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Sept. 18, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
22:34
'Taking Rights Seriously' - Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Judge Andrew Napolitano gives a master class on why the Bill of Rights are NOT something granted by government, but that already exist by virtue of our humanity.

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Time Text
Government's Role in Rights Protection 00:15:03
Our first speaker of the day is someone who is an incredible speaker, a brilliant person, and we were talking before the show that his program is more popular.
It's watched by more people than when he was on Fox News.
They tried to cancel him, but success is the best revenge.
Judge Andrew Napolitano.
Thank you.
Thank you, my friends, and good morning.
Shortly after I left Fox, I authored and produced and starred in a one-man off-Broadway show called Why is the Government in My Soup?
And as I was entering the theater one night, I saw a lady across the street.
I knew she had her eyes on me, running across the street, flailing her arms.
I waited for her right in front of the theater.
She said to me, Judge Napolitano, Judge Napolitano, I heard you were dead.
How do you respond to something like that?
So I said, Madam, I am sorry to disappoint you.
I hope I don't disappoint you today.
This is a serious matter for us to discuss.
The topic is taking rights seriously.
We take rights seriously.
The government doesn't take rights seriously.
The rights that we have, basically articulated in the Bill of Rights, which calls itself a Bill of Rights in the government's mind, are not rights.
They are temporary privileges which the government is able to increase when it wants and decrease when it prefers.
So I have three topics to talk to you about in the 20 minutes allotted to me this morning.
These topics take about four weeks each in the course on jurisprudence in a law school, so I obviously am going to compact them.
I'm not here to sell books, but my most recent book is called Freedom's Anchor, an introduction to natural law jurisprudence in American Constitutional History.
It's 400 pages.
It has 2,000 footnotes.
The 2,000 footnotes represent the universe of everything written in English and in Spanish on natural law.
So our first topic today is the origins of human liberty.
The second topic is natural law versus positivism.
And the third topic is the consent of the governed.
So let's ask ourselves a couple of questions.
The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
If the states were to enact an amendment repealing the First Amendment, would we still have the freedom of speech?
Second question, every state in the Union has laws against murder.
If a state were to limit the laws against murder so they didn't apply to certain groups, would murder still be a crime?
Now, lest you think these examples are fanciful, they're not.
One of the people running as a major party candidate for President of the United States wants to amend the First Amendment so as to enable the Congress to make it a felony to burn a flag.
We're not talking about burning a government flag or your neighbor's flag.
Talking about burning your own flag, an act that Justice Antonin Scalias said is the quintessential expression of freedom.
The flag stands for the right to burn it.
And the other major party candidate for president believes that the murder laws should not apply to babies in the womb because to that party candidate, The killing of a baby in the womb should follow the laws in the District of Columbia and New Jersey, where the baby in the womb can be killed up to fill in the blank of birth.
Most people would say, all right, Judge, you mean up to the moment before birth?
No.
Up to the moment of birth?
No.
Up to the moment after birth.
New Jersey, where I live and was once a member of the state judiciary, and the District of Columbia, where every law is subject to approval by Congress.
How many times has the Republican Congress attempted to interfere with the abortion laws in the District of Columbia?
It's an easy number to remember.
Zero.
So these are not fanciful fears that our rights could be interfered with.
Of course, if the First Amendment were abolished and you believe in natural law, then you know that our right to speak freely comes from our humanity.
We are born with this right, and our right to be alive is by virtue of our birth.
And if the government doesn't protect us from death, then we have to protect ourselves.
Natural law teaches that our rights come from the exercise of human reason.
Whether you believe we are offspring of God the Father, as I do.
Listen, I am an old-fashioned pre-Vatican II Latin mass attending Francis skeptic.
I got to say that twice.
Francis skeptic, Catholic.
But you don't have to be Catholic.
You don't even have to believe in the existence of God to recognize that we are the highest creatures on the planet and we exercise our free will.
And in the exercise of that free will, we do so to discover the truth.
And when rational people exercise their free will, they come to the conclusion of what is right and what is wrong.
The act of exercising the free will, the rational choices that we make, the reading, the writing, the understanding, the rationalizing, the explaining, is the exercise of these natural human rights.
They are rights because they come from our humanity.
The opposite of this theory is called positivism.
Unfortunately, that's the regime under which we live today.
