The American Declaration of Independence poses history’s most formidable challenge to earthly tyrants. God created us free and equal, the Declaration’s signers insisted. And for nearly two-and-a-half centuries, millions of people around the world have embraced those “self-evident” truths.
Alas, since 1776 the opposite view has never vanished altogether and, at times, has even gained ascendancy. In many cases, those who have rejected the doctrines of God-given rights and equality have openly denigrated both the Declaration and America’s broader republican experiment.
Small wonder, therefore, that the woke editors at National Public Radio have attached a “trigger warning” to the Declaration.
As one might expect in light of the establishment media’s obsession with wokeness, that trigger warning did not appear overnight. In fact, it has been in place for several years.
Thanks to recent developments, however, the trigger warning and the editors who affixed it deserve increased scrutiny.
In an essay published by The Free Press on April 9, longtime NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner exposed his own news organization as a progressive echo chamber, the leaders of which made conscious decisions to abandon journalism for political advocacy when they decided, for instance, to push woke narratives such as “systemic racism” or when they ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story because it might have helped then-President Donald Trump.
Katherine Maher, NPR’s new woke CEO, responded to the essay by suspending Berliner, thereby proving his point about the tax-supported ideological monolith.
To his credit, Berliner resigned on April 17 rather than work for the woke tyrant Maher.
That same day, Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee issued a statement announcing that she would renew efforts to defund NPR. May those noble efforts succeed.
In the meantime, the Berliner-NPR saga has provided the occasion for a fresh look at the trigger warning and what it reveals about NPR’s editors.
The Trigger Warning
NPR’s trigger warning on the Declaration of Independence includes dubious historical assertions, both specific and general.
For instance, in a 2021 story about the annual broadcast reading of the Declaration by NPR staff, an editor’s note — dated July 8, 2022, and thus retroactively added to the story — warned readers of “offensive” and racist content.
“This story quotes the U.S. Declaration of Independence — a document that contains offensive language about Native Americans, including a racial slur,” the note read.
The alleged “slur” appeared in a passage accusing King George III of fomenting “domestic insurrections” among “merciless Indian Savages.”
NPR coupled that specific assertion with a more general critique of the Declaration.
“It famously declares ‘that all men are created equal’ even though women, enslaved people and Indigenous Americans were not held as equal at the time,” NPR wrote.
That, according to NPR, reflects “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies” in the document, though it “also laid the foundation for our collective aspirations, our hopes for what America could be.”
Thus, the trigger warning had two basic messages for members of the NPR audience.
First, it told them to regard the phrase “merciless Indian savages” as a “racial slur.”
Second, it encouraged them to approach the entire Declaration with skepticism or even to dismiss it as flawed and hypocritical.
An abundance of historical evidence, however, suggests that if NPR’s editors wish to find something truly flawed and hypocritical, then they should look no further than their own trigger warning.
The Declaration of Independence: A Universal Appeal and a Revolutionary Moment
The Declaration’s principal authors very plainly did not intend “merciless Indian savages” as a racial slur. Nor did the document’s most faithful adherents — both at home and abroad for generations thereafter — ever interpret it as proclaiming God-given rights for white men only.
Thomas Jefferson, of course, wrote the Declaration’s first draft. But the five-man drafting committee also included the likes of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.
In his voluminous correspondence and assorted writings, Jefferson envisioned whites and Indians living together in harmony and even intermarrying.
“[I]n truth the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix and become one people, incorporating themselves with us as citizens of the U.S.,” then-President Jefferson wrote in 1803.
In December 1763, amid Pontiac’s War on the colonial frontier, a group of Pennsylvania vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys descended on the town of Lancaster, where they slaughtered and scalped 20 unarmed Conestoga Indians who had no known connection to the conflict.
Franklin, the colony’s most famous inhabitant, responded with outrage.
In a narrative of the massacre published in early 1764, Franklin rejected the race-based retribution on which the Paxton Boys justified their grisly work.
“If an Indian injures me, does it follow that I may revenge that Injury on all Indians?” Franklin wrote.
“If it be right to kill Men for such a Reason, then, should any Man, with a freckled Face and red Hair, kill a Wife or Child of mine, it would be right for me to revenge it, by killing all the freckled red-haired Men, Women and Children, I could afterwards any where meet with.”
Adams, 2nd U.S. president, left behind fewer commentaries on relations with Indians than did Jefferson and Franklin.
But Adams’ son John Quincy Adams, 6th U.S. president, described the Indian Removal policy undertaken in the 1830s as a betrayal of his own administration’s principles, as well as that of his father and every other president prior to Andrew Jackson.
In 1841, Quincy Adams lamented Indian Removal as “a perpetual harrow upon my feelings.” He also counted that crime “among the heinous sins of this Nation for which I believe God will one day bring them to judgment.”
In short, regardless of how some of their unscrupulous and bloodthirsty contemporaries might have interpreted the phrase “merciless Indian Savages,” the Declaration’s principal authors gave no indication that they regarded it as a racial epithet. In fact, they left substantial evidence to the contrary.
Likewise, those who denigrate the Declaration as flawed and hypocritical must somehow account for its transcendent global popularity.
Indeed, for nearly two centuries the Declaration served as a template for anti-imperialist independence movements worldwide.
