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March 22, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
07:44
The Truth About "All Men Are Created Equal"
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
All men are created equal.
These five words are the most abused, misinterpreted, and dangerous words in American history.
They have been used to justify every egalitarian fantasy and every so-called equal rights movement since the country began.
They are, of course, Thomas Jefferson's words from the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson has been claimed as an inspiration by abolitionists, Suffragettes, gay rights activists, open borders fanatics, and now people who say we don't have the right to keep out Muslims.
This is all crazy, of course.
Jefferson didn't mean any of this.
But President Barack Obama was just keeping up with the times when he tweeted a quotation from the gay activist Harvey Milk: They can never erase those words.
That is what America is about.
A lot of people agree.
The distinguished historian Joseph J. Ellis called these five words"the most potent and consequential words in American history." Well, what did Jefferson really mean?
First of all, in 1776, the only people who could vote were free white men who owned property.
Jefferson never wanted to give the vote to women or blacks or Indians or poor people.
And of course, from the age of 21, Jefferson owned slaves.
He had about 200 when he wrote the Declaration.
He thought slavery was an evil thing, but he also thought that free blacks in a white society was even worse.
He wanted the slaves freed and sent back to Africa, or any place.
Where whites and blacks would be, in his words, beyond the reach of mixture.
He didn't think blacks were very intelligent either.
As he put it, quote, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.
And let's not forget the purpose of the Declaration of Independence.
It was to explain why the American colonies have the right to be free from Britain.
It lists a bunch of grievances against the king that justify revolution.
One of those grievances is that the king had encouraged a tax on settlers by, as Jefferson put it, merciless Indian savages.
I don't think Jefferson thought savages were his equals.
The five famous words appear near the beginning of 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 inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
Well, was it self-evident in 1776 that women and blacks and homosexuals and American Indians were all equal or ever would be?
Of course not.
Not one of the signers of the Declaration thought those things or ever dreamed anyone would ever think such things.
This sentence is setting the stage for a bunch of untitled commoners to tell King George III and all of his dukes and earls that the colonists aren't going to take orders from them anymore.
That Americans were the equals of their rulers.
The great essayist H.L. Mencken translated the Declaration into plain English.
When he got to the created equal part, he put it this way.
Me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better.
In other words, Jefferson is saying, we are men like you, and we have the right to tell you to buzz off.
In 1825, 49 years after he wrote the Declaration, Jefferson himself made it clear that all the Declaration did was explain why the colonists had the right to rebel against England.
Its purpose was, as he explained, To find out new principles or new arguments never before thought of, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.
No new principles.
Just a common sense explanation for why Americans were fighting the Redcoats.
And for decades, that's the way most people understood the Declaration.
There was nothing holy about it.
It did its job, and the United States became independent.
It was much later.
When the obsession with equality went into high gear, that people went back to the Declaration and decided to twist Jefferson's words into something insanely different from what he meant.
Those five words are the only ones in the whole Declaration anyone cares about today, and that is only because they deliberately ignore what the words originally meant.
And don't forget, when the Founders decided to write a Constitution, That is to say, when they made the rules for actually running the country, they didn't put in any fluff about people being equal.
Oh, no.
We have an electoral college to keep the rabble from running wild.
We had indirect election of senators to keep the rabble from running wild.
And it took amendments to the Constitution to give freedom to slaves and to give women the vote.
But those words of Jefferson's have become a Frankenstein monster.
In February 2014, U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen issued a ruling declaring that the state of Virginia's ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional.
Her reasoning, and I quote, Our Constitution declares that all men are created equal.
No, it doesn't.
Now, here's a photograph of Judge Wright Allen.
And before you draw unkind conclusions about her, both the New York Times and NBC passed along her astonishing error without correcting it.
They couldn't tell the Constitution from the Declaration either.
Well, the Frankenstein monster really gets around.
In 1945, Ho Chi Minh issued a proclamation of independence from France in which he cribbed all men are created equal straight out of the Declaration.
But not even the commies put those words into their constitution.
Lately, I heard from an American who teaches English at a Chinese university out in the provinces.
He talks to his students about race differences in IQ, but many of them say, no, that can't be right.
All men are created equal.
They don't even know where the words come from, but even Chinese out in the sticks parrot this nonsense.
And one more thing.
Liberals think the"created equal" phrase in the Declaration is somehow proof of racial equality.
Do they also think that it's proof of creationism?
It says all men are"created equal" and endowed by their"Creator" with inalienable rights.
Well, try using the Declaration to prove that evolution is wrong.
You'd be laughed out of town.
Just as we ought to laugh out of town every goofball who claims the Declaration proves everyone is equal to everyone else.
It's a form of insanity.
And I think that's exactly how Jefferson would have seen it.
Thanks very much for watching.
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