Grainger Announcer (12:22)

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Josh Hammer (12:57)

So we spent some time here laying the foundation as to what inspired America, ultimately culminating in these shots being fired there at Leston and Concord and the Treaty of Paris and the failed Articles Confederation and the signing of the Constitution. A lot that's predicated on this nation's Declaration of Independence, which was written in 1776 and for which we celebrate the 250th anniversary this July 4th. I know that I cannot wait for that. What a show. President Donald Trump is gonna put on. A tremendous show of that I have no doubt whatsoever. Frankly, I cannot wait to see all that that entails. My only regret, on a very personal note, is that my favorite now tragically late country music artist, the amazing, amazing red, white and blue blooded patriot Toby Keith is going to be un. He won't be here. He's not alive. And that is. That is just a shame because I cannot even imagine what that performance will look like. But alas, I digress. Now the Declaration of Independence, which is IND premise upon Lockean natural rights theory, is something of a philosophical abstraction. The point though that I was beginning to make, which I will finish now, is that this philosophical abstraction, this notion of holding truths to be self evident, the natural rights theory is that all men are created equal. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. Men can only say such things when they are speaking and writing and pontificating, disseminating their thoughts in a certain overarching civilizational milieu. An example that I like to make when I talk about this on college campuses is I say as follows. Imagine that you are the Taliban. Imagine. You probably want to imagine that. It sounds terrible, I know, just do it. Indulge me for a second. Imagine that you are the Taliban. Imagine that you are hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan, that you are a goat herder, etc, etc. Do you think that you would find it self evident that all men are created equal? The answer is of course no. The answer would be no. Similarly for sub Saharan tribal African warlords, etc. It was evident to men like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson because they were thinking and writing in a certain civilizational milieu. And this is the milieu of the broader Anglo American tradition that America inherited. When John Jay writes in the Federalist 2 about how all Americans who have this revolutionary fervor come from a common stock and any similar religious background and so forth, there, that's what he's getting at. This is a similar background. Now America's Constitution, I did just say earlier in the show that it is only the surrounding frame of silver for the apple of gold that is decoration. The Constitution is a simply magisterial document though it is the greatest charter for self governance that man has ever created, has ever written, has ever developed. Perhaps you think you could do better in the year 2026. I'm sure a lot of leftists think that a lot of these intersectional woke idiots who think that just a bunch of dead white male slaveholders wrote some things about rights. I don't think you can do a whole lot better than that. Now America's constitutional structure, as again we explained yesterday's show, has this basic tripartite separation of powers structure. Article one, the Congress, Article two, the Executive Branch. Article three, the Judiciary. This notion of a tripartite separation of powers was partially predicated upon Montesquieu in continental Europe. Writing in France, Montesquieu being one of the more conservative leaning of the French Lyman philosophers, in contrast to Voltaire who was a radical liberal atheist leftist and it was also partially inspired, that is to say America's separation power structure from England itself. England had something resembling a separation of powers between the monarch, the king, Parliament and the judiciary, which is to say the common law tradition. This goes back in England at least as far as Magna Carta. When King John signed Magna Carta, ensuring that the King was not absolute, not did not have plenary on a whims notice, control over the entire population, the king actually at English common law was himself subject to the law. So America inherited this structure from England, but we certainly improved upon it in many coherent ways. Congress, as we were explaining as a show, was to be the most powerful of the branches. The executive was to, was to have control primarily over foreign affairs and the United States military, but to have some other discretionary control as well. And the judiciary was to be the least dangerous of the branches, confined to proper case or controversies before its legitimate jurisdiction. Zooming out though, the grand purpose, the ultimate purpose of this system of separation of powers is to secure liberty on the one hand, and substantive justice on the other hand. Liberty has