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July 30, 2025 - Rudy Giuliani
01:00:54
America's Mayor Live (723): Mayor Rudy Giuliani Analyzes the U.S. Declaration of Independence
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Constitution shirt.
It has the names of all the great heroes who put their lives at risk signing this.
But first, we're going to begin with there are two beautiful songs, neither of which made the number one spot of a national anthem.
But many people think they're more beautiful.
I don't.
Maybe because I got used to the national anthem and I love it.
And it began as baseball games and football games and everything else.
And I got so offended when people kneeled down.
I couldn't stand that.
But I do believe that these two other songs, one of them is God Bless America, which we'll play a little later.
Maybe we'll play it with the introduction that they offer, the poetic introduction that they often don't play.
And they should play it because then you find out it's really a hymn.
It's a religious song.
But so is this.
Some people think this is even more beautiful.
This is America the Beautiful.
And everyone knows the first verse of it.
And everyone knows that the best version of it is Ray Charles.
Although I sometimes like it better with a chorus because it has a more military sort of feeling of, I think we're going to play the Ray Charles because it's the one people know the best.
But this song has some verses in it after the first verse that are absolutely beautiful and absolutely poetic.
And it always had one that I love the best.
And it's the last verse, oh, beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years.
Nine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.
America, America, God shed his grace on thee and crowned thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
Well, I didn't know what alabaster meant.
And I actually had to look it up again to make sure I was right, but I am right.
Alabaster is a white stone.
Usually used like in sculpture and in beautiful bridges.
So it's white gleaming stone.
So we're just saying, you know, you could substitute gleaming cities or beautiful cities or the word shiny would be a little bit too vernacular, I guess.
But I remember as a kid when we would sing that, I would say to myself, what the heck is alabaster?
But this is absolutely gorgeous.
So we're going to play it now at the beginning of the show.
And I want you to pay attention.
The first verse, the first stanza, rather, you're going to know this.
I probably sang it a million times.
The last three are just as beautiful.
And I have to say, I don't have them memorized.
I recognize them when I hear them.
But we really should sing this thing straight through.
So let's play this as our beginning hymn.
And that's what it is.
It was written by Catherine Lee Bates toward the end of the 19th century.
And then the music, and it was written for kind of slightly different music.
And then Samuel Augustus Howe wrote this music for it.
And when he wrote this music for it, it became very, very popular.
And I will try to discover the original music too.
But let's listen to America the Beautiful.
America the Beautiful.
Oh, beautiful, all heroes proved in liberating strife who more than self help country loves mercy more than night.
I'm
America America make God thy gold refinement.
And ever again divine And you know, when I was in school, we used to sing it something like this.
Listen here: beautiful, spacious skies, and the waves of rain majesties.
But now wait a minute, I'm talking about America, sweet America.
Girl, you know, God done shed his grace on thee, he gave me a crown like the, yes he did, heavy brotherhood.
From sea to shining sea, you know, I wish I had somebody to help me sing this.
America, America, I love you America.
You see, my God, he done shed his grace on thee, and you ought to love him for it.
Cause he, he, he crowned that good, he told me he would, every brotherhood.
One, see, two, shine, shine and see.
Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, I thank you, Lord.
Shining free.
Rendition, what a beautiful song.
What great video.
I mean, it has to be played that way.
It's telling us how beautiful our country is.
And then you get to see how beautiful our country is.
My father and mother would often say to me, why would you travel to Europe?
There's so much to see in America.
And when I took my first trip to Europe, they were like angry at me.
Why don't you go?
I mean, there are much more beautiful things to see in America.
Even though I was going to go to Italy, I would have thought they would have liked that.
But no, they were like, you know, they were brought up, they were first generation.
All my grandparents were born in Italy.
And both my grandparents, set of grandparents, maternal and paternal, were married in the United States, met and married in the United States.
It's very strange.
You know, it's like, you think at least one of them had known each other from Italy.
They didn't.
Although they came from places relatively close to each other.
And they were on both sides of the family rigid patriots.
My grandfather was, my father's father must have had a group of friends.
They came from northern Italy and from Tuscany.
