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Abused Equalities
00:06:59
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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. | |
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Liberals And The Declaration
00:00:56
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| 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. | |