Why the Declaration of Independence still matters — Part 1: The Declaration and slavery

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On June 7, 1776, the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania State House, better known today as Independence Hall. Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a motion calling for the colonies' independence. The “Lee Resolution" was short and sweet:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Intense debate followed, and the Congress voted 7 to 5 (with New York abstaining) to postpone a vote on Lee's Resolution. They called a recess for three weeks. In the meantime, the delegates felt they needed to explain what they were doing in writing. So, before the recess, they appointed a five-man committee to come up with a formal statement justifying a break with Great Britain. They appointed two men from New England — Roger Sherman and John Adams; two from the middle colonies — Robert Livingston and Benjamin Franklin; and one Southerner — Thomas Jefferson. The responsibility for writing what would become the Declaration of Independence fell to Jefferson.

In the rotunda of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., there are three original documents on permanent display: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. These are the three pillars of the United States, yet America barely seems to know them anymore. We need to get reacquainted — quickly.

In a letter to his friend John Adams in 1816, Jefferson wrote: “I like the dreams of the future, better than the history of the past."

America used to be a forward-looking nation of dreamers. We still are in spots, but the national attitude that we hear broadcast loudest across media is not looking toward the future with optimism and hope. In late 2017, a national poll found 59% of Americans think we are currently at the “lowest point in our nation's history that they can remember."

America spends far too much time looking to the past for blame and excuse. And let's be honest, even the Right is often more concerned with “owning the left" than helping point anyone toward the practical principles of the Declaration of Independence. America has clearly lost touch with who we are as a nation. We have a national identity crisis.

The Declaration of Independence is America's thesis statement, and without it America doesn't exist.

It is urgent that we get reacquainted with the Declaration of Independence because postmodernism would have us believe that we've evolved beyond the America of our founding documents, and thus they're irrelevant to the present and the future. But the Declaration of Independence is America's thesis statement, and without it America doesn't exist.

Today, much of the nation is so addicted to partisan indignation that "day-to-day" indignation isn't enough to feed the addiction. So, we're reaching into America's past to help us get our fix. In 2016, Democrats in the Louisiana state legislature tabled a bill that would have required fourth through sixth graders to recite the opening lines of the Declaration. They didn't table it because they thought it would be too difficult or too patriotic. They tabled it because the requirement would include the phrase “all men are created equal" and the progressives in the Louisiana legislature didn't want the children to have to recite a lie. Representative Barbara Norton said, “One thing that I do know is, all men are not created equal. When I think back in 1776, July the fourth, African Americans were slaves. And for you to bring a bill to request that our children will recite the Declaration, I think it's a little bit unfair to us. To ask our children to recite something that's not the truth. And for you to ask those children to repeat the Declaration stating that all men's are free. I think that's unfair."

Remarkable — an elected representative saying it wouldn't be fair for students to have to recite the Declaration because “all men are not created equal." Another Louisiana Democrat explained that the government born out of the Declaration “was used against races of people." I guess they missed that part in school where they might have learned that the same government later made slavery illegal and amended the Constitution to guarantee all men equal protection under the law. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were an admission of guilt by the nation regarding slavery, and an effort to right the wrongs.

Yet, the progressive logic goes something like this: many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, including Thomas Jefferson who wrote it, owned slaves; slavery is evil; therefore, the Declaration of Independence is not valid because it was created by evil slave owners.

It's a sad reality that the left has a very hard time appreciating the universal merits of the Declaration of Independence because they're so hung up on the long-dead issue of slavery. And just to be clear — because people love to take things out of context — of course slavery was horrible. Yes, it is a total stain on our history. But defending the Declaration of Independence is not an effort to excuse any aspect of slavery.

Okay then, people might say, how could the Founders approve the phrase “All men are created equal," when many of them owned slaves? How did they miss that?

They didn't miss it. In fact, Thomas Jefferson included an anti-slavery passage in his first draft of the Declaration. The paragraph blasted King George for condoning slavery and preventing the American Colonies from passing legislation to ban slavery:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights to life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere... Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.

We don't say “execrable" that much anymore. It means, utterly detestable, abominable, abhorrent — basically very bad.

