The Glenn Beck Program - Glenn Beck Presents: The 1776 Report the Left Didn't Want You to See

Episode Date: July 4, 2021

We've heard a lot about the 1776 Commission over the past several months. From the mainstream media, you’ve heard lies and slander: It was a racist panel put together by President Trump to peddle a whitewashed version of American history. In reality, the 1776 Commission was established by President Trump in the fall of 2020 with the purpose of promoting “patriotic education.” Not to mandate it, not to propose legislation – simply to PROMOTE it. The media and academia lost their minds over this now controversial idea that we should teach young Americans to appreciate the nation they’ve inherited. And predictably, just hours after Biden took the oath of office, he signed an executive order to dissolve the 1776 Commission, calling the commission's report “offensive and counterfactual.” Glenn presents the 1776 Commission's report in its entirety, because unlike the media and President Biden who want to hide it from you, Glenn wants you to seek the truth and celebrate Independence Day with pride.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to this special presentation of the 1776 report. You may recall that the 1776 Commission was established by President Trump in the fall of 2020, with the purpose of promoting patriotic education. That I will soon sign an executive order establishing a National Commission to promote patriotic education. It will be called the 1776 Commission. Well, the media and academia almost. lost their minds over this now controversial idea that we should teach young Americans to actually love and appreciate the nation they've inherited by telling them the whole truth.

The 1776 Commission had to rush the development of this report because they knew that as soon as Joe Biden was sworn in his president, the commission's days would likely be numbered. The 1776 report was instantly demonized by the media, mostly because it was commissioned by the Trump administration. But it was clear from the avalanche of criticism that virtually no one actually read the report or even gave it a chance. Predictably, just hours after Biden took the oath of office, he signed an executive order to dissolve the 1776 commission. That was one of his first acts in office. President Biden had an opportunity to work toward his campaign promised to be a uniter by keeping the commission going. Instead, he squashed the commission on day one,

and it sent a clear signal about his true priorities and his belief of America and our founding. He called the 1776 commission's work, quote, offensive and counterfactual, end quote. I'm not sure how recounting real truth in American history and teaching, somebody to love one's nation. I don't know when that became offensive, but that is now, unfortunately, where we find ourselves. So why am I presenting the 1776 report in its entirety? Well, for one, because I want to encourage you to actually hear the report for yourself, unlike the media and President Biden. They will hide it from you. So I'm going to show it to you. And I'd love if you would share this series far and wide after you hear the entire report for yourself.

Then you can decide if anything in it is offensive and counterfactual, as the president now says. Secondly, I know how busy you are with family and work. You might not be able to spare the time it takes to read the whole 1776 report, but you might be able to watch it or listen to it instead and share it with your family. This report is about baseline principles that most Americans used to agree on. It is a sounding of the alarm to say, look, a lot of our fellow Americans don't believe in baseline principles anymore. And that's partly because they never knew them in the first place. I believe this project is worth doing because we must try to get back to the commonality of American principles.

We must make the effort because there are forces now hard at work, like the purveyors of critical race theory, or things like the 1619 project, where they want you to reimagine American history. Those things are trying to derail the grand experiment of America and chart a completely different course for the nation, leading to further bitterness and divide, I believe. America's founding was good.

But because it was implemented by men, it is imperfect. Just because implementation has faltered doesn't mean the principles themselves are flawed. We are trying to be a more perfect nation. America has drifted dangerously close to the edge, far from its mission statement in the Declaration of Independence. We must get back to basics. So without further ado, here is the 1776. report. In the course of human events, there have always been those who deny or reject human freedom. But Americans will never falter in defending the fundamental truths of human liberty that

was proclaimed on July 4, 1776. We must always hold these truths. The declared purpose of the President's Advisory 1776 Commission is to enable a rising. generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776, and to strive to form a more perfect union. This requires a restoration of American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those principles that is accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling. And a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future. The Commission's first responsibility is to produce a report summarizing the principles

of the American founding and how these principles have shaped our country. That can only be done by truthfully recounting the aspirations and actions of the men and women who sought to build America as a shining city on a hill. An exemplary nation, one that protects the safety and promotes the happiness of its people, as an example to be admired and emulated by nations of the world that wish to steer their government towards greater liberty and justice. The record of our founders striving and the nation they built is our shared inheritance, and it remains a beacon.

As Abraham Lincoln said, not for one people or one time. but for all people, for all time. Today, however, Americans are deeply divided about the meaning of their country, its history, and how we should be governed. This division is severe enough to call to mind the disagreements between the colonists and King George and those between the Confederate and the Union forces in civil war. They amount to a dispute over not only the history of our country, but also its present purpose and future to be.

direction. The facts of our founding are not partisan. They are a matter of truth and fact and history. Controversies about the meaning of the founding can begin to be resolved by looking at the facts of our nation's founding. Properly understood, these facts address the concerns and aspirations of Americans of all social classes, income levels, races, and religions, regions, and all walks of life. As well, these facts provide necessary and wise cautions against unrealistic hopes and checks, against pressing partisan claims or utopian agendas, too hard or too far. The principles of the American founding can be learned by studying the abundant documents contained in the record. Read fully and carefully. They show how the American people

have ever pursued freedom and justice, which are the political conditions for living well. To learn this history is to become a better person, a better citizen, a better partner in the American experiment of self-government. Compromising actions by imperfect human beings, the American story has had its share of missteps, errors, contradictions, and wrongs. These wrongs have always met resistance from clear principles of the nation, and therefore our history is far more, far more one of self-sacrifice, courage, and nobility. America's principles are named at the outset to be both universal, applying to everyone, and eternal, existing for all time. The remarkable American story unfolds under and because of these great principles. Of course, neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent.

