Tag: founding fathers

How the Slaveholding Founders Really Felt About Slavery

The Declaration of Independence accused the king and Parliament of Great Britain of “exciting domestic insurrections” among the half-million people enslaved in the American colonies. This was a reference to the November 1775 proclamation by Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, that he would free “all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to rebels)” who were “able and willing to bear arms” against the American revolutionaries.

Today’s readers often consider it hypocritical that the Founders denounced Britain for offering black Americans the same freedom for which they were themselves fighting. Some of the revolutionary era’s readers thought the same thing. In 1776, the London writer John Lind published a pamphlet responding line by line to the Declaration, and in it he ridiculed the patriots: “Is it for them to complain of the offer of freedom held out to these wretched beings? of the offer of reinstating them in that equality which, in this very paper, is declared to be the gift of God to all?“

What Lind overlooked was that Americans did not deny that it was self-contradictory for them to hold slaves while proclaiming liberty to be every person’s birthright. On the contrary, their embarrassment over that inconsistency had been particularly glaring when Virginians drafted their Declaration of Rights in June 1776. Thomas Jefferson went even further, admitting that slaves were justified in violently rebelling against their oppressors. The thought that God’s “justice cannot sleep forever” made him “tremble,” he said.

But the real story of the “domestic insurrections” passage is more complicated than modern readers typically realize. The best point to begin understanding it is October 1769, when a poor man named Samuel Howell approached Jefferson, then a 26-year-old lawyer practicing in Williamsburg, to ask for help in defending his freedom against the claim that he was a slave.

Howell’s great-grandfather was a black man who’d had a baby girl with a white woman. Under Virginia laws of that time, the daughter was bound to servitude until the age of 31, and during those years, she gave birth to Howell’s mother. She, too, was enslaved until the age of 31, and during that time, she gave birth to Howell himself. The owner of Howell’s mother and grandmother, thinking that Virginia law also rendered Howell a slave until the age of 31, then sold him.

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Founding Felons: Jefferson Would Be on a Watch List Today — You Might Be Next

Everything this nation once stood for is being turned on its head.

We are being asked — no, told — to believe that the greatest threat to America today is not government overreach, endless war, corruption, surveillance, or the steady erosion of constitutional rights.

No, the real threat, it seems, is speech.

Dangerous speech. Hateful speech. Critical speech. Speech that dares to challenge power.

In the wake of the reported assassination attempt on President Trump, the Trump administration has wasted no time advancing a dangerous narrative: that criticism of the president — especially criticism labeling him authoritarian or fascist — is not just wrong, but responsible for violence.

The implication is as chilling as it is unconstitutional: if you criticize the government too harshly, you may be to blame for what happens next.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the government’s argument is this: criticism fuels anger, and anger leads to violence against the Trump administration.

Which means the solution, in the government’s eyes, is simple: silence the criticism — but only when it is leveled at the Trump administration.

When White House officials suggest that calling a president a fascist may constitute libel or slander, they are not merely defending reputations — they are laying the groundwork for criminalizing dissent.

This is how it begins.

This is how republics become regimes.

First, criticism is labeled dangerous. Then it is labeled harmful. Then it is labeled illegal. And before long, it is gone.

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech — especially when the justification is “safety.” Because every time the government claims it must limit freedom to protect the public, what it is really doing is expanding its own power.

The irony is almost too glaring to ignore.

By the standards now being floated by those in power, America’s founders themselves would be considered extremists.

Seditionists. Radicals. Domestic threats.

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Rewriting Revolutionary History: Is Jamie Raskin Even Capable of Honesty?

The late Scott Adams had a way of describing a certain group of Democratic operatives and lawmakers that seemed fitting as I watched and rewatched an exchange between Representatives Jim Jordan and Jamie Raskin.

Adams said that while all Democrats lie, there is a small group of them who seem to assume the mantle of tier-one fibbers. These are the ones who are capable of saying the most verifiably dishonest things, and do so with a straight face that makes it look like even they believe what they are saying. 

I believe Jamie Raskin may have been among them (I’m not 100% sure), along with Eric Swalwell, Ilhan Omar, James Clapper, and John Brennan, and perhaps others. 

The reason such a group exists, Adams theorized, was that, in order for Democrats and the legacy media to make some of their most outlandish hoaxes stick, they needed a special group of people who can convincingly say something that is completely untrue and just keep repeating it until the public starts to think it is true.

Adams observed that you never hear from these people all at once, but when it’s their turn, they step in like a designated hitter and slug away with their fabrications. 