Jefferson was upset when Georgia and North Carolina threw up the biggest resistance to that paragraph. Ultimately, those two states twisted Congress' arm to delete the paragraph.

Still, how could a man calling the slave trade “execrable" be a slaveowner himself? No doubt about it, Jefferson was a flawed human being. He even had slaves from his estate in Virginia attending him while he was in Philadelphia, in the very apartment where he was writing the Declaration.

Many of the Southern Founders deeply believed in the principles of the Declaration yet couldn't bring themselves to upend the basis of their livelihood. By 1806, Virginia law made it more difficult for slave owners to free their slaves, especially if the owner had significant debts as Jefferson did.

At the same time, the Founders were not idiots. They understood the ramifications of signing on to the principles described so eloquently in the Declaration. They understood that logically, slavery would eventually have to be abolished in America because it was unjust, and the words they were committing to paper said as much. Remember, John Adams was on the committee of five that worked on the Declaration and he later said that the Revolution would never be complete until the slaves were free.

Also, the same generation that signed the Declaration started the process of abolition by banning the importation of slaves in 1807. Jefferson was President at the time and he urged Congress to pass the law.

America has an obvious road map that, as a nation, we're not consulting often enough.

The Declaration took a major step toward crippling the institution of slavery. It made the argument for the first time about the fundamental rights of all humans which completely undermined slavery. Planting the seeds to end slavery is not nearly commendable enough for leftist critics, but you can't discount the fact that the seeds were planted. It's like they started an expiration clock for slavery by approving the Declaration. Everything that happened almost a century later to end slavery, and then a century after that with the Civil Rights movement, flowed from the principles voiced in the Declaration.

Ironically for a movement that calls itself progressive, it is obsessed with retrying and judging the past over and over. Progressives consider this a better use of time than actually putting past abuses in the rearview and striving not to be defined by ancestral failures.

It can be very constructive to look to the past, but not when it's used to flog each other in the present. Examining history is useful in providing a road map for the future. And America has an obvious road map that, as a nation, we're not consulting often enough. But it's right there, the original, under glass. The ink is fading, but the words won't die — as long as we continue to discuss them.

Is Trump's prosecution NORMAL?  This COMPLETE list of ALL Western leaders who served jail time proves otherwise.

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Mainstream media is on a crusade to normalize Donald Trump's indictments as if it's on par with the electoral course. Glenn asked his team to research every instance of a Western leader who was jailed during their political career over the past 200 years—except extreme political turmoil like the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, Irish Revolution, etc.—and what we discovered was quite the opposite.

Imprisoning a leader or major political opponent is not normal, neither in the U.S. nor in the Western world. Within the last 200 years, there are only a handful of examples of leaders in the West serving jail time, and these men were not imprisoned under normal conditions. All of these men were jailed under extreme circumstances during times of great peril such as the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War.

What does this mean for America? Are Trump's indictments evidence that we are re-entering times of great peril? Below is a list of Western leaders who were imprisoned within the last 200 years. Take a look and decide for yourself:

Late 1800s

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Jefferson Davis: The nearest occurrence to a U.S. President to serve jail time was in the case of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. Jefferson was captured in Georgia by Northern Soldiers in 1865 and locked up in Fort Monroe, Virginia for two years. He was offered a presidential pardon but refused out of his loyalty to the confederacy.

Early 1900s

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Eugene V. Debs: Debbs, a Midwestern socialist leader, became the first person to run for president in prison. He was locked up at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta having been convicted under the federal Sedition Act for giving an antiwar speech a few months before Armistice Day, the end of World War I. Many of his supporters believed his imprisonment to be unjust. Debs received 897,704 votes and was a distant third-part candidate behind Warren G. Harding, the Republican winner, and James M. Cox, the second-place Democrat. Harding ordered Debs’s release from prison toward the end of 1921.