been explained in many cases over the years is preserved by sheer dint of the fact that each branch has limited powers and that there are checks and balances from one branch unto the other. This is how we can connect the dots of the Jeffersonian Declaration to the Constitution that's actually drafted 11 years after the Declaration. So the Declaration famously speaks of now natural rights, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Well, the framers asked then, 11 years later, Jefferson was not there at the Convention, he was in pre revolutionary France. But the Framers then in Philadelphia in that sweltering summer of 1787, asked themselves, how can we establish a government that among other things will secure these rights and also allow legitimate room to pursue substantive justice? Separation of powers was perhaps the number one answer here as to what they had in mind. By diffusing power, you therefore are able to limit the vicissitudes inherent in human nature that on a day in, day out basis will have people naturally trying to agglomerate power, to stomp on other constitutional actors and we the people themselves, and ultimately just trying to trample on all that we are here to do, which is to preserve and to pass on this great tradition in order to breathe from one generation to the next. As James Madison puts it in Fidelis 51 and a paraphrase means close paraphrase, if all men are angels. Government of course would be unnecessary. But the duty of a constitutional draftsman is to devise a constitutional structure and system that will chain men's appetites to be wholly unangelic, dare I say even demonic, to stomp on others, to intrude on the rights of others there to undermine liberty and to undermine substantive justice. And the challenge furthermore is to do this while as Madison writes in another Farrell's paper, Farrells number 57, while establishing and securing ample leeway and legroom, you might say, for the political branches to pursue the common good, or what the preamble refers to as the general welfare, which is the ultimate goal of any constitution, separation powers is perhaps the clearest way of actually going ahead to do that. Federalism is another way of doing that as well. Now, much like separation of powers, America did not create federalism out of whole cloth. There was something of a federalism like system that had developed at common law, especially in the century prior to the American Revolution. So in the early 18th century this is when you had the formal union of England and Scotland. So there were already the beginnings of some form of devolution of power from Westminster in London to Scotland and nowadays also to Wales and Northern Ireland as well. So the antecedents of some form of federalism were there, frankly, going back to the Bible, that we might actually say that they were even back then. The prophet Jeremiah, of course in chapter 29, famously exhorts that you are to seek the welfare in your own city, because there you shall find welfare. So these are ancient principles there. But America really did take it to the whole next level. The federalist notion of dual spheres of sovereignty is indeed a unique contribution to western political theory. Even more unique, I would argue, than separation of powers, which is more similar to other Western democracies as well. Federalism is fairly unique. It is a dramatic departure from the much more limited form of devolution of powers that was happening around that time in Great Britain. Federalism in America means at what it says that both the states and the federal government are sovereign in their own legitimate spheres of influence, frankly. Actually, as it turns out, the states are sovereign a lot more of them. As Madison put it in yet another Farrells paper on ferals number 45, he said that the powers for the federal government, the national government, are few and defined. Those for the states are numerous and indefinite. It's true that the 14th Amendment, which we discussed at length yesterday with Mike Davis, when it comes to birthday citizenship, it's true that the 14th Amendment definitely tends to not wholly invert but to complicate this notion of a less powerful national government to a more powerful state government. Still that is the basic baseline, the presumption off of which we are operating. And the Roberts Court, the contemporary Supreme Court, has done a lot, frankly, to restore this original notion of, of federalism. We have a long ways to go, but it's been very good at that. All this, again, is intended to, on the one hand, secure liberty, on the other hand, to provide for we the people's duly elected officials enough leeway, enough Runway to pursue the common good. As for what exactly is the common good and who exactly are we determinant and who are we in the first place there? Well, these are some of the questions that we will address for the rest of today's show. So stay with us, folks. Just another commercial break. We'll be right back with more. On the other side.