No nation before America even dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics. no one has strived harder or done more to achieve them. Lincoln aptly described the American government's fundamental principles as a standard maxim for a free society, which should be familiar to all and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, end quote. with the very attempt to attain them, every attempt to attain them, would Lincoln continue,

constantly spread and deepen the influence of these principles and augment the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere, end quote. The story of America is the story of this ennobling struggle. The president's advisory, 1770s. Commission presents this first report with the intention of cultivating a better education among Americans in the principles and history of our nation, and in the hope that a rediscovery of those principles and the forms of constitutional government will lead to a more perfect union. Part 2. The meaning of the Declaration

The United States of America is in most respects a nation like any other. embraces a people who inhabit territory governed by laws administered by human beings. Like other countries, our country has borders, resources, industries, cities, towns, farms, and factories, homes, schools, and houses of worship. And though although a relatively young country, its people have a shared history of a common struggle and achievement from carving communities out of vast, untamed wilderness, to winning individuals. independence and forming a new government through wars, industrialization, waves of immigration, technological progress, and political change.

However, in other respects, the United States is wildly unusual. It is a republic, that is to say, its government was designed to be directed by the will of the people, rather than the wishes of a single individual or a narrow class of elites. Republicansism is an ancient form of government, but one uncommon throughout history, in part because of its fragility. It has tended to make republics short-lived. Contemporary Americans tend to forget how historically rare republicanism has been, in part because of the success of our republic, in our time, which is derived in no small part from the very exact. and success of America. In two decisive respects, the United States of America is unique. First, it has a definite birthday, July 4, 1776.

Second, it declares from the moment of its founding, not nearly the principles on which a new government will be based, but it asserts those principles to be true and universal, applicable to all men and all times. and all times, as Lincoln said. The other nations may have birthdays, for instance, that would eventually evolve into the French Republic was born in 1789, when Parisans stormed the hated prison and launched the downfall of the French monarchy and its aristocratic regime. The People's Republic of China was born in

1949 when Mao Zedong Chinese communists and their party defeated the nationalists in the Chinese civil war. But France and China, as nations, as people and culture inhabiting specific territories, stretch back centuries, even a millennia, over the course of many governments. But there was no United States of America before July 4, 1776. There was not yet formally speaking. an American people. There were instead living in the 13 British colonies in North America some two and a half million subjects of a distant king. Those subjects became a people by declaring themselves such and then by winning independence

through a fight because they said that it was their right to be free. They made that assertion on the basis of principle, not blood, not kinship, or what we might call ethnicity today. Yet this fact must be properly understood, as John Jay explained in Federalist number two. Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government. Very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint councils, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

End quote. Yet, as Jay and all the founders well knew, the newly formed American people were not quite as homogenous in ancestry language or religion, as this statement would seem to assert. There were neither holy English or holy Protestant nor Holy Christian. Some other basis would have to be found and asserted to bind the new people together and to which they would remain attached if they were to remain a people. That basis was the ascertain of universal and eternal principles of justice and political legitimacy. But this too has to be qualified.

Note that Jay lists six factors binding the American people together, of which the principle is only one, the most important or decisive one, but still only one, and insufficient by itself. The American founders understood that for republicanism to function and endure, a Republican people must share a large measure of commonality in manners and customs and language and dedication to the common good. All states, all governments, make some claim to legitimacy, that is, an argument for why their existence and specific form are justified. Some dismiss all such claims to legitimacy as false. Advance to fool the ruled into believing that their ruler's actions are justified when, in fact, those actions only serve the private interests of a very few.

But no actual government understands itself. this way, much less any such cynical claim in public. All actual governments rather understand themselves as just and assert a public claim as to why. At the time of the American founding, the most widespread claim was the form of the divine right of kings. That is to say, the ascertain that God appoints some men or some families to rule and consigned the rest to be ruled. The American founders rejected that claim. As the 18 charges level against King George in the Declaration of Independence

makes very clear our founders considered the British government of the time to be oppressive and unjust. They had no wish to replace the arbitrary government of one tyrant with that of another, however. More fundamentally, having cast off their political connections to English, our founders needed to state a new principle of political legitimacy for their new government. As the Declaration of Independence puts it, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind required them to explain themselves and justify their actions. But they didn't merely wish to assert that they disliked British rule, and so we're replacing it with something better that they liked.

They wished to state justification for their actions, and for the government to which it would give birth. And they wanted something that was both true and moral. Moral, because it is faithful to the truth about things. Such a justification could only be found in the precepts of nature, specifically human nature, accessible to the human mind, but not subject to the human will. Those precepts, whether understood as created by God or sin, simply as eternal, are a given that man did not bring into being and cannot change.

Hence, the Declaration speaks of both the laws of nature and nature's God. And it appeals to both reason and revelation as the foundation of the underlying truth of the document's claims and for the legitimacy of this nation. The core assertion of the Declaration and the basis of the Founder's political thought is that all men are created equal. From the principle of equality, the requirement for consent naturally follows. If all men are equal, then none might rule over another without his consent. The assertion that all men are created equal must also be properly understood.

