Jonathan Turley quoted a gobsmacking statement from MSNow’s consistently ridiculous Katy Tur that is, I kid you not, too stupid to qualify for Unethical Quote of the Month.
Commenting on Speaker Mike Johnson’s evocation of natural rights at the “Rededicate 250” rally on the mall in Washington, DC., she said, “What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from “you, our creator and heavenly father.” Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?”
No, you moron, it is him correctly interpreting what Thomas Jefferson wrote about natural rights, the core of the American philosophy of liberty and individual determinism over government domination. The Declaration states without equivocation, “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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Who or what “The Creator” is was consistently left up to individual faith and judgment by the Founders, who often used neutral terms like “Providence” to describe the origins of life, humanity and the universe. Jefferson’s point, which of course statists like the Axis of Unethical Conduct and its mouthpieces like Tur want to ignore, is that certain rights accrue in a just society to an individual automatically, and government cannot ethically or morally take those rights away. To maintain that such rights have to be granted by the government is to declare humanity unacceptably dependent on the power and will of others. The Declaration, Constitution and the Bill of Rights explain what the government can’t do.
How can someone who doesn’t understand this—because they never learned it, presumably—get to be a network news host? It’s horrifying. Similarly horrified by Tur’s ignorance, Jonathan Turley wrote today,
“The Revolution was fought over natural rights that belonged to colonists as human beings, bestowed by God and defended by the American Revolution. The Constitution created a system that guaranteed the protection of those rights contained in the Declaration of Independence.Speaker Johnson was speaking directly to the foundation of this Republic in reaffirming his faith in natural rights. Of course, the rejection of natural rights in academia and politics is consistent with the view that our rights evolve with a “living Constitution.” What the government giveth, the government may taketh away. The debate reflected in Tur’s comments could not be more timely or elemental on our 250th anniversary. We must again decide not just who we were then but who we are now as Americans. There are many who want to decouple our system from natural rights as they “reimagine” American democracy and “trash” the American Constitution.”
No wonder so many Americans are gulled by the Democrats’ cynical claim to be “protecting democracy.” They don’t know what American democracy is.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s depressing how many (mostly on the left) regularly refer to rights being “given” to us by the Constitution, rather than protected by it.
Probably she was taught that the declaration of Independence and the Constitution were all about protecting rich slaveowners and moving West past the Appalachians to take the land from the Indians.
Turley wrote: The debate reflected in Tur’s comments could not be more timely or elemental on our 250th anniversary. We must again decide not just who we were then but who we are now as Americans. There are many who want to decouple our system from natural rights as they “reimagine” American democracy and “trash” the American Constitution.”
Factually, “we” have already decoupled and that decoupling has been occurring for a long time. If Man was really regarded as ‘sacred’ and as ‘endowed’ with Being and Entity with divine rights, the Nation would be very very different in quality. The culture would be extremely different.
America was in fact “reimagined” through the process of the Industrial North conquering and crushing the original portion of it that had to be remade, refashioned.
The very Idea of America was reworked through those processes begin in the 1860s. The notion of a “propositional nation” is a fairly radical step.
Who we are now?? We are fairly much on the verge of being completely reduced to mechanism within a vast machine. And in that context is it not necessary to understand the advent of ultra-intense surveillance by AI computer systems and systems like Palantir?
It isn’t that she wasn’t taught it, she doesn’t believe in it. She doesn’t want it that way. That is why they came up with a new term for it, Christian Nationalist.
When was the first time you heard that term, or alt-right, or extreme right? From the media, who treated the terms as if they were longstanding terms with well-accepted meanings for years. What they mean by it is to demonize normal Americans as something devious. It is why the FBI could reclassify mothers as potential ‘domestic terrorists’ for wanting to bear and raise children.
These people want us reclassified as government slaves. If your rights depend on someone else, you are that person’s slave.