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Josh Hammer (23:54)

welcome back. So with America's constitutional structure defined, this notion of separation of powers and federalism is important to ask who is at the is tasked with deciding these issues. And this raises perhaps the all important question as to who is an American, what is an American for that matter? It's a question that was increasingly on the mind of my late friend Charlie Kirk in what tragically proved to be the final year of his life at the now infamous Hamptons retreat, this retreat that happened in the hamptons for about 35 to 40 people that I was at in early August, the same one that people like Candace Owens and others have been lying about for nearly a year now. I vividly recall Charlie asking whether or not Zoramdani actually was an American. And you might raise an eyebrow and scoff or chortle, perhaps. And you might say, what are you talking about? Of course he is. He's the mayor of New York City, for God's sake. But there's a difference here between what is the legalistic definition of who is an American or who can become American on the one hand, versus the more philosophical, deeper meaning of who or perhaps even what is American on the other hand. Now, to be sure, religious freedom is codified into the Constitution. There is no doubt about that whatsoever. In fact, it is the very first two clauses in the very First Amendment. You have the Establishment clause and the free exercise clause that very clearly says that Congress shall make no law respecting assassination of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof. And this was clearly an overwhelmingly majority Protestant country at the time American founding. But there were Jews, there were Catholics, and to a much lesser extent, there actually were some Muslims. The Muslims were not exactly practicing. They were not really mosques. They were kind of just the Muslim descendants of some African slaves who come over from Western Africa over the 17th into the 18th century. But religious freedom is clearly there in the American Constitution, no doubt about that. And this current Supreme Court has been amazing, frankly, at affirming the First Amendment when it comes to religious liberty and actually both halves of that, both the establishment clause half and the free exercise half. But America always was a Protestant majority culture, a Protestant majority nation. I've been reading this, this wonderful book that goes into extraordinary detail about some of the theological foundations of America from here to Massachusetts in the 17th century through the American founding. It is difficult to describe in distilled form just how important Protestant conceptions of humanity, of individualism, of nationhood, of covenants. A lot of this, of course, borrowed from the Hebrew scriptures, which these 17th and 18th century Protestants were deeply, deeply familia with. It's difficult to overstate the extent to which these concepts and frankly, these lifestyles and ways of life ultimately affected what is now we now know as America. For instance, just to give a common, ubiquitous example, the very notion of the Protestant work ethic. America has built incredible things, incredible things. We have won more Nobel Prizes than in any other country. We have invented remarkable, remarkable things. Think about the light bulb right there. That's Thomas Edison, all sorts of vaccines, the discovery of the DNA gene code with Watson and Crick, the Internet developed here in the United States wasn't really just Al Gore, contrary to what he might have said a quarter century ago. There's so much that we have here that ultimately really in many ways is downstream of that Protestant work ethic. In some ways, even some American Jews are in this respect, perhaps even a little more Protestant alike. American Catholics, the Catholic Church is definitely known for its hierarchy, in contrast to Protestantism, but even many American Catholics are a lot more Protestant. Like, at least when it comes to this emphasis on individualism, on not just submitting to authority, on questioning authority, on challenging the status quo, all of these notions were tied into America's Protestant majority identity. Again, I'm off today for Passover. I am an observant Jew. I am the last one here. To say that you have to be a Protestant in order to be a good American. That is obviously not my stance, nor is it merely a sectarian Jewish stance that matters. I live in Florida. We have the best governor in the country. His name is Ron DeSantis. He is a Catholic and he is an amazing, an amazing American patriot. So you obviously don't have to be a Protestant in order to be a great American or be an American patriot. Rather, what I am saying here is that there is the overarching ethos hovering in the background of what cultural Anglo American Protestantism has done and continues to guide and shape us, this country. In fact, without that overarching Anglo American Protestant ethos, I am not entirely sure. In fact, I doubt that America will be the country that it is today. So in terms of who or what is an American, the answer is that you don't necessarily have to be, God forbid, of a certain race or anything like that, and you don't have to be of a certain religious background, but you definitely have to culturally, in a civic sense, also assimilate into the inherited and God willing, of in perpetuity Protestant majority culture. That's a culture that is inextricable from what it means to be America. And that is something I think that is worth dwelling a bit upon as we approach this nation's 250th anniversary this July 4th as well. Now, I kind of glossed over the Bill of Rights. I mentioned the First Amendment. There are plenty of other amendments there in those first 10amendments that are profoundly important as well. You, of course, have the Second Amendment, your right to keep and bear arms. We had the formidable victory in 2008 of D.C. versus Heller. One of the great majority opinions from Justice Anthony Scalia, which finally, finally affirmed that the text that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed actually means what it says. You have the Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. This was