It doesn't mean that all human beings are equal and equal. wisdom, courage, good looks, or any of the other virtues and talents that God and nature distribute unevenly among the human race. It means, rather, that human beings are equal in the sense that they are not by nature divided into castes with natural rules and those who would be ruled. Thomas Jefferson liked to paraphrase the Republican political thinker Alginon-Sydney. He said, quote, the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God, end quote. Superiority of talent, even a superior ability to rule, is not a divine or natural title or warrant to rule. George Washington is surely one of the most able statesmen who ever lived, never made such an outlawful.

and indeed vehemently rejected such assertations made by others about him. As Abraham Lincoln would later explain, there was no urgent need for the founders to insert into a merely revolutionary document this abstract truth applicable to all men and all times. They could simply have told the British king that they were separating and left it at that. But they enlarged the scope of their declaration, so its principles, would serve as a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression. The finality of that truth that all men are created equal was intended to make impossible any return to formal or legal inequality, whether to such older forms as absolute monarchy

and hereditary aristocracy, or to as of yet unimagined form. that we might be seeing in these recent times. Natural equality requires not only the consent of the government, but also the recognition of fundamental human rights, to include, but not limited to, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the fundamental duty or obligation of all to respect the rights of others.

These rights are found in nature, not created by man or the government, Rather, men create governments to secure these natural rights. Indeed, the very purpose of our government is to secure these rights, which exist independently of government. Whether the government recognizes them or not, a bad government may deny or ignore natural rights and even prevent their exercise in the real world.

But it can never negate or eliminate them. The principles of the Declaration are universal and eternal, yet they were asserted by a specific people for a specific purpose in a specific circumstance. The general principles stated in the document explain and justify the founder's particular actions in breaking off from Great Britain. They also explain the principles upon which they would build their new government. These principles apply to all men, but the founders acted to secure only American rights, not those of all men. The world is still and always will be divided into nations,

not all of which will respect the rights of their people, though they should. We confront, finally, the difficulty that the eternal principles lucidated in the declaration were stated and became the basis for an actual government, only a relatively short time ago. Yet if these principles are both eternal and accessible to the human mind, why were they not discovered and acted upon long before 1776? Well, in a sense, the precepts of the American founders were known to prior thinkers, but those thinkers stated them in entirely different terms to fit the different political and intellectual circumstances of their times. For instance, ancient philosophers appear to teach that wisdom is a genuine, title to rule, that in a decisive respect, all men are not created equal. Yet they also teach that it is all but impossible for any actual living man to obtain genuine wisdom. Even if wisdom

is a legitimate title to rule, if perfect wisdom is unattainable by any living man, then no man is by right the ruler of any other except by their consent. More fundamentally, by the time of the American founding, political life in the West had undergone some changes, two momentous changes. The first was the sundering of civil from religious law with the advent and widespread adoption of Christianity. The second momentous change was the emergence of multiple denominations within Christianity that undid Christian unity and, in turn, greatly undermined political. unity. Religious differences became sources of a political conflict and war. As discussed further in appendix two, it was in response to these fundamentally new circumstances that the American founders developed the principle of religious liberty. While the founder's principles are both

true and eternal, they cannot be understood without also understanding that they were formulated by practical men to solve real-world problems. For the founder's solution to these problems, we have to turn to the Constitution. Part 3. The Constitution of Principles. It's one thing to discern and assert true principles of political legitimacy and justice, but it is quite another to establish those principles among an actual people in an actual government here on Earth. As Winston Churchill put it, in not a dissimilar context, even the best of men struggling in the most just of causes cannot guarantee victory.

They can only deserve it. The founders of the United States, perhaps miraculously, achieved what they set out to achieve. They defeated the world's strongest military and financial power and won their independence. They then faced the task of forming a country that would, would honor and implement the principles upon which they declared their independence. The bedrock upon which the American political system is built is the rule of law. The vast difference between tyranny and the rule of law is the central theme of political

thinkers all the way back to classical antiquity. The idea that the law is superior to rulers is the cornerstone of the English constitutional constitutional thought as it developed over the centuries. The concept was transferred to the American colonies and can be seen expressed throughout colonial pamphlets and political writings, as Thomas Payne reflected in common sense. Quote, for as in absolute governments, the king is law. So in free countries, the law ought to be king, and there ought to be no other. But less any ill use should afterwards arise,

Let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished and scattered among the people whose right it is." To assure such a government, Americans demanded a written legal document that would create both a structure and a process for securing their rights and liberties, and spell out the divisions and limits of the powers of the government. That legal document must be above ordinary legislation. and day-to-day politics. That is what our founders meant by Constitution, and it is why our Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Well, their first attempt at forming a government,

the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, was adopted in the midst of the Revolutionary War and not ratified until 1781. But during that time, American statesmen and citizens alike concluded that the articles were just too weak to fulfill a government's core function. This consensus produced the Constitutional Convention of 1787,

which met in Philadelphia that summer to write the document which we have today. It is a testament to those framers' wisdom and skill that the Constitution they produced remains the longest continually operating written constitution in the history, all of the long and storied history of humans. The meaning and purpose of the Constitution of 1787, however, can't be understood without recourse to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, human equality, the requirement for government, by consent, and the securing of natural rights, which the Constitution is intended to embody, protect, and nurture. Lincoln famously described the principles of the

Declaration, borrowing from Proverbs 2511, as an apple of gold and the Constitution as a frame of silver meant to adorn and preserve the apple. The latter was made for the former, not the reverse. The form of the new government that the Constitution delineates is informed in part by the charges the declaration levels at the British ground. For instance, the colonists charged the British king, with failing to provide or even interfering with representative government. Hence, the Constitution provides for a representative legislature. It also charges the king with concentrating executive legislature and judicial power into the same hands, which James Madison pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

Instead, the founders organized their new government into three co-equal branches. and balancing the power of each against the others to reduce the risk of abuse of power. The intent of the Framers of the Constitution was to construct a government that would sufficiently be strong enough to perform those essential tasks that only a government can perform, such as establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare. Those are the main tasks named in the documents preamble, but not so strong as to jeopardize the people's liberties. In other words, the new government needed to be strong enough to have the power to secure rights without having so much power as to

enable or encourage it to infringe on those rights. More specifically, the framers intended the new constitution to keep the 13 states united to prevent the breakup of the union into two or more smaller countries, while maintaining sufficient latitude and liberty for the individual states. The advantages of the Union are detailed in the first 14 papers of the Federalists, a series of essays written to urge the Constitution's adoption and boil down to preventing and deterring foreign adventurism in North America, avoiding conflicts between threats, achieving economies of scale and best utilizing the diverse resources of the continent.