Positivism teaches that the law is whatever the lawgiver says it is and whatever the lawgiver has ratified.
So under positivism, if the First Amendment were repealed or if the First Amendment were amended so that flag burning was criminal, then that would be the law of the land.
Regrettably, under positivism, if the state of New Jersey or the state of California or the District of Columbia want to allow babies to be killed at any time during gestation, much less after birth, that is the law of the land and there's no recourse.
The last president of the United States that we had who believed in the natural law, Thomas Jefferson.
Since then, everybody in government, not Ron Paul, not Thomas Massey, not Rand Paul, there are obviously giants among us who have the courage to resist, but the huge forces in government, the War Party, the Uniparty, this is 90% of the Congress and 90% of the people that live and work around here.
By the way, this very town that we're in is named after Lincoln's secretary.
what the hell are we doing here in Herndon?
Of course, I'm happy to be here.
As I know all of you are, in large measure, because of the personal courage and ability to articulate human freedom of our standard bearer.
So, this battle of natural law versus positivism is an ancient battle.
I mean, it goes back to Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas and the great British jurists who didn't have written laws to interpret, but interpreted cases before them based on their understanding of right and wrong.
And it produced a great body of law, which we lawyers and judges call the common law.
Unfortunately, that too has fallen by the wayside because we have legislative bodies, whether it's the Congress or a state legislature or a city council that thinks it can right any wrong and regulate any behavior and govern any event and intrude onto any private process that it wants.
So there's very little common law left because you'd be hard pressed to find an area of human behavior, the color of your necktie, the strength of the chair you are sitting on, the thickness of the rug, the brightness of these lights that is not regulated by the federal government.
Because thanks to the second worst president in American history, who was once the president of Princeton and the governor of New Jersey, he gave us the administrative state, which allows unnamed, unseen, unresponsive bureaucrats to regulate our life.
These are the people who are surrounding us in Herndon, Virginia, which, by the way, has the highest per capita income of anywhere in the U.S. outside of Hollywood and Manhattan because the government pays its people very well.
What is the government?
The government is a monopoly of force in a geographic area, and its essence is the negation of liberty.
If you believe in the natural law and that it trumps lowercase T positivism, that our rights come from our humanity, then you know that the government only exists because it can steal our rights.
So here's a Murray Rothbard for you.
You're sitting at home one night.
There's a knock on the door.
You open the door.
There's a guy with a gun.
The guy says, there's two of them with guns, and they say, give us your money.
We want to give it away in your name.
And you think, what kind of a robbery is this?
I'm going to call the police.
And they say, don't bother.
We are the police.
Another Murray Rothbard, there are three ways to accumulate wealth.
One is the sweat of your brow.
The other is the inheritance model.
The third is the mafia model.
Give us your money or your life.
Which model does the government use?
Well, we know the answers to this because the government does not take rights seriously.
The government literally believes that all of our rights, including Washington, D.C. and New Jersey, the right to be alive, the right to live, are subject to its whims and to its personal, its political vagaries.
When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he appealed for this.
All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Well, if a right is inalienable, this is the essence of natural law, then the government can't take it away by a decree, by an order, even by a majority vote.
It can only take rights away if we waive them.
A bank robber who steals the money in the bank waives his right to freedom by his act of theft and robbery.
And then again, it can only be taken away via due process, a fair jury trial in which he has all of the protections that are required under the Bill of Rights.
Today, when the government and defense counsel walk into a courtroom, the government is presumed to be valid.
The government is presumed to be moral.
The law is presumed to be constitutional.
That's wrong because government consists of theft, because the essence of government is the negation of liberty.
At every turn, the government should be considered wrong, immoral, unjust, unconstitutional.
It should have to prove its case against every measurement of morality.
But of course, the government hates morality because it is, as the Polish philosopher Lajak Kolyakowski in an intriguing book called, Is God Happy?
I won't give you the answer, says the natural law is like a beast on the back of everybody in government, reminding them if they're about to interfere with human liberty, the beast will bite.
Would that we had such a beast on our government today?
When Jefferson wrote, our rights are inalienable, he did not appeal to the Magna Carta.
He did not appeal to any act of the British Parliament.
He did not appeal to the unwritten British Bill of Rights.
He appealed, quote, to nature and nature's God, a 1776 phrase for natural law.
