How can anyone escape the irony that in this year, as we celebrate 250 years since the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, the principles of that declaration are being widely challenged?
When Americans should be basking in the light of our hard-fought-for freedoms, standing guard on our God-given rights noted in that declaration, there are Americans ready to turn their back on them.
Candidates advocating socialism, the antithesis of "all Men... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," are winning elections.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed invokes "Inshallah" — "God-willing" in Arabic — that he will have success overturning our God-given rights.
The Manhattan Institute's Jesse Arm convincingly criticizes Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost by one point to El-Sayed, for then stepping up and endorsing him.
Business as usual in party politics says this is the thing to do — to support, in the end, the party.
But the differences between El-Sayed and Stevens were not policy technicalities. El-Sayed and his socialist comrades hate our great, free country and want to dismantle it. This is not something to endorse.
Confused, lost progressives — a good portion of whom have no religion and no church they attend — are joining hands with El-Sayed and his socialist comrades to eradicate American freedom.
But why are so many grazing out like sheep to slaughter?
I am thinking about the very great speech about the Declaration of Independence given by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last April at the University of Texas at Austin.
Thomas spoke of his childhood in the South stained with racism and the history of slavery. Nevertheless, said Thomas, "It was universally believed among those blacks with whom I lived and who had very little or no formal education, that in God's eyes and under our Constitution, we were equal. .... Somehow, without formal education, the older people knew that these God-given or natural rights preceded and transcended governmental power or authority."
They understood that what was wrong in the country was where there was departure from the God-given principles of individual freedom that defined our founding.
It's the same point that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made in his 1963 "I Have a Dream Speech," which he concluded with "Free at last, Free at last, Thank God Almighty, We are free at last."
What can Republicans do?
Thomas asks how it could have been that in 1896, the Supreme Court endorsed, with just one dissent, "government-enforced racial segregation and validated the Jim Crow South" in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. He asks in bewilderment how this decision, against everything our country is about, held for 60 years until it was overturned.
Why? Thomas notes it is not because "there are too few people who know what is right." Rather, it is "because there are too few people who are willing to do what it takes to do the right thing, to sacrifice popularity, flattery, comfort, and security that are the purchase price for principle."
In this 250th anniversary of our declaration, it is time to fight like never before for our principles, knowing our problems come from where we have departed from the principles of our founding.
We are drowning in debt because over the years we opened the door to progressivism/socialism.
That progressivism/socialism drives inflation, hampers our healthcare and retirement, and drives our kids to failing public schools.
And let's remember, as the anniversary of September 11, 2001, approaches, when some 3,000 Americans were killed, that there is evil in the world and those who hate us and want to kill us.
Where we need government is spending for our defense. But we don't have the money because it's being sucked into bankrupt government social programs.
This is the time that Republicans must be shining the light of our free nation under God and drive out the darkness that is creeping across our country.
Star Parker is founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and author of "Necessary Noise, How Donald Trump Inflames the Culture War and Why this is Good News for America" (Hachette 2019).