While the Constitution is fundamentally a compact among the American people, its first seven words, are we the people of the United States, it was ratified by special conventions in those states. The peoples of the states admired and cherished their state governments, all of which had adopted Republican constitutions before a federal constitution was completed. Hence, the framers of the new national government had to respect the state's prior existence and jealous guarding of their own prerogatives. They also believe that the role of the federal government should be limited to performing those tasks that only a national government can do, such as providing for the nation's

security or regulating commerce between the states, and that most tasks were properly the responsibility of the individual states. and they believe that strong states as competing power centers would act as counterweights against a potentially overweening central government, in the same way that the separation of powers checks and balances the branches of the federal government. For the founders, the principle that just government requires the consent of the government, in turn, requires republicanism, because the chief way that consent is great, Granted to a government is on an ongoing basis through the people's participation in the political process.

This is the reason the Constitution guarantees to every state in this union, a Republican form of government, end quote. Under the United States Constitution, the people are sovereign. But the people don't directly exercise their sovereignty, for instance, by voting directly in popular assemblies. Rather, they do so indirectly through a representative institution. This is, on the most basic level, a practical requirement in a republic with a large population and extent of territory. But it is also intended to be a remedy to the defects that are common to all republics up to that time.

See, the framers of the Constitution faced a twofold challenge. They had to assure those alarmed by historic record that the new government was not too Republican in simply copying old failed forms, while also reassuring those concerned about overweening centralized power, that the government of the new constitution was Republican enough to secure equal natural rights and prevent the reemergence of tyranny. Well, the main cause of prior Republican failure were class conflict and tyranny of the majority. In the simplest terms, the largest single faction in any republic would tend to band together and unwisely wield their numerical strength against unpopular minorities, leading to conflict and eventually collapse. The founder's primary remedy was union itself.

Against the old idea that republics had to be small, the founders countered that the very smallness of prior republics all but guaranteed their failure. In small republics, the majority can be more easily organized, and they can organize themselves into a dominant faction. In large republics, the interest becomes too numerous for any single faction to dominate. The inherent or potential partisan un-wisdom of the dominant faction also would be tempered by a representative government. Rather than the people acting as a body, the people instead would select officeholders that would represent them. This would, quote, refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice would be the least likely to sacrifice

to temporary or partial considerations, end quote. And in the separation of powers, it would work in concert with the principle of representation by incentivizing individual officeholders to identify their personal interests with the powers and preroges, of their office, and thus keep them alert to the danger of encroachments from other branches and offices. The founders asserted that these innovations and others combined to create a republicanism

that was at once old and as well new, true to the eternal principles and timeless ends of good government, but awake to and corrective of the deficiencies in prior examples of popular rule. One important feature in our written constitution is the way, a very careful way. It limits the powers of each branch of government. That is, it states what those branches can do and by implication what they may not do. This is the real meaning of limited government. It's not about the government's size or funding levels.

They remain small. It's really more about the government's power. the activities the government does, they must remain limited to a certain carefully defined area or two and responsibilities as guarded by the bicameralism, federalism, and the separation of powers. The Constitution was intended to endure. But because the founders knew well that no document written by human beings would ever be perfect or anticipate every future contingency, they provided a new government.

for a process to amend the document, but only by popular decision-making and not by ordinary legislation or judicial decree. The first ten amendments would become known as the Bill of Rights, and they were included at the demand of those especially concerned about vesting the federal government with too much power and who wanted an enumeration of specific rights that the new government lawfully could never transgress. But all agreed that the substantive rights are not granted by the government. Any just government exists only to secure those rights.

And they specifically noted in the Ninth Amendment that the Bill of Rights was a selective and not an exclusive list. That is, the mere fact that a right is not mentioned in the Bill of Rights is not proof nor evidence that it doesn't exist. It's important to note the founder's understanding of these rights that are decisive for Republican government and the success of the founder's project. Our first freedom, religious liberty, is foremost a moral requirement of the natural freedom of the human mind. As discussed in appendix 2, it is also the indispensable solution,

to the political religious problem that emerged in the modern world. Faith is both a matter of private conscience and public import, which is why the founders encouraged religious free exercise, but barred the government from establishing one national religion. The point is not merely to protect the state from religion, but also to protect religion from the state, so that religious institutions could flourish, and pursue their divine mission among men.

Like religious liberty, freedom of speech and freedom of the press is required by the freedom of the human mind. More plainly, it is a requirement for any government in which the people choose the direction of the government policy to choose requires public deliberation and debate. A people that cannot publicly express its opinions, exchange ideas, are openly openly, argue about the course of its government is not free. Finally, the right to keep and bear arms is required by the fundamental natural right to life. No man may justly be denied the means of his own defense. The political significance of this right is hardly less important. An armed people, is a people capable of defending their liberty no less than their lives and is the last

desperate check against the world's worst tyranny. Part 4. Challenges to America's principles. Challenges to constitutional government are frequent and are to be expected in a popular government based on consent. In his farewell address, George Washington advised advised his countrymen that when it came to the preservation of the Constitution, they should resist with care, the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious, the pretext. The Constitution has proven sturdy against narrow interest groups that seek to change elements of the Constitution merely to get their way.