Not (quite) so. The Dissident Right in America has a history that precedes the later media definitions. Alt-Right was a term thought up and used by certain political theorists who no longer identified with so-called American Conservatism. See for example: A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders (Arktose, 2018). And Rightwing Crutics of American Conservatism (George Hawley, Kansas University 2016). Prior to the 1990s and 2000s there are other authors read by those dissident rightists like Wilmot Robertson (The Dispossessed Majority).
If your rights depend on someone else, you’re a slave.
We certainly live in systems in which our agency is limited. To be a subject is not altogether a bad outcome, it is a question of conditions, isn’t it?
To be a subject is not altogether a bad outcome, it is a question of conditions, isn’t it?
Signature significance for a total estrangement from core American values, and right in line with the belief system of Winston Smith after he has been broken in “1984.” You are saying being a slave is great as long as you are a happy slave with a benign master. It’s a common attitude but not an American one. And, of course, in such a system one has no control over whether Big Brother is benign or brutal.
What I try to point out, Jack, is the reality of things as they now are, and without patriotic or romantic overlays. I think I am interpreted as being merely critical (Monsieur Witherspoon thinks I am a “Liberal”).
So, what I see a lot of is people who accept “subject” status by finding a position for example in a corporation (by nature not a democratic legal creation) and simpky accepting “this is what I have, and here I must remain so that I am cared for and take care of myself). It is a form of subjectitude.
To say this does not mean I am opposed to the systems created in the present, or am taking a critical position like a Leftist, rather that I am unsure if they really express the “core American values” you refer to.
And most (seem to) live in partial estrangement.
The Founders weren’t stupid and were familiar ultimately with the Cosmological Argument, which by the way, ultimately trumps all other first principles:
Multiple gods makes a little less sense than no gods.
And no god makes way less sense than ONE God (in the case of the Declaration of Independence, identified as “their Creator”)
If a single deity turned out to be maintaining this world, it seems clear that that entity wouldn’t care very much about human rights or wellbeing. It could be doing a much better job of protecting them, if it did care.
But that’s not what Jefferson was saying. “Whatever”–God, gods, “providence,” “the Creator”—includes those inherent rights because basic ethical principles dictate them for everyone who lives. Nobody is inherently better than anyone else. Beings deserve autonomy. “Thous shalt not kill.” No further divine interference needed or desired.
I agree with that. If an energy being showed up and somehow proved it had created humanity, I don’t think we’re obligated to abide by whatever collection of rights it intended to grant or deny humans. Rights are based on principle, not authority.
As a soft derivation of the “Problem of Evil”, this is usually answered:
Option 2 makes sense until you think about it. Firstly, there are a lot of horrible things that happen that nobody chooses or even accidentally causes. Stopping those disasters would align with people’s free will and give them more opportunities to express it, rather than overriding it. Secondly, there are plenty of ways to protect and educate people without violating anyone’s free will.
It’s horrifying that someone like that has been given a platform. If she wants to believe that we should derive our rights from the government so that it can arbitrarily decide who is worthy of certain rights and can bestow upon and/or remove from whomever it chooses, that’s her prerogative, but she cannot assert with any accuracy that the Declaration of Independence did not claim that we are born with rights.
Jefferson even explained in the next paragraph that governments were established by the consent of the govern to secure the rights, not to grant them. This was a radical idea at the time and most modern governments aren’t even run with that philosophy in mind.
This attempt to equate Speaker Johnson with so-called Christian Nationalist beliefs is lame. Unfortunately, far too many Americans are deficit in their understanding of our institutions and our history to realize how wrong she is.
Her educational institutions should turn her photo on their alumni walls around in embarrassment. And they would if, as I suspect, they weren’t partly responsible for forging her beliefs in this matter.
But they are Christian Nationalist beliefs. Anyone who believes their rights come from God and not the government is a Christian Nationalist under the current application of the term. That was my point, these scary terms like alt-right and Christian Nationalist just come out of nowhere applied to rather conventional ideas. That is why any woman who wants to have children and raise them herself was listed as a national threat by the FBI, much like Catholics who wanted a Latin Mass.