And people from Tuscany, my father would say, often think they're better than anybody else, and they're not.
And some of them would like complain about America not having this and America not having that.
And my grandfather used to really let him have it.
He would say, why don't you go back?
You've got enough money now to get a little trip back.
I mean, if you don't like it here, nobody's keeping you here.
And he never let his kids learn Italian, nor did my maternal grandparents.
Both of my grandmothers, who were born in Italy and came here as infants, couldn't remember Italian.
My mother didn't learn it at home.
She learned it a bit in school.
And I knew some of it from Latin.
I literally knew more Italian than my Italian grandparents.
It was a different kind of thing.
They were American, and that was it, boy.
My grandfather used to maintain, it probably should be better to say American-Italian instead of Italian-American, because that was the order that it had to be now.
Isn't it so different than the way the greatness of American immigration was a word that was necessarily part of it for most of our history, but we didn't say it with it, but we knew it, called assimilation.
Immigration worked in this country so brilliantly because people became American.
It's always been a problem in Europe and now a big problem, right?
Because people remained separate.
They stayed.
If Italians went to live somewhere, they remained with the Italians.
And if people came from Asia, they didn't integrate into the society.
Germany is having that problem now.
England, France, and Germany are having that problem with the Muslim population, where in some places they want to have Sharia law.
Here, everybody wanted to have American law.
That's why they came here.
They didn't, I mean, as my grandfather had these arguments and won them all, he often won them all.
Do you want to go back?
To which he would get, no.
So there was like this love of America that you can feel in that song.
And now, for some time, and sometime can be more than 20 years, I think on purpose, the left wing has created an uncomfortable feeling about patriotism.
Like it's a form of nationalism, some form of Nazism.
Of course, that's absurd.
Love of country isn't Nazism.
Of course you should love your country and make it better.
So the words of this song are just...
We ask God to shed his grace on America and crown us with brotherhood.
We remember our pilgrim past who set up a thoroughfare for freedom across the wilderness.
We forget that.
I mean, we talk about how they conquered, they also civilized and humanized.
Maybe they didn't do it all perfectly.
Maybe some of it was even mean and vicious, but a lot of it wasn't, and not all of them were.
And not all of the people they met up with were angels either.
Nor did they here forever.
They came from Asia.
I mean, when they say, well, America was colonized by who?
What about the people coming over the land bridge from Alaska?
They got here a little earlier, and they didn't organize it in a way that it looked like it was untouchable.
I mean, there were hardly any cities.
There were no buildings, no recorded history.
They had a culture, but did they have a civilization?
There's a distinction between the two.
I mean, if they did, it certainly was committed to writing.
Quite a bit different than Western civilization, right?
going back to the Greeks and the Romans and Jews.
And And God, mend thine every flaw.
The concept in America is to constantly be creating a more perfect union.
It's an acceptance of the fact that we're human and we do things wrong and we need to correct ourselves.
God, mend thine every flaw.
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.
We kind of lost that under Biden for a few years.
Well, I sure felt like we did.
Who more than self their country loved?
Is that true?
Do you love your country more than yourself?
There better be a lot of you that do.
Otherwise, we're not going to keep it.
And mercy more than life.
Oh, beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years.
Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.
And then we asked for God to shed his grace on us.
What a beautiful, beautiful song and what a beautiful poem and what a beautiful prayer.
Now to the Declaration of Independence, which is what we celebrate today, except let's begin with the fact that every American holiday has quirks.
You know, Memorial Day, people without thinking say happy Memorial Day.
And of course, Memorial Day is a day to remember the dead, those who died in war.
It is a little inappropriate to say Happy Memorial Day.
But I don't, and I know some people get very offended by that, and I don't like it, but I understand.
I understand.
And they get Veterans Day Memorial Day confused.
Because our holidays have lost some of their rationale that drove them originally.
This was a day of great picnics and parades.
Now it's a day of mostly, you know, having fun.
Well, that's okay.
But what happened to all the parades and all the...
They show us our commonality with each other.
Well, this all started.
This all started this idea of a declaration of independence.