At the same time, it is important to note that by design, there is room in the Constitution. for significant change and reform. Indeed, great reforms, abolition, women's suffrage, anti-communism, the civil rights movement, the pro-life movement, all have come forward that improve our dedication to the principles of our Declaration of Independence under the Constitution. More problematic have been movements that reject the fundamental truths of the Declaration of Independence,

and seek to destroy our constitutional order. The arguments, the tactics, and the names of these movements have changed, and the magnitude of the challenge has varied. Yet they are all united by adherence to the same falsehood that people do not have equal worth and equal rights. At the infancy of our republic, the threat was a despotic king who violated the people's rights and overthrew the colonist's long-standing tradition of self-government. After decades of struggle, the colonists succeeded in establishing a more perfect union

founded not upon the capricious whims of a tyrant, but Republican laws and institutions founded upon self-evident and eternal truths. It is the sacred duty of every generation of American patriots to defend this priceless inheritance. Slavery. The most common charge leveled against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn't believe in their own stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue. It's done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with the devastating effect on our civic unity in social fabric. Many Americans labor under the illusion that slavery was somehow a uniquely American evil.

It is essential to insist at the outset that the institution is seen in a much broader perspective. It's hard for people brought up in the comforts of modern America in a time which the idea that all human beings have invalatable rights, inherent dignity, it's almost taken for Granted, to imagine the cruelties and enormities that were endemic in earlier times. It's hard. But the unfortunate fact is the institution of slavery has been more the rule than exception throughout human history. It was the Western world's repudiation of slavery, not just beginning to build at the time

of the American Revolution, which marked a dramatic sea change in the world. moral sensibilities. The American founders were living on the cusp of this change, in a matter that straddled two worlds. George Washington owned slaves, but he came to detest the practice and wished for a plan, adopted for the abolition of it. By the end of his life, he freed all the slaves in his family estate. Thomas Jefferson also held slaves, and yet included in his original handwritten draft of the Declaration, A strong condemnation of slavery, which was removed at the insistence of certain slaveholding delegates.

Inscribed in marble in his memorial in Washington, D.C. is Jefferson's foreboding reference to the injustice of slavery. I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever. End quote. James Madison saw to it at the Constitutional Convention that even when the Constitution compromised with slavery, it never used the word slave to do so. No mere semantics. He insisted that it was wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.

Indeed, the compromises at the Constitutional Convention were just that. Compromises. The three-fifths compromise was proposed by an anti-slavery delegate to prevent the South from counting their slaves as whole persons for the purpose of increasing their congressional representation. The so-called fugitive slave clause, perhaps the most hated protection of all, accommodated pro-slavery delegates, but it was written so the Constitution did not sanction slavery in the states where it existed. There is also a provision in the Constitution that forbade any restriction of the slave trade for 20 years after ratification, at which time Congress immediately outlawed the slave trade. The First Continental Congress agreed to discontinue the slave trade and boycott other nations that engaged in it. In the second constitutional Congress, they reaffirmed this policy.

The Northwest Ordinance, a pre-constitutional law, passed to govern the Western territories, and passed again by the First Congress and signed into law by President George Washington, explicitly banned slavery from those territories and from any other states that might be organized there. Above all, there is clear language in the Declaration itself. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The founder's new slavery was incompatible with that truth. It's important to remember that as a question of practical politics, no durable union could have been formed without a compromise among the states on the issue of slavery. Is it reasonable to believe that slavery could have been abolished sooner had the slave states not been in the union with the free?

Maybe. But what is momentous is that a people that included slaveholders founded their nation on the proposition that all men are created equal. So why did they say that without immediately abolishing slavery? To establish the principle of consent as the grounds of all political legitimacy and to check against any possible future drift towards the return of despotism for sure, but also, in Lincoln's words, to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as the circumstances should permit, end quote. The foundation of our republic planted the seeds of death of slavery in America. The Declaration's unqualified proclamation of human equality flatly contradicted the existence of human bondage, along with the Constitution's compromise. It understood in light of that proposition.

It set the stage for abolition. The movement to abolish slavery that first began in the United States led the way in bringing about an end to all legal slavery. Benjamin Franklin was president of the Pennsylvania Society for the promoting of the abolition of slavery. John Jay, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was the president of a similar society in New York. John Adams opposed slavery his entire life as a foul contagion in the human character and an evil of colossal magnitude, end quote. Frederick Douglass. He was born a slave, but he escaped and eventually became a prominent spokesperson for the abolitionist movement. He initially condemned the Constitution, but after studying its history, came to insist that it was, quote, a glorious liberty document and that the Declaration of Independence was, quote, the ring bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny, end quote.

And yet, over the first half of the 19th century, a growing number of Americans increasingly denied the truth at the heart of the founding. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina famously rejected the Declaration's principles of equality as the most dangerous of all political error and a self-evident lie. He never doubted that the founders meant what they said. To this rejection, Calhoun added a new theory in which writes in here not in every individual by the laws of nature and nature's God, but in groups or races according to historical evolution. This new theory was developed to protect slavery. Calhoun claimed it was a positive good and specifically to prevent lawful majorities from stopping the spread of slavery into federal territories where it did not yet exist. In the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public

mind rested in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. Abraham Lincoln observed in 1858, quote, all I have asked or desired anywhere is that it should be placed back upon again the basis of what the founders of our government originally placed it upon. This conflict was resolved, but at a cost of more than 600,000 lives. Constitutional amendments were passed to abolish slavery, grant equal protection under the law, guarantee the right to vote regardless of race. Yet the damage done by the denial of core American principles and by the attempted substitution of a theory of group rights in their place proved widespread and long-lasting.