Nazi sympathizers and collaborators: After the end of World War II in 1945, several European leaders who had "led" their countries during the Nazi occupation faced trial and imprisonment for treason. This list included Chief of the French State Philippe Pétain, French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, and Minister-President of Norway Vidkun Quisling. The latter two were also executed after their imprisonment. President of Finland Risto Ryti and Prime Minister of Finland Johan Wilhelm Rangell were also tried and jailed for collaborating with the Nazis against the Allied Powers.

Late 1900s

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The end of the Cold War: The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was one of the pivotal moments that brought the Cold War to a close and marked the end of Communist East Germany. With the fall of the wall and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the former leaders were brought to trial to answer for the crimes committed by the GDR. General Secretary Erich Honecker and General Secretary Egon Krenz were both put on trial for abuse of power and the deaths of those who were shot trying to flee into West Germany. Honecker was charged with jail time but was released from custody due to severe illness and lived out the rest of his life as an exile in Chile. Krenz served 4 years in jail before his release in 2001. He is one of the last surviving leaders of the Eastern Bloc.

Lyndon LaRouche: Larouche was a Trotsky evangelist, public antisemite, and founder of a nationwide Marxist political movement, became the second person in U.S. history to run for President in a prison cell. Granted, he ran in every election from 1976 to 2004 as a long-shot third-party candidate. When he tried to gain the Democratic presidential nomination, he received 5 percent of the total nationwide vote. Even though in 2000 he received enough primary votes to qualify for delegates in a few states, the Democratic National Committee refused to seat his delegates and barred LaRouche from attending the Democratic National Convention.

TOP 5 issues that have gotten WORSE since the last State of the Union

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If you saw Biden's State of the Union last week, or Glenn's firey reaction to it, you know that Biden hardly spoke a word that wasn't a flat-out lie.

If you spent the last 12 months in a fallout shelter and Biden's speech was the only media interaction you had since the last State of the Union, you might be tempted to believe that the country has improved in some way over the past year. But the rest of us, who have been living above ground, going to the grocery store, and paying some attention to current events, had only to look around to see that Biden's speech was nothing but hot air.

Here are the TOP 5 issues that have gotten worse since the last State of the Union.

Economy

Biden spent a significant amount of time during the State of the Union boasting about the strength of his economy, but anyone who has checked their bank account lately was left wondering if he was holding his speech upside down. It's not just the cobwebs in your wallet; the numbers show the devastation wrought by "Bidenomics" too. In 2022, American grocery bills increased by 11.4 percent and restaurant bills by 7.7 percent. In 2023 prices only continued to rise, with an additional 1.2 percent increase in food-at-home prices and a 5.1 percent increase in away-from-home prices.

Debt crisis and inflation

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The national debt continues to grow, and Biden managed to add almost 3 trillion dollars in just one year. As of December 2022, the national debt was $31.42 trillion. As of January 2024, the national debt has risen to $34.19 trillion.

Inflation didn't fare much better. While the 2023 annual inflation rate did drop from the horror of 2022, from 6.5 to 3.4 percent, that is still significantly higher than anything we saw before 2021. You also have to remember that it CARRIES year to year, as Glenn explained in his response to Biden's State of the Union: "Yes, it's not as bad as it was, but it's still what it was PLUS what it is now."

Border

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Biden's mismanagement of the southern border has inflamed the border crisis to all-time highs. In 2022 there were a staggering 2.2 million illegal border crossings, but that wasn't enough for Biden apparently, as an additional 2.5 million illegally crossed in 2023. An estimated 10 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border since Biden took office, and the effects are being felt. There has been a surge in crime across the country that is impacting millions of Americans, including the tragic murder of Laken Riley.

Fentanyl

The fentanyl crisis has only continued to worsen as more and more synthetic opioids flood our streets. Between the fiscal year 2021 and 2022, there was a shocking 54 percent increase in fentanyl trafficking offenses as more and more of the narcotic is smuggled across the southern border. We also saw an increase in fentanyl overdose deaths. In 2022 there were approximately 73,654 deaths, which is a significant increase from 70,601 in 2021.