It was in the minds of the colonists even before the war broke out.
But when the war broke out, it sort of pushed it over the top.
So just to set it chronologically, officially the war with England broke out on April 19th, 1775.
Remember, we celebrated that a short while ago, and we're here in New Hampshire, and we're pretty close to Lexington and Concord, where it broke out in Massachusetts.
No one really knows who fired first, whether it was the British troops or the colonists, but they did, and it ignited all of the colonies who had been working together for several years to deal with the oppression of the King of England, which had been going on for over a decade.
And then finally, because of that, they convened the Second Continental Congress and they meet in Pennsylvania.
They meet in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the beautiful Independence Hall, which you can go see anytime you want.
And there, they convene a session of Congress that is now going to support an army.
And of course, they select George Washington as the president of that army, often referred to as a ragtag army.
America didn't really have a standing army.
At best, it had militia in the various colonies that really weren't all that close to each other.
They kind of lived quite separate existences.
And our overlord, the British Empire, tried to keep them separate.
They weren't very happy about the committees of correspondence that were started by mostly the Virginians and the Bostonians and brought in everything else.
And they had been communicating for quite some time.
It's probably their work that brought about ultimately the Declaration of Independence, the organized army.
So they had been meeting for some time.
The war had been going on.
The war had not been really going well, but it was clear we were at war with England.
And therefore, there was no point in not declaring it because the feeling was that we had to have allies if we were going to be able to defeat this biggest empire in the world, and that we had to make our case to get those allies.
So, you know, there were a lot of debates as to what's the main purpose of the Declaration of Independence.
I would say it is not to rally the American people.
The American people were already rallied.
We had already voted for war.
We had even voted for independence.
This declaration was to tell the world why we were doing this and to gain their support to the extent that we could, to show them how we were being subjugated to a tremendous amount of oppression by King George.
And actually, on July 2nd, 1776, the Second Continental Congress approved independence.
So this was written or actually promulgated after we were already independent to explain our independence.
But it had been in the works.
In June, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia stood up and proposed a resolution that these colonies have the right to be free and should be free.
That resolution was tabled and given to a committee to write an appropriate explanation of what we were doing.
And that is what led to the Declaration of Independence.
The committee, of course, the most famous members of the committee were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.
Also, there was a member from Pennsylvania and a member from New York.
And they spent about four weeks themselves as a committee debating the debating what the text was going to be.
And if you've ever, as a lawyer, I've often written briefs with three other lawyers, and you really have to pick somebody to write it.
So the choices really were Adams or Jefferson.
The other two members were Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York.
And of course, Benjamin Franklin.
There are two stories as to who got selected.
One is that Benjamin Franklin asked Adams to sublimate his rather imposing ego because Franklin believed that Jefferson was a better writer.
Another version is that Adams, on his own, sublimated his ego, maybe possibly with the help of his wonderful wife, Abigail, who had tremendous admiration for Jefferson all throughout their lives.
I mean, remember, we'll jump ahead until July 4th in 1825, when these two men died within four hours of each other.
Jefferson died before Adams.
Adams didn't know that.
And as he was dying, he said, well, thank God Jefferson still lives.
Didn't know that Jefferson had been dead for four hours.
But the two of them had a very volatile relationship that was very good for the country because it allowed us to have eloquent, brilliant men arguing different parts and different ways of organizing this government.
But then when they retired from government, they became best friends and have a correspondence that's probably among the most brilliant government correspondence ever written.
Boy, could we use either one or both back.
So it was decided that Jefferson would write it, draft it.
That draft, by the way, exists in the Library of Congress.
If you ever want to go read it and compare it to the edits of it, it'd be really interesting to do.
I did that a long time ago.
Gosh, back in the 70s, I think.
You know when I did it?
I did it on the 200th.
I did it on the Bicentennial.
I was living in Washington during 1976 when we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Constitution.
And one of those days, I slipped out of the Justice Department and looked at it.
And, you know, I had to do it fast.
I had to get back to work.
It is remarkably close, although there were 83.
I think I have the number right.
If I'm off, I'm off by just a little.
There were 83 edits from Jefferson's draft.