These indeed are the direct ancestors of some of the destructive theories that today divide our people and tear the fabric of the country apart. Progressivism. In the decades that followed the Civil War, in response to the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of urban society, many American elites adopted a series of ideas to address these changes called progressivism. Although not all of one piece, and not without its practical merits, the political thought of progressivism held

that the times had moved far beyond the founding era and that contemporary society was way too complex to any longer being governed by principles formulated in the 18th century. To use a contemporary analogy, progressives believed that America's original software, the founding documents, were no longer compatible or capable of operating America's vast, more complex hardware.

The advanced industrial society that had emerged since the founding was changing everything. More significantly, the progressives held that the truths were not permanent, but only relative to their time. They rejected the self-evident truth that the Declaration of Independence all men are created equal and endowed equally, either by nature or by God, as unchanging rights. As one prominent progressive historian wrote in 1922, to ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question, end quote. Instead, progressives believe there were only group rights that are constantly redefined

and changed with the times. Indeed, society has the power and the obligation not only to define and grant new rights, but also to take away old rights as the country develops. Based on this false understanding of rights, the progressives designed a new system of government. Instead of securing fundamental rights grounded in nature, government operating under a new theory of the living constitution, should constantly evolve to secure evolving rights. In order to keep up with these changes, government would be run more and more. by credentialed managers, who would then direct society through rules and regulations that would

mold to the currents of the time. Before he became President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, laid out this new system whereby the functions of government are in a very real sense, independent of legislation, and even constitutions, end quote. That meant that this new view of government would operate independent, of the people. Far from creating an omniscient body of civil servants led only by pragmatism or science, though. Progressives instead created what amounts to a fourth branch of government called, at times, the bureaucracy or the administrative state.

This shadow government never faces elections and today operates largely without checks and balances. The founders always opposed government unaccustomed. accountable to the people and without constitutional restraint, and yet it continues to grow all around us. Fascism. The principles of the Declaration have been threatened not only at home, but in the 20th century, two global movements threatened to destroy freedom and subject mankind to a new kind of slavery. Though ideological cousins, the forces of fascism and communism were bitter enemies in their wars to achieve world domination.

What united both totalitarian movements was their utter disdain for natural rights and free peoples. Fascism first arose in Italy under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, largely in response to the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. Like the progressives, Mussolini sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts. All power, corporate and political, would be exercised by the state and directed toward the same goal. Individual rights and freedoms hold no purchase under fascism. Its principle is instead, in Mussolini's words, everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Eventually, Adolf Hitler in Germany wed this militant and dehumanizing

political movement into his pseudo-scientific theory of Aryan racial superiority and Nazism was born. The Nazi juggernaut quickly conquered much of Europe, the rule of the Axis powers, is not a government based on the consent of the governed, end quote, said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is not a union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to protect themselves, and their freedom and their dignity from oppression, it is an unholy alliance of power and pelf to dominate and enslave the human race, end quote. Before the Nazis could threaten America in our own hemisphere, the United States had built an arsenal of democracy,

creating more ships, planes, tanks, and munitions. Eventually, America rose up and sending troops by the millions across the oceans to preserve freedom everywhere American troops went. They embodied in their own ranks and brought with them the principles of the Declaration, liberating peoples and restoring freedom. Yet, while fascism died in 1945 with the collapse of the Axis power, it was quickly replaced by a new threat. The rest of the 20th century was defined by the United States' mortal and moral battle

against the forces of communism. Communism. Communism seems to preach a radical or extreme form of human equality, but at its core, wrote Karl Marx, is the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and more specifically, the struggle between the bourgeois and the proletariat.

In the communist mind, people are not born free and equal, they are defined entirely by their class. Under communism, the purpose of government is not to secure rights at all. Instead, the goal is for a class struggle that necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, end quote. So by its very nature, this class struggle would be violent. Quote, the communist disdain to conceal their views and aims, Marx wrote, they openly declare that their ends can be obtained,

only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling class tremble at a communist revolution. End quote. This radical rejection of human dignity spread throughout much of the world. In Russia, the bloody Bolshevik revolution during World War I established the Communist Soviet Union. Communism understands itself as a universalist movement of global conflict, and communist dictatorships eventually seized power through much of Europe, Asia, and significant parts of Africa and South America.

Led by the Soviet Union, communism even threatened or aspired to threaten our liberties here at home. What it could not achieve through force of arms, it attempted through subversion. Communism did not succeed in fomenting revolution in America, but communism's roots. relentless anti-American, anti-Western, and atheistic propaganda did inspire thousands, perhaps millions, to reject and despise the principles of our founding and our government. While America and its allies eventually won the Cold War, this legacy of anti-Americanism is by no means entirely a memory, but still pervades much of academia and the intellectual and cultural spheres. The increasingly accepted economic theory of socialism, while less violent than communism,

is inspired by the same flawed philosophy and leads down the same dangerous path of allowing the state to seize private property to redistribute wealth as the governing elite see fit. For generations, Americans stood as the bulwark against global communism. Our Cold War victory was always. not only to our superior technology, economy, and military. In the end, America won because the Soviet Union was built upon a lie. As President Ronald Reagan said, I have seen the rise of fascism and communism. Both theories fail. Both deny those God-given liberties that are inalienable, the right of each person on this planet. Indeed, they deny the existence.

of God." "...eracism and identity politics." The 13th Amendment to the Constitution passed after the Civil War brought an end to legal slavery. Blacks enjoyed a new equality and freedom, voting for and holding elective office in states all across the Union. But it did not bring an end to racism or the unequal treatment of blacks everywhere. Despite the determined efforts of the post-war Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves,

the post-bellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly any better than slavery. The system emmeshed freed men in relationships of extreme dependency, and used poll taxes, literacy tests, and the violence of the vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan to prevent them for exercising their civil rights, particularly the right to vote. Jim Crow laws enforced the strict segregation of the races and gave legal standing to some states to a pervasive subordination of blacks. It would take a national movement composed of people from different races,

ethnicities, nationalities, and religions to bring about an America fully committed to ending, legal discrimination. The civil rights movement culminated in the 1960s, passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights. It presented itself and was understood by the American people as consistent with the principles of the founding. When the architects of our republic wrote those magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promising note to which every American was to fall error, Martin Luther King, Jr.