To honor our 250th anniversary every student, teacher, parent, and independnet adult should be brought back to school on July 4th, There should be invited to listen to a loop reading of the Declaration, the Constituiton and the Bill of Rights. Extra credit if you stay to hear the Amendements.
I think that’s an awesome idea.
Reading. People tend to retain information “better” when they read it, in comparison to listening. Reading is more involving than listening, you cannot be doing something else while you are reading. But your point of reacquainting oneself with the Founding Documents is a sound one.
We went to Colonial Williamsburg on Independence Day a few years ago – and they always read the Declaration on the courthouse steps. CW, like all good institutions, has been under progressivist pressure for quite awhile now and I wondered how much of it they would read.
We were pleasantly surprised when they not only pushed through the whole thing but read each and every one of the grievances which modern anti-American activists and other Democrat-adjacent types tend to disregard as rural bumpkin conspiracy theories and other self-delusions.
Hello Jack and good morning -This column was brought home to me by two sources: (1) King Charles’ recent speech to Congress; and (2) Hillsdale
Katy Tur is not alone in her opinion. Not too long ago Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) stated the following at the Foreign Relations Committee meeting “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes.” Tim Kaine also ran for Vice President on the Hillary Clinton ticket. So my impression is that Katy Tur’s sentiment reflects Democrat dogma.
Let’s assume that the Democrats will gain the trifecta in the future (Presidency plus both Houses in Congress), can we still claim that the founding documents of the USA (Declaration of Independence and Constitution) still reflect “American” values? Or have they simply become “Conservative” values or “Republican” values? My impression is that the values of the Democrats are much closer to the Labour Party in the UK and to the EU bureaucracy than to the values of the founders of the USA. Was there anything specifically “American” about the values of the Obama and Biden administrations? I have my doubts about it, and my impression was that the USA under Biden was just another Western country with a leftwing government and a bloated bureaucracy and a zeal to limit the rights of its citizens including free speech; not a city on a hill with a unique mission respecting God given rights.
Some of the commenters referred to “Christian Nationalism”. I did not hear Katy Tur mention that, maybe I missed it. Can anybody define what that term means? How does this apply to e.g. the Declaration of Independence? Thomas Jefferson was in favor of the separation of Church and State. His beliefs were not Orthodox in the Christian sense; he was a Deist who believed in a rational, benevolent Creator but rejected supernatural elements like miracles, the Trinity, and the divinity of Jesus. He used scissors and glue to compile a Bible with harmonized Gospels that omitted all the miracles and supernatural elements, solely focusing on the ethical teachings of Jesus.
The term “Christian Nationalism” is simply used by the left to introduce a bogey man; there is only a very small minority of people who are willing to claim that term (e.g. a pastor in Moscow, Idaho).
“Some of the commenters referred to “Christian Nationalism”. I did not hear Katy Tur mention that, maybe I missed it.”
She didn’t, but considering the Left’s fixation on labeling so-called Christian Nationalism a threat to democracy, it’s hard not to believe this was where she was headed with her concern about Speaker Johnson reference to God.
“The term “Christian Nationalism” is simply used by the left to introduce a bogey man. there is only a very small minority of people who are willing to claim that term (e.g. a pastor in Moscow, Idaho).”
That’s exactly right. However, it is a tactic of totalitarian-leaning groups to inflate the numbers and influence of their targets to create a threat that doesn’t exist. For example, the Jewish population of Germany at the time Hitler became Chancellor was less than 1%. A huge number of Germans didn’t even know a Jewish person. Yet, he was successful in convincing people that the Jews had an inordinate amount of influence in the country.
Now, I’m not saying that the Democrats are Nazis…
“She didn’t, but considering the Left’s fixation on labeling so-called Christian Nationalism a threat to democracy, it’s hard not to believe this was where she was headed with her concern about Speaker Johnson reference to God.“
OK let’s not lay words in Katy Tur’s mouth; but it seems we both agree that Katy Tur’s statement is symptomatic for how the Left (or the Democrats, but that is the same nowadays) thinks about the origin of natural rights.