Nothing substantive but one.
Nothing substantive but one.
What do you think that was?
What do you think the one that Jefferson was upset about?
Nobody ever mentions it when they take his statue down, huh?
He wanted to blame the king of England for requiring us to keep slavery.
Because when he was a young legislator in the House of Burgesses at 27 years old, Jefferson had introduced a resolution to free slaves.
He almost ruined his political career at the time.
So when we listen to the Declaration of Independence and we say, how can it say all men are created equal when certainly black men were slaves at the time?
They weren't equal.
Why would Jefferson write that?
Did you ever hear of a poison pill?
Jefferson knew that if he could get that language past him, that would sit there, igniting the conscience of Americans.
And over a period of time, we would limit and then eliminate slavery.
His biggest problem was his fear that if he did it and it were done precipitously, it would create a tremendous amount of violence and that on both sides, people had to be made ready for it, otherwise it could create its own revolution.
Maybe he was right about that.
Maybe he was wrong about it.
But there probably wasn't a day in Jefferson's life when the unfairness of slavery didn't press on him.
And that was true of many of them.
And of course, many of them were abolitionists, particularly all those from the North.
And many of them eventually died because they were abolitionists.
So when we talk about slavery and the horror of it and the black mark on our history, all true.
But then we have to also talk about the bravery and the courage and the moral courage of those who opposed it and the 300,000 or so men who gave up their lives to free black men and women.
That's also part of the story, because America is not a perfect country, but it's always seeking to be.
So the Constitution, I mean, the Declaration of Independence, to understand it more easily, is divided into, I would say you could.
You could divide it into.
We have that on the screen, of course.
Okay, so you could divide it into four or five parts, whichever you prefer.
I prefer five because I really do think there's a bit of a distinction between one part of it and the other.
So the very first paragraph is really an introduction to tell you what this is all about.
The who, what, when, where, and why of a great writer who is about to write one of the most important documents in the history of the world.
This document has led to the freedom of many, many countries.
France, Haiti, you can go on and on, all use these words.
The first paragraph is the introduction.
The second paragraph is really the preamble.
And the preamble sets forth our rights.
The rights that we are relying on for this very, very surprising and dangerous action of revolting against the strongest military power in the world.
The third and by far the longest part of the declaration is the list of grievances, of which I believe there are 28.
The ones that we have against the king and an explanation of how he has taken away the rights that we possess, not from him, not from each other, not from government, but the rights that are given to us by God.
And then the formal Declaration of Independence, and maybe the most dangerous part of the document, the signatures of these men who were traitors and would have, if caught, been hung.
They all knew it.
They discussed it many times.
And they even would tease about it.
So the very, very first part is the introduction, explaining what we're about to do.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them,
a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
So now you see that this declaration, although yes, written to the American people.
But the American people two days earlier had already declared independence.
This is written to the world in order to calm down those who would oppose us and win over those who might support us.
Because at this point, no one was supporting us but our 13 colonies that were rather disorganized and certainly not ready for war against the greatest military power in the world.
And then we go into the preamble, which sets forth our argument for where these rights come from.
Hoping that Hoping that there'll be universal agreement with this, or close to universal agreement.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
We might have written, we hope these truths are self-evident, because if they're not, they're all going to die.
That all men are created equal.
Now, that's the poison pill.
Jefferson might have been the most brilliant president we ever had.
John Kennedy certainly thought so.
There's no doubt that President Trump does.
He knew that by putting those words in there, immediately people are going to say, well, what about the slaves?
And since this is our founding document, it was his confident view that this would eventually prevail.
There are even writings of his, which we can dig out and show you later on when he's out of government, when he explains why and how he did this.
Adams was fully aware of why he did this.
And it was in part because they refused to allow him to put in a grievance against the king, how he had nurtured and demanded that slavery remain.
So this was put in as a contradiction.
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.
Basically, unalienable, meaning they can't be taken away.
And where do they come from?
Not the government, not the other citizens, not even from a democracy.
They come from above.
And he made, and he made, in the beginning, he also made, you might notice, sort of an exception for those who might not believe in God, where he says, either nature or nature is God.