The government of the United States of America wedded at its birth to the concept of natural rights.
What happened when we enacted the Constitution?
Fear of the French 00:02:44
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
Everybody knows that phrase from the First Amendment.
And yet, when fear of the French, this is inconceivable today, fear of the French, fear of the French spread through the land.
Well, they had just cut off the king's head in 1789.
Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts.
So the same generation, in some cases the same human beings who had just written, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, made a law abridging the freedom of speech.
The Ron Paul of his day, Congressman Matthew Lyon, challenged the free speech restrictions on the Alien and Sedition Acts by mocking a rather rotund John Adams by calling him in public, Your Majesty.
Didn't work.
And then he called him your pomposity.
Didn't work.
And then he called him, and John Adams was as wide as he was tall, your rotundity.
And it worked.
He got indicted and prosecuted for violating the Alien and Sedition Acts by mocking the president's waistline.
Even though the Constitution says you shall only be tried for a federal crime in the district in which the crime was alleged to have taken place, they tried him in Boston because John Adams was from Boston and was very popular there.
He was convicted and sentenced to two years in a federal dungeon in western Massachusetts.
And while there, he did something which, if you are from Chicago, New Orleans, or Hudson County, New Jersey, you're familiar with this.
He ran for re-election from his jail cell, and he won.
And, of course, when he returned to Washington, D.C., expecting to see his rotundity, instead he saw the tall, thin, raven-haired author of the Declaration of Independence in the White House.
who proceeded to pardon him and return the 420 acres of his farmland in Vermont that the government had seized.
When Jefferson argued that no government is legitimate without the consent of the governed, Professor Rothbard has argued that he meant it literally.
Time Comes When Consent Matters 00:04:22
We're not talking about constructive consent.
We're talking about actual consent.
I can't imagine anybody in this room has actually consented to any government.
Nobody here, obviously was alive when the Constitution was ratified, who's consented to a doctrine, to a document that has utterly failed to restrain the government.
Instead, it has unleashed the government to regulate any behavior and write any law and tax any event that it wants.
Question, is any government licit in the absence of actual consent?
Answer, yes.
One that protects the natural rights of people.
If my neighbor steals my cow, but my neighbor doesn't consent to the government, too bad.
The government will get my cow back for me.
Because the only licit government is one that protects natural rights.
And everything else that the government does is beyond our consent to it.
I was giving a talk like this not maybe 15 or 20 years ago in a venue like this, somewhere in Northern Virginia.
I don't remember exactly where.
And in the middle of the talk, I recognized somebody in the audience and I stopped and I thought, good God, this is one of the greatest people in America.
And he's sitting here listening to me.
And I paused for a minute.
People thought I was having some sort of a medical event.
I wasn't.
I was fixated.
I was fixated on the face of this person sitting in an audience like this, listening to me, just a guy on television.
And he was the Thomas Jefferson of our age.
It was Ron Paul.
We since, of course, have become very good friends and collaborators, as I have with his son, Senator Rand Paul, and we've been privileged to do many, many programs on Fox and elsewhere together.
Thank you, Daniel, for what you said about my podcast.
It's interesting.
Almost everyone on the podcast I met at Fox, and none of them is permitted to be on air at Fox any longer.
Oh my, how the times have changed.
I am 74 years old.
I know John Mearsharmer doesn't believe it.
He says I look an act younger.
But I have for 50 years been making the argument of the primacy of the individual over the state.
That is, of course, one of the first principles that we all accept.
The individual is immortal.
The state exists by theft.
I have made this argument in any form that I can to anybody that will listen to me.
But a time will come when I will no longer be able to make this argument.
And I hope that when I leave this veil of tears, I will do so in my home, in my bed, surrounded by people I love, waiting happily to adore the beatific vision.
Now, I'm Catholic, so I believe that.
If you're not Catholic, good luck.
But anyway, not all of you will have this luxury, particularly the young people here.
Some of you will die because of what you believe and what you have said in a government prison.
And some of you will die because of what you believe and what you have said in a government town square to the sound of the government's trumpets blaring.
When The Time Comes 00:00:23
When the time comes to make these awful decisions, you will know what to do.
Because freedom lies in the human heart.
And while it is there, no army, no dictator, no majority vote can take it away.
But it must do more than just lie there.
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