drafted in direct response to the abhorrent 1760s, 1770s era practice of the colonial Red Coast. The British army intruding upon the homes of the colonists with what courts refer to as general warrants, where a warrant did not have to be reasonable or specified. It was just there to tell you that you had a place to go and you could go and rummage to your heart's content and disturb the people and all that belongs there. The colonists were not having that. The fifth Amendment, with its avowed protection for due process of law, speedy trial, 6th amendment, 8th amendment, the prohibition against cruel and usual punishments. This is deeply, deeply important stuff. I only glossed over a little bit there because much like Antonin Scalia himself once said, you could have all the beautiful Bill of Rights that you want. As Scalia often noted, actually the Soviet Union itself had its own Bill of Rights. Yes, that's right. Joseph Stalin had his version of a Bill of Rights. Perhaps even the Third Reich did. I don't think they did, but at one point, maybe they proffered to prove something that they called Bill of Rights or something like it there. But ultimately, the only guarantee of liberty from one generation to the next is constitutional structure when it comes to this. Also in terms of cultural Protestantism and religion more generally, they're taking us back to Washington's Farewell Address. These are the nuts and bolts of what it will mean to prolong America's experiments of liberty and justice into the 21st century and beyond. Nuts and bolts is that we are going to have to have a majority Protestant culture and non Protestants, and I am among them, have to culturally and civically assimilate into that Protestant majority culture. We're going to have to have a firm separation of powers, not a separation of powers that permits the judiciary to be supreme, which it has been ever since a somewhat obscure Supreme Court case In the late 1950s, referred to as Cooper versus Aaron, the foundations of modern judicial supremacy in America. A healthy separation of powers also does not allow for the rise of an unelected fourth branch government, otherwise known as the administrative state or the deep state, the bureaucracy. It's garbage. It's unconstitutional. Thankfully, we saw a major doctrine called Chevron deference overturned at the Supreme Court a couple of terms ago. God willing, we will have much more in the way to come here for the rest of this Supreme Court term and in years to come. Trump is definitely fighting very hard on that. But these are the nuts and bolts of American democracy, liberty and justice, separation of powers, a renewed vigorous federalism, a religious polity, and above all, a Protestant majority. One and an immigration system that reflects that. We take this notion of we the people very, very seriously. And we are going to be very, very hesitant to let in newcomers unless they can overcome a rebuttable presumption, a presumption that they are not among us. Make the prospective migrants choose and demonstrate and persuade that he belongs be part of we the people. That is at least how it ought to go.

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Josh Hammer (34:49)

Foreign Policy is another part of what it means to be an American that is often debated. A lot of folks had this conception that the American Founders were hardline isolationist figures. They wanted to duck their heads in the sand like an ostrich and have nothing to do with the rest of the world. The history belies that. For starters, the actual war itself that found the Republic, the Revolutionary War, was fought against a foreign power. That's probably your very first indication that the founders were not so naive as to think they could just duck their heads in the sand and get away with it. The second and third wars in the history of the Republic involved Muslim pirates. Yes, the Barbary wars, the second and third, or the first and second Barbie wars, the second and third wars in the history of the United States preceding The War of 1812, essentially a rematch against the British. There are all sorts of other colonial or early Republic era examples as well. There was the French and Indian War, part of the Seven Years War, which the colonists were very familiar with in the 1760s. There was the XYZ affair involving the French in this. In the 1790s there the notion that Americans were blind to the rest of the world was ludicrous. It's true that George Washington said in his farewell address, it's true that George Washington said to beware of foreign entanglements. No doubt about that. And we should be aware of foreign entanglements. I actually just argued in my last indicated column that NATO is currently an organization in search of a purpose. And unless until NATO actually recovers a sense of purpose, the United States should seriously consider either defunding it or perhaps even getting out of it completely. But there is a prudential middle ground here between ducking your head in the sand and trying to conquer the world. The correct way to view America's role in the world is not necessarily that we are the singular nation that can liberate the masses of worldkind of global mankind in the whole world. No, that's, that's not a healthy way to view it. But it's definitely not a healthy way to view it either that we, that we can just pretend like there are not problems beyond our shores. America was indeed a covenantal nation. God willing, it still is and God willing will be for a very long time. The Constitution and the Declaration with its natural rights undergird is a conception of a covenant, of a people swearing they are part of this great intergenerational compact from one generation to the next, from the dead, the living to the yet unborn. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, America is more than any other country in the world stage today, a covenant. That does not mean that that covenant extends to all the masses, that it should be forcefully exported to all of the world. As John Quincy Adams put it prior to his stint as president back when he was Secretary of State to President James Monroe, he gave a very famous speech in the early 1820s, referred to as the monsters to destroy speech, where he famously said, and I'm paraphrasing, but again a very close paraphrase, he famously said that America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well wisher of the world's liberties, but ultimately the guarantor only of her own liberties. That is essentially my foreign policy on a personal level, and I would argue that is the proper conservative way to think of foreign policy. We are not here to be the Peace Corps. We are not here, as George W. Bush put it in his second inaugural address, to enact a global campaign of a freedom agenda. We're not here to tell the Taliban goat herder in the mountains of Afghanistan that maybe he doesn't, but he should. He really should think of Lockian liberal natural rights theory as self evident. That's not our job. It's just not. We don't have the resources, frankly. We're not very good at it. And it is wildly utopian and wholly untethered to the real world in which the conservative must here, there and everywhere exist. But we have threats. There are people that wish us ill. There are people that want to injure, maim and harm us. And God forbid there are people that want to kill us, we better take them seriously. And America has always taken them seriously, from the Mexican American War to the Spanish American War to World War I and World War II and all the various post World War II conflicts as well. Perhaps we should not have gotten involved in all of them. I tend to agree. Actually. Iraq was a tremendous mistake. The Libya intervention, a tremendous mistake. But we have enemies. Iran is one such enemy. We are now almost. Not quite, but almost. Coming up on a month and a half into Operation Epic Fury, how will this actually resolve itself? How will the conflict with Iran ultimately resolve? Whether there's a ceasefire. There's not a ceasefire. Or a cessation of hostilities. A huna, as the Arabs call it. They speak Farsi in Iran, not Arabic. What will it look like there? And is this actually going to be the end of this conflict? Well, I don't know. What I can tell you is that in this particular case, Donald Trump is acting upon the John Quincy Adams insight. He saw that we're not going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. In this case, the monster came to us. In this case, the monster was birthed with revolution. In 1979, the Monster took over the US embassy in Tehran. That same year, in 1979, the Monster murdered 241 US marines at the Marines Barrack in Beirut, Lebanon. In 1983, the Monster slaughtered 60 to 70 people at the US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon that same year. The monster has conducted any number of other target assassinations. The monster killed hundreds and hundreds of American soldiers with IED roadside bombs placed during the Iraq War. The monster even tried to kill Donald J. Trump himself. There was just a Pakistani national recently who was convicted, trying to do exactly that on orders from the IRGC and the Iranian military and clericy brass. This is what American foreign policy ought to look like. In practice, it is to strike, get the job done, and do not get involved in a lengthy quagmire approach. A lot of folks are saying that this in Iran is turning into a lengthy quagmire. I have my doubts I have not seen that evidence yet. We are barely over a month into this conflict. An extended quagmire. Looks like Vietnam. It looks like Afghanistan. To compare those two historical examples to what is currently happening in Iran strikes me as a tremendous folly, and it should not happen. Donald Trump earns our trust. He earns our respect when it comes to foreign affairs. And in acting as he's acting right now, I would argue he's acting very much in line with many of the great foreign policy statesmen of American history, men like George Washington, men like Dwight Eisenhower, men, frankly, like Ronald Reagan himself. So, folks, again, this July 4, 1776, is the 250th anniversary of this great nation. Many of my favorite memories from childhood are predicated upon this day on July 4th. That is to say, I think back to my childhood. How we would decorate our bicycles in red, white and blue. And the high school bands we'd be playing, Genkee Doodle Dandy and the Star Spangled Banner and every other form of patriotic song or hymn that you can imagine. It was a huge part of my childhood, a huge part. I was not born for this Nation's bicentennial in 1976. I was born in 1989. This will be the first major anniversary of America that I will experience. If you define majors every 50 years, it's a unique time to pause, to slow down, to think about all that we have and all that we hope to conserve. The American left is an active, fifth column subversive force seeking to destroy America from within. They are doing the willful bidding of America's geopolitical enemies of the China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, etc. Axis. The goal of those of us who identify as conservatives is to stop that, to conserve and preserve this great experiment in oral liberty, this amazing, beautiful, exquisite constitutional structure, the amazing constitutional innovation of federalism, the Protestant majority, publicly assimilated culture, and to preserve this notion that America has long had of a pioneering spirit encapsulated by the Artemis II launch to the moon just this past week. That's who we are. We are always searching for the next frontier. We are never satisfied. We are never satiated. We are always looking for the next great adventure and the next great hope. In order to find that next great hope, we must be anchored in terms of who we are and appreciate above all who we are. I look forward to doing exactly that on July 4, 2026, folks. Have a great rest of your evening there. I'll be back with a new episode tomorrow. Josh Hammer signing off. We'll be right back.

Grainger Announcer (44:43)

This is the story of the One As a maintenance tech at a university, he knows ordering from multiple suppliers takes time away from keeping their orig arena up and running. That's why he counts on Grainger to get everything he needs, from lighting and H vac parts to plumbing supplies, all in one place. And with fast, dependable delivery, he's stocked and ready for the next tip off. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.