I thought of Adams’ comments when I saw Raskin in action at a hearing conducted by the House’s Subcommittee on Constitution and Limited Government on March 18. That’s when he claimed that Thomas Paine, the founding father and author of “Common Sense,” was an “undocumented immigrant.” 

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Fired ABC Hack Terry Moran’s Latest TDS Meltdown: Trump “Is the man that we were warned about by the founders”

In June, ABC hack-reporter Terry Moran was fired following an X post attacking President Trump and White House Advisor Stephen Miller.

Although Moran tried to quickly delete the post, it sealed his fate with his former network.

Following his ouster, Moran made it clear he is a left-wing activist and launched a new journey to ‘fight for democracy’ during this “dark time” in American history.

During an interview on ‘In Good Faith,’ Moran revealed the extent of his virulent Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).

“What we are seeing is, no doubt, what other countries have seen a lot. What our Founding Fathers predicted would happen.”

“A great, strong man, would arrive, and not great in the good sense but great in the power sense.”

“Trump is the most dominant figure of our age around the world. Don’t underestimate him. He is a world historical figure and he is the man that we were warned about by the founders.”

“That democracies fall when a man who can captivate the populace wants to exercise the power that’s there in the government, and that is what we’re watching.”

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Corruption: The Founders Warned Us About Ourselves

“This can only end in despotism.”

Benjamin Franklin didn’t offer that as a theory. It was a sentence – and prophetic. He knew exactly what happens when a people trade virtue for vice: liberty dies, and tyranny takes its place. Not by accident. Not by force. 

But by choice.

And he wasn’t alone. The founders – and the political thinkers they studied – understood this brutal truth: no system of government can survive the corruption of its own people. Not a monarchy. Not a republic. Not even one bound by the most carefully written constitution in human history.

Once the rot sets in, the outcome is inevitable. The laws become meaningless. The safeguards fail. The tyrants rise. And the people, soft and submissive, cheer them on.

That’s the path we’re on now. Not because we’ve been conquered. Because we’ve decayed.

This isn’t a warning about what politicians are doing to us. It’s a reckoning for what we’ve allowed to happen in ourselves. The one form of corruption no constitution can ever fix is the corruption of the people.

VIRTUE OR TYRANNY

Franklin made that plain just before the Philadelphia Convention began. He wasn’t focused on structures or amendments. He focused on character – because he knew freedom isn’t granted, it’s earned. And not everyone earns it.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

James Madison didn’t pretend otherwise. In the debates over ratification, he dismissed the fantasy that liberty could be preserved by parchment alone. If the people are corrupt, they won’t just tolerate corruption in office – they’ll literally vote for it. And that makes every branch of government just as rotten as the people who put them there.

“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.”

Thomas Jefferson explained what comes next. The collapse of liberty doesn’t begin with gunfire or invasions – it begins with rot. A quiet, invisible corrosion that spreads through the people until the entire system breaks.

“It is the manners and spirit of the people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”

These weren’t new insights. The American founders didn’t invent this doctrine – they inherited it. Algernon Sidney paid for it with his life.

He warned that liberty and virtue are inseparable. Once one falls, so does the other.

“Liberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the people are corrupted, nor absolute monarchy introduced where they are sincere.”

John Adams reached the same conclusion. He didn’t talk about elections or institutions. He made something else clear: the Constitution was made for a people of strong moral character – and it’s useless without them.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Samuel Adams didn’t just warn about corruption – he exposed the strategy behind it. Tyrants don’t need chains or armies to enslave a people. They just need to make the people ignorant and vicious. That’s how they hold power.

“It is in the Interest of Tyrants to reduce the People to Ignorance and Vice. For they cannot live in any Country where Virtue and Knowledge prevail.”

And the tyrants don’t even need chains. A broken people will do the job for them – gladly.

“The Religion and public Liberty of a People are intimately connected; their Interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately; and therefore they rise and fall together. For this Reason, it is always observable, that those who are combin’d to destroy the People’s Liberties, practice every Art to poison their Morals.”

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The Founders on What Really Makes a “Land of the Free”

“All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought.”

Samuel Adams penned these words with the kind of clarity that makes modern political discourse look like finger painting.

Here’s the rub: Do we actually value freedom enough to defend it? Or have we become so comfortable with our chains that we’ve forgotten what it means to be truly free?

Let me be blunt. Freedom isn’t about having benevolent masters. It’s not about government officials who promise to be nice – or even those who actually do.

It’s about power itself – who has it, who controls it, and most importantly, whether it can be stopped the instant it exceeds its limits.

