to death. He’s a vegan, and yet he’s 50 pounds overweight. He’s on 3 different blood pressure meds, and the last time I visited them last fall he took his blood pressure while he and I were sitting at their kitchen table. It was around 150 over 90. He’s one of the smartest people I know (scored a perfect score on his math boards when he applied for grad school), but his common sense quotient is severely lacking.
Sorry to hear that – hope he changes…and not just politics, but the whole lifestyle.
I admit to being just about the opposite of driven so for the first half of my adult life, I really had nothing – I wasn’t a street person, but I just spent the money as it came in. I met my to-be Mrs and she sort of took charge of this situation and now, 25 years later, I’ve a house with a pool, two cars (one paid for, the other almost paid for), I take vacations to nice places (last month Del Mar, later this month Lake Tahoe) and even when a financial rough patch hits (and they always do!) I’ve got enough resources to smooth it over. I’ve always worked hard in the sense that I do my job very well (and, indeed, enjoy what I do a lot), but I’ve still never gotten that bug which makes me laser focused on “success” as defined by a post-Christian economic system. That is, I don’t need to pile it up nor do I need to buy everything that’s hot at the moment.
And I’m not stressed out! Sure, I get stressed; we all do. I also feel anxiety and sadness at times – that’s just part of life! But it doesn’t control me. I smoke, I’ll take a drink, I enjoy my bacon double cheeseburgers and while I could use to drop a few pounds, I’m not a lard butt and my overall health is excellent…the only thing wrong with me is a progressively worse knee on the right side but that was built in from childhood injuries. Sure, the eyesight is a little poorer than it was (I simply must have glasses on when I’m driving or its all kinda blurry out there) but that is just getting older. OTOH, the 60 year old who’s been smoking since he was 14 can still do laps underwater in the pool (and while I do consider the possibility of cancer at this point I’ve been smoking so long that the damage, as it were, is already done…if I’m to get cancer, stopping smoking at this point would only delay it by a trivial amount of time; additionally, cancer is very rare in my family including among relatives who chain smoked unfiltered cigarettes for decades…and, of course, we all gotta die of something, so no sense in getting too worked up about what will eventually get us…as the Mrs says, “when you’re number’s up, its up”).
This takes us back to the chicken/egg conundrum: Are chronically dissatisfied people drawn to the negativity of the Left, or does being part of the Left generate negativity?
I know/have known a lot of Libs and every single one of them has been angry and even hostile. I remember when Obama came on the scene (out of nowhere, as we know) and my irrational Lib brothers loved him. I said the motto “Hope and Change” was silly because it didn’t say what was wrong and needed to be changed, and the response was “everything”. Really? Like what? Just “everything”. What will change? “Everything”. What and why? “Because it needs to be changed.” And so on.
They were the people who got all surly and embarrassed at the little theater I have described when another conservative and I acted out political discourse with a Lib: “How do think the tax code should be changed?” GEORGE BUSH IS AN ASSHOLE !!! “What do you think of our foreign policy?” GEORGE BUSH IS AN ASSHOLE !!! “Why do you want to expand the role of the federal government instead of letting states make their own laws?” GEORGE BUSH IS AN ASSHOLE !!! We were having fun, skewering the pseudo-political rage of the Left, while the two Lib brothers seethed but couldn’t say a word because it was so accurate. Both of them knew that I had asked these questions and others like them and never gotten any response more coherent than GEORGE BUSH IS AN ASSHOLE !!!
Obama got in and they were still not happy, just shifting their hostility to anyone who didn’t like Obama, fed by the lapdog media and its howls of “birtherism” and “racism”. Then Trump came along and it was katy bar the door, there was a bigger rage target in sight.
The closest we have ever seen to a positive post from a Lib troll here has been glee at the anticipated defeat of some conservative.
I think your son in law is illustrating the truth in the saying that hating someone is like taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die. That kind of generic seething rage and hatred eats away at its host, with little effect on the target.
Chesterton noted that the flaw of Progressive thought is that they never quite get around to telling us what the destination is – it is all just Progress! To what? A better future! Which will have? Shut up! This is why he said the first thing any political movement needs is an impractical person – someone to set a vision up ahead to be achieved…even if is verily a castle in the sky, at least it is a definite goal. And having a goal – some set thing which, once done, is done – the people involved will feel a sense of purpose and accomplishment. If all you’re doing is Progress without a goal, you get irritated because you don’t know why you’re on the road…you just know you’ve got to be on it for some reason and those who are pointing out off ramps make a Progressive very angry.
“his common sense quotient is severely lacking” which is because he took it out of gear and is now just free-wheeling down the incline created by the Left and its lapdog media.
(That “free-wheeling” might be another of my generational references, probably only understood by people who grew up shifting gears when we drove.)
He’s one of the smartest people I know (scored a perfect score on his math boards when he applied for grad school), but his common sense quotient is severely lacking.
There seems to be a lot of those people
The Wannabe Political Assassins of Donald Trump
How Florida deals with criminals
What a hoot!
Someone put in a lot of time on this and it seems pretty professionally done. Not a lot of consistency, though, going from alligators to laser sharks to pythons
I think it’s called “stream of consciousness,” kind of like the way Trump talks.