Education and mental health

While the pandemic is long over, the lingering effects of the lockdowns are still being felt. Unsurprisingly, missing years of school has a major impact on the educational development of children. Kids across America are STILL struggling from pandemic-related setbacks, reading scores are still falling, and parents are reporting that their kids are struggling in their studies. The mental health crisis, another symptom of the COVID lockdowns, has also continued to worsen. Tragically, suicides increased by 2.6 percent between 2021 and 2022, marking the continued decline of mental health in America.

TOP FIVE takeaways from Super Tuesday

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The 2024 Presidential Election is taking shape.

Yesterday was Super Tuesday, the single biggest day in the presidential primary season. More than one-third of all delegates needed for a candidate to become the Presidential nominee of their party was up for grabs along with a plethora of state and local elections. In short, yesterday's results will shape the rest of the election season. It was a big deal.

Here are the top 5 takeaways from yesterday's elections:

Haley drops out

Nikki Haley drops out of the 2024 Presidential election.

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After the mass exodus of Republican candidates in January, most commentators agreed that it was only a matter of time before Haley stepped out as well. Haley put up a valiant effort and held out almost two months longer than the other Republican candidates, but after a disappointing turnout on Super Tuesday, she made the call to step back from the race. There was a small victory for Haley fans, however, in that she won Vermont, her first state primary victory following her win in Washington, D.C.

Trump sweeps the board

Trump wins over 1,000 delegates during Super Tuesday.

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While Haley had a disappointing day yesterday, Trump and his team celebrated a huge win. Aside from Vermont, Trump won every state that had a primary. At the time this was written, Trump had picked up a whopping 731 delegates, bringing his total to 1,004, out of the required 1,215 to win the presidential nomination.

Democrats are not committed to Biden

Biden wins big on Super Tuesday, but he is struggling to maintain his Democrat base.

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On paper, Biden had an excellent Super Tuesday, winning every state primary except American Samoa. However, a closer look reveals cracks in his supporter base. Yesterday, a shocking 19 percent of Minnesota Democrats voted for "uncommitted" instead of Biden. While that wasn't enough to change the outcome of the primary, it shows that Biden is walking on shaky ground, even among Democrats.

This phenomenon wasn't limited to Minnesota either. Eight percent of Colorado and Tennessee Democrats voted "uncommitted," and 10 percent of Massachusetts Democrats and 10 percent of North Carolina Democrats voted "no preference." Is this more evidence of a third-quarter bait-and-switch that Glenn has hypothesized?

The search to replace Feinstein continues

Adam Schiff and Steve Harvey compete for Diane Feinstein's Senate seat.

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California is having two Senate elections to replace the late Senator Dianne Feinstein. There is a special election to fill out the remainder of her term and a regular election to fill her seat for the next six years. The results of the Tuesday primaries put Republican and former Los Angeles Dodgers player Steve Garvey and Democrat Adam Schiff as the front runners, and the two of them will be going head-to-head in November. Surprisingly, even in deep blue California, Garvey won more votes than Schiff in the special primary. Does Garvey have a chance?

Ted Cruz is back up for election in Texas

Ted Cruz is up for re-election in 2024

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The Texas senate primaries were also on Tuesday, and Ted Cruz is back up for election in November. Cruz comfortably won the Republican Primaries with 88 percent of Texas Republicans backing him. Rep. Colin Allred, a Dallas-area congressman won the Democratic primary with a narrower margin of 58 percent. While it's easy for Texans to take their state's red status for granted, it is vital Texans stay vigilant and cast their vote this November.

This is YOUR CHANCE to make a difference!

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, arguably the most consequential election day leading up to the 2024 election. However, every election leading up to November is critical for determining the trajectory of our country. This may be the most important election season in recent memory, so it is imperative that we do our part and head to the polls, even for smaller elections.

Listeners of Glenn's show are already aware of the multitudes of serious problems that face our nation. From the crisis on the southern border that's letting criminals flood our streets to the never-ending flow of American tax dollars funding a proxy war in Ukraine, it's clear that the people currently in charge are not cutout for the job.

We need to put responsible people back in office and we cannot let any more left-wing activists take power. YOU need to go out and vote and make your voice heard. Check out our COMPLETE list of all the upcoming elections in the 2024 election season. Mark your calendars, plan ahead, and STAND UP!

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