So one would look at this as either natural, if you don't believe in God, these are natural rights that you have as a human being, because human beings are important and life is important.
This is a result of Western civilization, where humanity is important, lives are important.
You would never at this period of time ever get a document like this from any other civilization that was presently existing because they didn't value human life the way Western civilization did.
Western civilization can be described really as a story of how humanity becomes more and more important, which is why even the whole subject area of humanities comes out of Western civilization.
Man is so important in the Bible, the Old Testament, that God talks to him.
Man is so important to the Greeks that they can spend hours and hours and hours using the mind to try to figure out the cosmos.
Man is so important for the Christians that God becomes man.
So humanity and human life is precious.
So he argues that these rights are unalienable.
King has no right to interfere with these.
These don't come from the king.
They come from God.
That among these, what are these inalienable rights?
They're not limited to this.
Remember?
What he says here, please pay attention to the language.
It's really important.
I mean, he wrote this very carefully.
And as I said, there were 83 edits.
And he was a lawyer.
So he understood the significance of every word in this document.
And notice he says, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are, what that means is that there are more of them.
But these are the most important ones.
And what are those?
The right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to the pursuit of happiness.
Life means no one has the right to take your life.
Certainly not government.
Liberty means freedom, the right to freedom.
The pursuit of happiness means to have a decent life.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.
Not the king.
Big difference, huh?
The world just changed.
This was not a generally accepted right.
Now, philosophers for 100 years have been writing about this.
And if you want a place where many of these ideas came from to Jefferson, that would be from the English philosopher John Locke.
But these were things that philosophers wrote about.
They didn't inhere in any government.
The power of governing came from, if it did come from God, it came from God to the king, not from God to the people.
Just think of how revolutionary that concept was and how that concept would not only rock King George III, but every monarch in Europe in particular, the important ones and the petty little ones.
Men derive their rights from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.
Whoa.
King, if you take our rights away, we can alter you or abolish you.
I don't know.
Go put yourself back then, huh?
What an arrogant group of farmers these were, huh?
I don't know if you've seen the play Hamilton, which has its, you know, has its merits, considerable merits, and of course is somewhat inaccurate as any of these versions are.
But they do a very, very good job of how this was also shocking to George III, who they make into a bit of a fool, which he may have been.
And he may have had some mental illness.
I don't know.
I mean, it's always been speculated that he did.
But in any event, can you imagine how impudent this was?
It's the right of the people against the king of England to alter or to abolish it.
And remember, these words are reverberating in France.
What did France have?
A king.
They were reverberating in Spain.
What did Spain have?
A king and a queen.
There are a lot of kings then.
There was the Holy Roman Emperor who theoretically ruled all of Europe.
And this puny little colony, which most of them knew very little about, except they all ran around like savages.
This puny little colony is saying, if we don't like the way you're governing us, king, we can get rid of you.
well i mean it's a lot more than that but if if you're interfering with those rights that come from god not you we can interfere with you
It is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
They get to set up their form of government.
It doesn't get imposed on them, which maybe can tell you some of the problems we had in the 19th and 20th century with all the Congress of Vienna and the great powers dividing up the world and creating governments after the First World War and the Second World War.
How much of that has led to chaos, killing, civil wars, wars that are going on to this day?
If this, well, an unknown caller, we are not going to respond to an unknown caller, right?
Ted is going to take care of it.
You should see what Ted does to the unknown callers.
Laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
Here we are, only part of the way through the second paragraph, and Thomas Jefferson has turned the world around.
The concept of the world for the last 15, 1800 years was that, you know, kings govern the world with power given to them by God or some form of God.
Even though in general, the power usually was given to them because they kill somebody to get it.
Maybe the prior king.
I mean, it had nothing to do with God.
It had to do with revolution and murder and killing and corruption.
Laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
So their government is left to them.
Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transi causes.
And accordingly, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable Than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
So he's basically saying that people, due to inertia, will accept a great deal, even if their rights are being jeopardized in order to have an orderly world.
And it's a function of human nature.
It has to go pretty far before you get to the point of revolution.