On July 5, 1811, Venezuela proclaimed its independence “In the Name of the All-powerful God.” Venezuela’s Declaration of Independence mimicked its American predecessor by referring to “consent,” “Rights” and the “political order of human events.” The Venezuelan deputies pledged “lives, fortunes, and the sacred tie of our national honor.”
On July 16, 1847, the people of Liberia — former slaves or descendants of slaves in North America whom the American Colonization Society assisted in relocating to the western coast of Africa — announced their own national identity.
“We recognize in all men certain inalienable rights,” the Liberian Declaration of Independence read. Those rights, of course, included “life” and “liberty.”
On September 2, 1945, a little-known nationalist insurgent proclaimed his own war-torn country’s independence.
“‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” Ho Chi Minh read aloud from the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free,” he added.
In other words, the American Declaration of Independence has inspired millions across the globe. Most of those oppressed millions differed in complexion from the American Founding Fathers and from one another. Apparently, those oppressed millions did not read the same slurs, flaws and hypocrisy into the document as did NPR’s editors.
Furthermore, to suggest that the Declaration requires a trigger warning because those who were not white men were “not held as equal at the time” is to miss the revolutionary moment entirely.
To the end of his life, for instance, Jefferson maintained that the Declaration had produced an awakening.
“[A]ll eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. [T]he general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view, the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately,” he wrote on June 24, 1826, in his last surviving letter.
Ten days later, on the Declaration’s 50th anniversary, Jefferson and Adams died only hours apart.
Long before that providential passing, however, their countrymen had begun putting the Declaration’s principles into law.
In 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania adopted an act for gradual emancipation of slaves. Other states followed.
Under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress banned slavery from territories lying north and west of the Ohio River.
This would qualify as strange behavior indeed from people who believed that the Declaration’s principles applied to white men only.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that enemies of the Declaration lurked throughout the United States. As time passed, those enemies grew bolder.
In the 1863 Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln referred to the “proposition that all men are created equal.”
How Jefferson’s “self-evident” truth had degenerated into a mere “proposition” by the middle of the Civil War tells us a great deal about the sort of people with whom NPR’s editors have aligned.
NPR’s Kindred Spirits: Others Who Felt Triggered by the Declaration
Those who attack the Declaration take sides with history’s most ardent defenders of slavery.
For instance, in 1854 George Fitzhugh of Virginia published “Sociology for the South Or The Failure of Free Society.”
In a work with strong Marxist undertones, Fitzhugh blasted competition-based industrial societies as dehumanizing. At the same time, he extolled the slave system, which he regarded as a remedy for freedom’s ills.
“All concur that free society is a failure. We slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best and most common form of Socialism,” Fitzhugh wrote.
Elsewhere, “Sociology for the South” betrayed racism perhaps best described as casual.
“He is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies towards him the place of parent or guardian,” Fitzhugh wrote of the black slave. “We shall not dwell on this view, for no one will differ with us who thinks as we do of the negro’s capacity, and we might argue till dooms-day, in vain, with those who have a high opinion of the negro’s moral and intellectual capacity.”
Naturally, therefore, Fitzhugh felt triggered by the Declaration, the principles of which he denounced as “wholly at war with slavery.”
He rated Jefferson an “enthusiastic speculative philosopher.” Franklin, too, Fitzhugh dismissed as “too much of a physical philosopher, too utilitarian and material in his doctrines, to be relied on in matters of morals or government.”
Thus, by diminishing the Declaration, NPR’s editors took sides with an antebellum racist who regarded slavery and socialism as synonymous.
For a similar reason, they also took sides with Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens.
In his “Cornerstone Speech” of Mar. 21, 1861, Stephens defended the newly-framed Confederate Constitution as free from all natural-rights heresies.
“The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution,” Stephens said of Jefferson, “were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.”
“Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error,” the Confederate vice president later added.
Having rejected the Declaration’s erroneous principles, Stephens then explained that the Confederacy would correct them.
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition,” he said.
Conclusion: NPR Not Alone
Alas, one hears echoes of Fitzhugh and Stephens in the establishment media and beyond.
On MSNBC in February, for instance, Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla stoked fears of so-called Christian nationalists and their crazy ideas.
“They believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority,” Pryzbyla said.
Indeed, Christian nationalists insist that rights come not from Congress or the Supreme Court, she added, but “from God.”
Perish the thought.
No doubt the MSNBC audience felt triggered by Pryzbyla’s revelation that millions of Americans still assent to the Declaration.
Then there is Yuval Harari, adviser to Klaus Schwab, head of the sinister World Economic Forum.
“Human rights are just like Heaven and like God. It’s just a fictional story that we have invented and spread around,” Harari said in a video posted to the social media platform X.
WEF favourite Yuval Harari, Professor of History at University of Jerusalem says “Human rights are a fiction.”
Like Heaven and like God – it’s just a fictional story that we’ve invented and spread around.
It’s just a story – it is not a biological reality. Just as ostriches… pic.twitter.com/KF4JwLy5je
— OZ (@goldcrown_oz) January 15, 2024
In sum, we see a clear line of demarcation here.
Either the Declaration’s principles are true, in which case our liberties come from God and no human being has a right to govern another without the other’s consent, or those principles are untrue, in which case government, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 1, depends on nothing but “accident and force.”
Like Harari, Pryzbyla, Stephens and Fitzhugh, NPR has made its sad choice regarding the Declaration.
After all, truth should not require a trigger warning.
