President Calvin Coolidge celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1926, with a speech providing a magisterial review of the history and thought underlying the Declaration. His speech on the occasion deserves to be read and studied in its entirety. The following paragraph, however, is particularly relevant to the challenge that confronts us in the variants of the progressive dogma that pass themselves off today as the higher wisdom:

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

(Posted annually since 2004.)

I continue to doubt that any Republican can win the presidency in 2024 with voter fraud unchecked in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Arizona and elsewhere. But if Trump managed to win the presidency somehow, what would happen next? We saw how leftists and RINOs reacted after Trump won in 2016. The insanity and evil has been unrelenting, and continues unabated 7 years later. I don’t think it’s possible to project the magnitude of the irrational reaction to another Trump win. And is Trump prepared to give every member of the Biden regime what he/she deserves–arrest and prosecution for actually treasonous behavior against the Constitution? It seems like a pleasant fantasy on one level. But it collides with reality on first glance. America could not survive 5 minutes of another Trump presidency. The left is evil, tyrannical and violent even with full control everywhere. Yet America also cannot survive another term of a Biden regime (or equivalent), especially when it becomes clear the system is permanently rigged for the sake of a Uniparty elite with zero interest in protecting the rights originally enshrined in our Constitution. I see no alternative here aside from (1) peaceful breakup, (2) civil war or (3) continued mass submission to an ever-expanding totalitarian, federal one-party “woke” dictatorship.

I don’t understand the lack of logic with many Trump supporters.

If Trump lost due to fraud in 2020, then what’s to stop him from losing to fraud again in 2024? Nothing has been done to stop fraud. The Supreme Court won’t even investigate; nor will the federal courts. 99 percent of the media won’t even talk about it. Fox News sacrificed Tucker Carlson as a self-inflicted punishment for daring to report evidence of election fraud before. If it happened once, it’s all going to happen again. Criminals repeat and expand their activity when they get away with all of it. The Democrat-Communists-fascists are more evil and tyrannical than ever. They have almost unlimited supplies of Zuckerberg, Soros and Bezos money. Of course they’re going to do worse to us, this time.

If Trump lost legitimately in 2020, then what’s to ensure him a victory this time? Especially when he’s so weighed down by absurd but nevertheless real felony charges that could land him in prison. Yes, in some respects these charges increase his popularity. But that still doesn’t mean he can win. Based on 2020, if you believe the results (I don’t, but some do), the numbers don’t add up. My guess is that these ridiculous felony charges literally invented by the weaponized “Justice Department” in Biden’s regime increase the intensity of support among people who were going to vote for Trump anyway, but they don’t necessarily increase his numbers.

By the way, I think Donald Trump was a great President. He brought America back to a level of morale and economic strength approaching the Reagan years. He built up the military. He supported the Constitution, by and large. He was not perfect, and I’m not referring to his Tweets or his style. His style of taking on the media was his single greatest strength, not his weakness. It was refreshing beyond belief; and now he’s paying for his success. He could have made better Supreme Court appointments, he fell for the COVID fiasco myth — at first — and he drove up the deficit and debt through the inflationary spending that Biden later expanded on massively. However, he never imposed or proposed tyranny. He was the exact opposite of all the things the Democrats accused him of — fascism, control — and of all the things the Democrats actually are.

Nevertheless, we cannot evade facts and logic. Do Trump supporters at least have a Plan B in place? What do they plan to do if biased, pro-Democrat polls show Trump beating Biden by 5 points, and they wake up the morning after election day in 2024 and find that Biden won by a hair, following water pipe bursts, data dumps and suddenly finding mail-in ballots of people who voted 100 percent Democrat? Or worse yet, that Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or Michelle Obama did the same thing?

The federal government is growing more tyrannical by the day. The only thing curbing it right now are leftover Trump appointments to the federal courts and Supreme Court. Five years from now, the Supreme Court will be hard core leftist, most likely, and the federal court appointments made by Biden will be having the same impact Trump appointments are sometimes having now. You might live in a red state, but the tyranny escalating from the federal government — gun bans, censorship through social media and the Internet, fuel bans — will override your state government. And just wait until social credit scores and shutting down bank accounts and the ability to use credit cards come (as has already happened in Canada) when you support political protests criticizing the one party in power. We’ll be facing whether or not it makes sense for rational state and local governments simply to nullify unconstitutional laws and executive orders, or even secede. That’s not going to be pretty, and I fear it won’t be bloodless.

