Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure?

 

Like so many of America’s traditional holidays, Independence Day no longer bears any connection to its original intent, as celebrated back in the 18th century by patriots who knew what it was to suffocate under oppressive regulation. In fact, according to a 2021 “Freedom in the World” report by Freedom House, this 4th of July will mark the 15th consecutive year of decline in freedom across the globe, including the United States.

But who seems to care?

Perched on the eve of our Nation’s 245th birthday, independence has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Liberty, freedom, self-determination, and self-reliance have all but become extinct, obsolete, old-fashioned, no longer in common use. Government, foreign invaders, big tech, and power wielding corporations employ more than innocuous euphemisms to explain away their freedom eroding exploits.

According to the Library of Congress, “The American republic was founded on a set of beliefs that were tested during the Revolutionary War. Among them was the idea that all people are created equal and that these people have fundamental rights, such as liberty, free speech, freedom of religion, due process of law, and freedom of assembly.”

America’s revolutionaries openly discussed these concepts. They certainly didn’t plot, behind the scenes, climbing over one another, exerting themselves in efforts to determine who could say what words or topics would be considered acceptable, who would be allowed on college campuses, Internet platforms, what could or could not be said in church, whether the color of your skin proved innocence or guilt, the list goes on and on.

Observed former American radio commentator and news columnist, Paul Harvey, regarding this Nation’s Founding Fathers, “These men were certainly not terrorists, not irresponsible malcontents, not fanatical incendiaries, they had everything to lose but they had learned that liberty is so much more important than security that they pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor (does anyone know what that means anymore?) and they fulfilled their pledge, they paid the price and freedom was born.”

Thomas Jefferson, who wielded one of the sharpest and most skilled pens in the revolutionary cause, drafted our nation’s assertion of belief in liberty. Fittingly, on the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., are inscribed these words: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Author David Horowitz—who spent the first part of his life in the world of the Communist-progressive left, a politics he inherited from his mother and father—claims this statement by Jefferson is the heart of the democracy in whose Founding he played so central a role. It keeps the mind free, which is the chief bulwark against the establishment of a totalitarian state.”

Unfortunately, that bulwark has, like exploding pyrotechnics on the 4th of July, been shattered.

Continues Horowitz, “Our nation enters the third decade of the twenty-first century divided, not by race, but by race politics, by an ideology that is totalitarian in nature. This destructive ideology is grounded in misrepresentation of our country’s history and its role in the world.

“Without much resistance, an extremist ideology has been inserted into the cultures of the existing institutions of American society, and a political minority has been put in a position to reshape the whole of American society and its political order.

“This misrepresentation has led to across-the-board hostility to the individual freedoms on which American’s democracy is built. Over decades, these investments have created an infrastructure of political indoctrination and control that is the antithesis of America’s democratic system and its values.

“The disturbing effectiveness of this strategy is evident in the way it has overwhelmed the thought process of otherwise intelligent human beings.”

I strongly implore we heed Thomas Jefferson’s prophetic words:

“The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence [as] prosecutor, and better men be his victims.

“It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united.

“From the conclusion of [their] war [for independence, a nation begins] going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights.

“The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of [that] war will remain on [them] long, will be made heavier and heavier, till [their] rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.

“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath.”