But then there's a big but here.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute, now capitalized, despotism.
It is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.
Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.
The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.
To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
Then he goes on to list 28 examples of how the king has trampled their human rights.
We can summarize those as passing laws without their consent.
We remember, I think, from our grammar school days, taxation without representation.
Well, that would apply to everything, not only taxation, but imposition of laws and duties and obligations without the consent of us, the American government, the American people.
He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of their own.
He has refused to pass laws that will request it for the accommodation of large districts of people and their needs.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual and uncomfortable.
In other words, he's called sessions of government that would be difficult for us to be part of.
He's dissolved representative houses in the colonies that appeared to not agree with him.
I'm paraphrasing, by the way.
He has, at times, suspended legislative powers.
He's imprisoned people.
He's endeavored to prevent the population of these states for that purpose obstructing the laws of naturalization of foreigners.
In other words, he's refused to allow us to bring people other than people from England, who he controls into the country because he wanted absolute and complete control over us.
He's obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing local judiciary power.
We were subject to the justice of the king across a big ocean.
We did not impart our own justice.
He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without our consent.
He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power, meaning they could do anything they wanted to us.
He has courted large bodies of armed troops among us.
Without our consent, our homes were used for soldiers to live there at will.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us, for protecting them by a mock trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states, for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world,
for imposing taxes on us without our consent, for depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury, for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses,
for abolishing the free system of English laws and establishing an arbitrary government, for taking away our charters, abolishing our valuable laws at will, and altering fundamentally our form of government, for suspending our legislatures.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coast, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries, German mercenaries, To complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized union.
He's restrained our fellow citizens and taken them captives on the high seas and required them to take arms against their country, to become executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring in on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
In every stage of these oppressions, we've petitioned for address.
Our repeated petitions have been unanswered.
A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren.
We've warned them of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us.
We have reminded them of the circumstances of our immigration and settlement here.
We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity.
And we've conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations.
They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.
We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind enemies in war, in peace, friends.
We therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,
do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved.
And that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.
And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor.
And then follows their signatures, which would constitute a sentence of death if they were captured by the British, which is why those words, we pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, are extremely powerful and very emotional words.
Well, that's what we're celebrating today.
Maybe the most consequential government document, certainly in the history of the world, what would be equal the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta.
Not really.
Took a long time for the Magna Carta to really become meaningful.
This became meaningful right away.
And for this, we're thankful.
We're thankful to God that we had these people with such great and tremendous courage.
And I will conclude by saying, doesn't it remind you of that day in Butler County when Donald Trump came this far away from being killed?
And instead of staying down low and going to Joe Biden's basement to him, he stood up, put his hand in the air, put his hand in the air, and he said, fight, fight, fight.
That's the blood of our forefathers that you see there.
And we still have it.
But we have to thank them and honor them and pray that we can live up to them.
So we're going to take a short break.
When we come back, we will begin the usual hour of America's mayor live.
But I say a prayer of thanksgiving to God that at the right time and at the right place, he provided these great men who could think beyond the years.
God bless America.
U.S. Army Major Scott Smiley paid a high price serving our nation.
Scott was leading his platoon in Iraq when a blast sent Shrapnel through his eyes, leaving him blind and temporarily paralyzed.
Scott would become the first blind, active duty military officer before medically retiring years later.
Thanks to friends like you, the Tunnels of Towers Foundation gave Scott and his family a mortgage-free, specially adapted smart home.
Show your support for America's heroes now.
Donate $11 a month to Tunnels of Towers at t2t.org.
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Here we are, pretty much at the beginning of the process here at this pristine, I call it a laboratory.
It's not like a factory, it's like a hospital.
This is the beginning of the process for roasting.
Deep green, very good quality.
Most people don't use this quality.
We deal with small farmers because they'd like to know who we're dealing with.
They give us the highest quality, all organic, non-GMO.
You should know all Arabica beans.
No Robusto.
All Arabica.
They're going to go into the roaster and it'll get roasted for about 20 minutes or so.
Oh my goodness.
Look at these.
My goodness.
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