Are you conservatives and Trump supporters ready for that very real prospect? I look out there, and all I see is denial.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Michelle Obama asks where would she be without affirmative action.

That’s precisely our point.

Michael J. Hurd

If you disagree with a leftist on ANYTHING — socialized medicine, COVID fascism, outlawing fossil fuels in 7 years, higher taxes, unlimited government spending and inflation of the currency — then you’re immediately and forever branded a “white supremacist” — even if you’re not white! (Ask Larry Elder, a black conservative who ran for Governor of California and was labeled a white supremacist).

What does it mean to be a racial supremacist, in all seriousness? It means to elevate race as the most important matter in human character; and it means to elevate your own particular race as superior to others.

The racial supremacists today are on the left, not on the right. They always and only talk about race. They make literally everything a racial issue. And they elevate their own particular race (primarily black, although anything nonwhite may qualify) as deserving of rights and privileges not conferred on people of the disfavored race.

This is EXACTLY what real white supremacists did in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. They elevated race to the # 1 consideration — and they elevated whites above blacks, every single time.

Today, leftists are doing the same. And they’re proposing a new form of slavery: reparations. They are actually proposing millions and millions of dollars in payments to people of the favored race to be paid for by those of the disfavored race. If they don’t pay for it in higher taxes, they’ll pay for it in the hyperinflation that government spending and debt are already starting to cause. If you don’t pay for reparations with a 70 or 90 percent tax rate, then you’ll pay for it by spending 50 or 100 or 200 percent more on groceries and fuel, next month and next year.

Sacrificing one race for the sake of the other is not new. White supremacists DID at one time propose this. But today’s nonwhite supremacists are doing the exact same thing today.

If this is what “progressive” means, then I’m right when I say “progressivism” is a malignancy, like a cancer. Unlike white supremacists of yesteryear, today’s nonwhite supremacists claim to be enlightened and “liberal.” They’re about as enlightened and gentle and the KKK — and Joseph Stalin.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

This malignant blockhead claims the state has a right to force a conservative Christian to do design work for gay clients. Would he support the state forcing a gay person to do work for a conservative Christian client? Of course not. Not that he’ll even be asked the question.

This is what happens when you are utterly devoid of the ability or willingness to think in principles.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose

Editor’s note: Dr. Meyer’s most recent book is Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe.

On Independence Day, it is appropriate to review the sources of our rights as citizens. There is one source that is more basic than any other, yet that receives less than the attention it deserves. I refer to the idea that there is an intelligent creator who can be known by reason from nature, a key tenet underlying the Declaration of Independence — as well as, curiously, the modern theory of intelligent design.

The birth of our republic was announced in the Declaration through the pen of Thomas Jefferson. He and the other Founders based their vision on a belief in an intrinsic human dignity, bestowed by virtue of our having been made according to the design and in the image of a purposeful creator.

“We Hold These Truths”

As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” If we had received our rights only from the government, then the government could justifiably take them away.

Jefferson himself thought that there was scientific evidence for design in nature. In 1823, he insisted so in a letter to John Adams:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.

Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued:

It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.

With such thoughts in mind, he wrote the Declaration, asserting the inalienable rights of human beings derived from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

Still Scientifically Credible?

Is Jefferson’s belief still credible in light of current science? The decades following Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species saw the rise of “social” Darwinism and eugenics, which suggested that the Jeffersonian principle of intrinsic dignity had been overturned.

Taken to heart, Darwin’s view of man does undermine the vision of the Founders. As evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson explained, Darwinism denies evidence of design and shows instead that man is the product of a “purposeless process that did not have him mind.” Fortunately, discoveries in modern biology have challenged this perspective and vindicated Jefferson’s thinking.

Since 1953, when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, biologists have increasingly come to recognize the importance of information to living cells. The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code, similar to a computer code. As Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”

No theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the digital information in DNA needed to build the first living cell on earth. Yet we know from repeated experience — the basis of all scientific reasoning — that information invariably arises from minds rather than from material processes.

Software programs come from programmers. Information — whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in radio signals — always comes from a designing intelligence. So the discovery of digital code in DNA points decisively back to an intelligent cause as the ultimate source of the information in living cells.