THE ACID TEST OF LIBERTY

During the height of the Revolution, John Dickinson posed the fundamental question that should haunt every American today. What does it actually mean to live in a “land of the free?”

“For WHO ARE A FREE PEOPLE? Not those, over whom government is reasonable and equitably exercised, but those, who live under a government so constitutionally checked and controlled, that proper provision is made against its being otherwise exercised.”

Let that sink in. The “Penman of the American Revolution” wasn’t talking about good government. He was talking about limited government – one that literally cannot exceed its bounds without being immediately slapped back into its constitutional box.

In short, if government has vast power but simply chooses not to use it today, congratulations: you’re not free. You’re just lucky.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF FREEDOM

Decades earlier, John Trenchard understood this distinction with painful clarity. Writing in Cato’s Letters, he declared that checks on government are the sole difference between free nations and unfree ones.

“Only the checks put upon magistrates make nations free; and only the want of such checks makes them slaves.”

Trenchard took it further and explained that freedom depends on one simple question: Do the people control the government, or does the government control itself?

“They are free, where their magistrates are confined within certain bounds set them by the people, and act by rules prescribed them by the people: And they are slaves, where their magistrates choose their own rules, and follow their lust and humours.”

Sound familiar? When government writes its own rules, interprets its own powers, and judges its own actions, you’re living in a soft tyranny – even if it respects the constitution and your liberty. The velvet glove doesn’t change the iron fist underneath.

Sound familiar? When government writes its own rules, interprets its own powers, and judges its own actions, you’re living in a soft tyranny. The velvet glove doesn’t change the iron fist underneath.

As Montesquieu put it, the solution is to use power to check power.

“To prevent this abuse, it is necessary, from the very nature of things, power should be a check to power.”

Making that work requires something most people don’t grasp – you need so many restraints on government that it’s practically in a straitjacket. Why? Because, as Thomas Gordon explained, humans are predictably terrible with power.

“Considering what sort of a creature man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many restraints, when he is possessed of great power: He may possibly use it well; but they act most prudently, who, supposing that he would use it ill, inclose him within certain bounds, and make it terrible to him to exceed them.”

The founders took this seriously. They didn’t design a system betting on good people doing the right thing. They designed it knowing that any power that can be abused will be abused.

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The Philosophy that Framed the Constitution

Today [September 17] is Constitution Day in America. The federal holiday (technically Constitution Day and Citizenship Day) commemorates the signing of the US Constitution on September 17, 1787. The 2004 law that established it requires all taxpayer-funded educational institutions to provide lessons on the Constitution on that day.

However, learning cannot be legislated into existence. Two decades later, the Constitution is as misunderstood by the American public as ever. The education establishment bears a big part of the blame for this plight. But another culprit is mainstream media.

Political Football or Romantic Relic?

Journalists, pundits, and politicians treat the Constitution as little more than a political football. In newspapers, on news shows, and online, the overriding concern is whether and how the document can be leveraged to advance the policy agenda of one political faction or another.

Constitutional scholars and educators are more often “above the fray.” But their treatment of the Constitution just breeds public misunderstanding in a different way. In classrooms, textbooks, museum exhibits, documentaries, and mass-market history books, discussions of the meaning of the Constitution are usually either vague or wrong. The “Constitution education complex” reveres the document as a national treasure and commemorates its framing, signing, and ratification as the triumphant conclusion of the Revolution and the Founding: America’s epic origin story. But it glosses over so much that even today’s Constitution-loving patriots perceive the piece of parchment as little more than a romantic relic.

What both the education establishment and mainstream media almost always omit from their discussions of the Constitution is a clear and correct explanation of its philosophy. It is necessary to understand the Constitution as a work of philosophy in order to correctly interpret what it says as the law of the land and fully appreciate why it is a national treasure. Without that grounding, journalistic discourse is doomed to devolve into “political football” bickering, and scholarly explorations are bound to meander into “romantic relic” territory.

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Timely lessons about tyranny from the father of the Constitution

“Take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.” — James Madison

James Madison, often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution,” once predicted that the Bill of Rights would become mere “parchment barrier,” words on paper ignored by successive generations of Americans.

How right he was.

The rights of the people reflected in those 10 amendments encapsulated much of Mr. Madison’s views about government, the corrupting influence of power, and the need for safeguards against tyranny.

Mr. Madison’s writings speak volumes to the present constitutional crisis in the country.

Read them and weep.

“The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.” 

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

In the years since the founders laid their lives on the line to pursue the dream of individual freedom and self-government, big government has grown bigger and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller.

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