That's what he said in his eye have a dream speech. Quote, this note was a promise that all men, yes, black men, as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, end quote. It seemed finally that America's nearly two-century effort to realize fully the principles the declaration had reached culmination, but the heady spirit of the original civil rights movement whose leaders forcefully quoted the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the rhetoric of the founders and of Lincoln, proved to be short-lived. The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders.

The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of non-discrimination and equal opportunity in favor of group rights. Not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers earlier, the justification for reversing the promise of colorblind civil rights was that past discrimination requires present effort or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment to overcome those long-accrued inequalities. Those forms of preferential treatment build up in our system over time. First in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed laws, and finally sanctified by the Supreme Court itself. Today, far from a regime of equal, natural rights for equal citizens, enforced equally through the application of law,

we have moved towards a system of explicit group privilege that in the name of social social justice demands equal results and explicitly sort citizens into protected classes based on race and other demographic categories. Eventually this regime of formal inequality would become known as identity politics, the stepchild of earlier rejections of the founding. Identity politics discussed in Appendix 3. It values people by characteristics like race, sex and sexual orientation and holds that new times demand new rights to replace the old.

This is the opposite of King's hope that his children would, quote, live in a nation where they were not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, end quote. It also denies that all are endowed with inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Identity politics makes it less likely that racial, racial rights. reconstruction and healing can be obtained by pursuing Martin Luther King's dream for America and upholding the highest ideals of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Part 5. The Task of National Renewal. All the good things we see around us, from the physical

infrastructure to our high standards of living, to our exceptional freedoms, are direct results of America's unity, stability, and justice, all of which, in turn, rest on the bedrock of our founding principles. Yet today our country is in danger of throwing this inheritance away. The choice before us now is clear. Will we choose the truths of the Declaration? Or will we fall prey to the false theories that have led too many nations to tyranny? It's our mission.

all of us to restore our national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country and by raising new generations of citizens who not only know the self-evident truths of our founding, but then act worthy of them. This great project of national renewal depends on true education, not merely training in particular skills, but the formation of citizens, To remain a free people, we must have the knowledge, strength, and virtue of a free people. From families and schools to popular culture and public policy, we must begin teaching our founding principles and the character necessary to live out these principles. This includes restoring patriotic education that teaches the truth about America.

Now, that doesn't mean ignoring the faults in our past, but rather viewing. our history clearly and wholly with reverence and love. We must also prioritize personal responsibility and the fulfilling of duties we have toward one another as citizens. But above all, we must stand up to the petty tyrants in every sphere who demand that we speak only of America's sins while denying her greatness. At home, at school.

at the workplace, in the world, it is the people and only the people who have the power to stand up for America and defend our way of life. The role of the family. By their very nature, families are the first educators, teaching children how to treat others with respect, make wise decisions, exercise patience, think for themselves, and steadfastly guard their God-given liberties. It's good mothers and good fathers, above all others, who form good people and good citizens. This is why America's founding fathers often echoed the great Roman statesman Cicero in referring to the family as the seminary of the republic. They understood

that the habits and morals shaped in the home determined the character of our communities and ultimate fate of our Constitution and our country. When our children see their mother and father hard at work, they learn the dignity of labor and the reward of self-discipline. When adults speak out against dangerous doctrines that threaten our freedoms and values, children learn the time-tested concept of free expression and the courageous spirit of American independence. When parents serve a neighbor in need,

They model charity. They prove that every human being has inherent worth. And when families pray together, they acknowledge together the providence of the Almighty God, who gave all of us our sacred liberty. For the American Republic to endure, families must remain strong and reclaim their duty to raise up moral, responsible citizens who love America, who embrace the gifts and the gifts and responsibilities of freedom and self-government. Teaching America.

The primary duty of schools is to teach students the basic skills needed to function in society, such as reading, writing, and mathematics. As discussed in Appendix 4, our founders also recognized a second and essential task. Educators must convey a sense of enlightened patriotism that equips, each generation with the knowledge of America's founding principles, a deep reverence for their liberties, and a profound love of their country. Make no mistake. The love we're talking about is something different than romantic or familial love, something

that cannot be imposed by teachers or schools or government edicts, least of all in a free country. Like any love worthy of the name, it must be embraced freely. and be strong and unsentimental, enough to coexist with elements of disappointment, criticism, dissent, opposition, and even shame that come with a moral maturity and open eyes.

But it is love all the same, and without the deep foundation it supplies, our republic will perish. State and local governments, not the federal government, are responsible for adopting curricula that teach children the principles that unite, inspire, and ennoble all Americans. This includes the lessons on the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence,

the Constitutional Convention. Educators should teach an accurate history of how the permanent principles of America's founding have been challenged and preserved since 1776. By studying America's true heritage, students learn to embrace and preserve. the triumphs of their forefathers while identifying and avoiding their mistakes. States and school districts should reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided, partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America's heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principals.