The growing evidence of design in life has stunning and gratifying implications for our understanding of America’s political history — and for our country’s future. On the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the evidence for “Nature’s God,” and thus for the reality of our rights, is stronger than ever.

This article appeared originally in the Boston Globe.

This is remembered as the First American War for Independence.

Which is how it should be referred to. It wasn’t really a “revolution” as the term has been come to be known. The leadership in the states endured before and after the war.

“First War of Independence” is the most accurate. And notice how nobody wants to make it only about slavery.

Why should we celebrate the Fourth of July? Because America — as the greatest product of Western civilization — is the greatest country in the world. But it cannot remain great unless we understand the causes of its greatness.

In this age of diversity-worship, it is considered axiomatic that all cultures and countries are equal. Western culture, it is declared, is in no way superior to that of any other, not even to tribes of cannibals. To deny the equality of all cultures, claim the intellectuals, is to be guilty of the most heinous of intellectual sins: “ethnocentrism.” It is to flout the “sacred” (and false) principle of cultural relativism. I disagree with the relativists — absolutely.

There are three fundamental respects in which Western culture is objectively the best. The core values and achievements of Western civilization — the values that made America great — are:

1. Reason. The Greeks were the first to identify philosophically that knowledge is gained through reason and logic as opposed to mysticism (faith, tradition, revelation, dogma). It would take two millennia, including a Dark Ages and a Renaissance, before the full implications of Greek thought would be realized. The rule of reason reached its zenith in the West in the 18th century — the Age of Enlightenment. “For the first time in modern history,” writes one philosopher, “an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture.” America is the epitome of Enlightenment thought.

2. Individual Rights. An indispensable achievement leading to the Enlightenment was the recognition of the concept of individual rights. John Locke demonstrated that individuals do not exist to serve governments, but rather that governments exist to protect individuals. The individual, said Locke, has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness. This was the founding philosophy of America. (America made a disastrous error by tolerating slavery, which originated elsewhere, but it was too incongruent with America’s core principles of reason and rights to endure and was corrected in the name of those principles.)

3. Science and Technology. The triumph of reason and rights made possible the full development and application of science and technology and ultimately modern industrial society. Once man’s mind was freed from the tyranny of religious dogma, and man’s productive capacity was freed from the tyranny of state control, scientific and technological progress followed in several interdependent steps. Men began to understand the laws of nature. They invented machinery. They engaged in large-scale production, that is, the creation of wealth. This wealth, in turn, financed and motivated further invention and production. As a result, horse-and-buggies were replaced by automobiles, wagon tracks by steel rails, and candles by electricity. At last, after millennia of struggle, man became the master of his environment.

The result of these core achievements was an increase in freedom, wealth, health, comfort, and life expectancy unprecedented in the history of the world. These Western achievements were greatest in the country where the principles of reason and rights were implemented most consistently — the United States of America. In contrast, it was precisely in those (third-world) countries which did not embrace reason, rights, and technology where people suffered (and still suffer) most from both natural and man-made disasters (famine, poverty, illness, dictatorship) and where life-expectancy was (and is) lowest. It is said that primitives live “in harmony with nature,” but in reality they are simply victims of the vicissitudes of nature — if some dictator does not kill them first.

The greatness of America is not an “ethnocentric” prejudice; it is an objective fact. This assessment is based on the only proper standard for judging a culture or a society: the degree to which its core values are pro- or anti-life. Pro-life cultures acknowledge and respect man’s nature as a rational being who must discover and create the conditions which his survival and happiness require — which means that they advocate reason, rights (freedom), and technological progress.

Despite its undeniable triumphs, America is by no means secure. Its core principles are under attack from every direction — by religious zealots who want to undermine the separation of church and state, and by its own intellectuals, who are denouncing reason in the name of skepticism, rights in the name of special entitlements, and progress in the name of environmentalism. We are heading rapidly toward the destruction of our core values and the dead end of nihilism. The core values and achievements of the West and of America must be asserted proudly and defended to the death. Our lives depend on them.

Copyright 1999 Ayn Rand Institute. All rights reserved. That the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) has granted permission to Capitalism Magazine to republish this article, does not mean ARI necessarily endorses or agrees with the other content on this website.