Any time teachers or administrators promote political agendas in the classroom, They abuse their platform and dishonor every family who trust them with their children's education and moral development. Quote, law and liberty cannot rationally become the object of our love, wrote founding father James Wilson, unless they first become the object of our knowledge, end quote. Students who are taught to understand America's exceptional principles and America's powerful history grow into strong citizens who respect the rule of law and protect the country they know and love. A scholarship of freedom. Universities in the United States are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel and censorship,

that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture, at the very least a disdain and worse outright hatred of our country. The founders insisted that universities should be at the core of preserving American republicanism by instructing students and future leaders of its true basis and instilling in them, not just an understanding but a reverence for its principles and core documents. Today our higher education system does almost exactly the opposite. Colleges peddle resentment and contempt for American principles and history alike in the process weakening attachment to our shared heritage. In order to build up a healthy, united citizenry, scholars, students, and all Americans must reject the false and fashionable ideologies that obscure facts,

ignore historical context, and tell America's story solely as one of oppression and victimhood, rather than one of imperfection, but also unprecedented achievement towards freedom and happiness and fairness for all. Historic revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historic truth shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination is an ideal. Intended to manipulate opinions much more than educate minds. Deliberately destructive scholarship shatters the civic bonds that unite all of us. It silences the discourse essential to a free society by breeding division, distrust, and hatred among its citizens. And it is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities.

suppression of free speech on our universities and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols. To restore our society, academics must return to their vocation of relentlessly pursuing the truth and engaging in honest scholarship that seeks to understand the world and America's place in it. The American Mind Americans yearn for timeless stories and noble heroes that inspire them to be good, brave, diligent, daring, generous, honest, kind, and compassion. Millions of Americans devour histories of the American Revolution and Civil War and they thrill to the tales of Washington and Jefferson, Hamilton, and Franklin, Lincoln, and Grant,

Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. We still read the tales of Hawthorne and Melville and Twain and Poe, the poems of Whitman and Dickinson. On Independence Day, we still hummed John Phillips Sousas, stars and stripes forever. We even sing along to Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land. Americans applaud the loyalty, the love, the kindness shared by the March sisters and little women, revere the rugged liberty of the cowboys and old westerns, cheer the adventurous spirit of the young Tom Sawyer.

These great works have withstood the test of time because they speak to eternal truths and embody the American spirit. It's up to America's artists and authors and filmmakers, musicians, social media, influencers, and other cultural leaders to carry on this tradition by one. once again giving shape and voice to America's self-understanding to be what Jefferson called an expression of the American mind. To them falls the creative task of writing stories and songs and scripts to help restore every American's conviction to embrace the good, to leave a virtuous life, and to act with an attitude of hope toward a better and bolder future for themselves, for their families,

and for the entire nation and world. Reverence for the laws. The principles of equality and consent mean that all are equal before the law. No one is above the law, and no one is privileged to just ignore the law, just as no one is outside of the law in terms of protection. In his Lyceum address, a young Abraham Lincoln warned of two results of growing disregard for the rule of law. The first is mob rule.

Whenever the vicious portion of our population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and without impunity, depend on it. This government cannot last. But Lincoln also warned of the great ambition of those who thirst for distinction, and although, quote, he would as willingly, perhaps even more so, acquire it by doing good as harm.

Yet that opportunity being passed has nothing left to be done in the way of building up. So he will set boldly to the task of pulling down. Whether the left or right, both mob rule and tyrannical rule, violate the rule of law, because both are ruled by the base of passions rather than the better angels of our nature. Both equally threaten our constitutional order. When crimes go unpunished, or when good men do nothing, the lawless in spirit will become lawless in practice leading to violence and demagoguery, patriotic education must have at its center a respect for the rule of law,

including the Declaration and Constitution, so that we may have what John Adams called, quote, a government of laws and not of men, end quote. In the end, Lincoln's solution must be ours. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the revolution, never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, to never tolerate their violation by others. As the Patriots of 76 did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so, too, the support of the Constitution and laws let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor. Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the United States.

the blood of his father, to tear the character of his own and his children's liberty. Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap. Let it be taught in schools and seminaries and in colleges. Let it be written in primers in spelling books, in almanacs. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in the legislative halls and enforced in the Courts of Justice." End quote.

Conclusion. On the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge raised an immortal banner in his time. It is often asserted, he said, that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, and therefore we may very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter.

If all men are created equal, that's final. If they're endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the govern, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made

beyond these propositions, end quote. America's founding principles are true, not because any generation, including our own, has lived up to them perfectly. but because they are based upon the eternal truths of the human condition. They are rooted in our capacity for evil and power, for good, our longing for truth and striving for justice, our need for order, and our love of freedom.

Above all else, these principles recognize the worth, equality, potential, dignity, and glory of each and every man, woman, and child created in the image. of God. Throughout our history, our heroes, men and women, young and old, black and white, of many faiths, and from all parts of the world, have changed America for the better, not by abandoning these truths, but by appealing to them. Upon these universal ideas, they built a great nation, unified, a strong people, and formed a beautiful way of life that's worth to Defending. To be an American means something noble and good. It means treasuring freedom and embracing the vitality of self-government. We are shaped by the beauty, bounty, and wilderness of our continent.

We are united by the glory of our history. We are distinguished by the American virtues of openness, honesty, optimism, determination, generosity, confidence, kindness, hard work, courage, hope. That's who we are. Our principles did not create these virtues, but they laid the groundwork for them to grow and spread and forge America into the most just and glorious country in all of human history. Now, as we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence,

we must resolve to teach future generations of Americans in accurate history of our country, so that we all learn and cherish our founding principles. Once again, we must renew the pride and gratitude we have for this incredible nation. We're all blessed to call home. When we appreciate America for what she truly is, we know that our declaration is worth preserving, our constitution worth defending,

our fellow citizens worth loving, and our country worth fighting for. It is our task. now to renew this commitment. So we proclaim in the words of our forefathers used two and a half centuries ago for the support of this declaration. With a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.