Can Ben Shapiro Guess the Founding Father Quote? | Independence Day Special

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Alrighty folks, in honor of July 4th, my producers will be quizzing me on quotes from the founding fathers.

We'll see how I do.

Can I identify them and explicate these quotes?

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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, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Of course, course, Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 1776.

All right, so what does that mean?

Well, when he says we hold these truths to be self-evident, he does not mean that every person, no matter your background, can simply discover these.

What he means is that they do not require outside evidence, that these are propositions that are going to have to prove themselves.

They are self-evident, that all men are created equal.

He does not mean that all human beings have the same capacity, of course.

He means that all men are created with equal rights before God, that they have the same value before their creator, that they are endowed by that creator, God, with certain unalienable rights, meaning you can't give them away.

That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Here, life, liberty, and property was the original formulation by the philosopher John Locke.

He substitutes pursuit of happiness not because he's a sort of libertarian, believing that the pursuit of happiness means

what you might think of today, smoking pot and having sex with randos.

You said it, not me.

The pursuit of happiness was meant to be the pursuit of eudaimonia, the sort of Aristotelian happiness that was virtue effectuated through the act of living.

The idea was that you have a right to life, right?

People can't kill you.

You have a right to liberty.

People can't deprive you of your liberty, enslave you, and the pursuit of happiness, meaning that you are supposed to pursue a virtuous life that is going to bring you happiness and no one can encroach upon that.

Many of those concepts are then later effectuated through the Constitution of the United States and things like freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Okay, this is James Madison in Federalist 51.

This is one of my favorite quotes from the Federalist Papers.

Nerd!

What he means is that we need to have a government of checks and balances.

What he says is that many people want to get rid.

of all the checks and balances because what if he had like an amazing amazing king oh the problem of course is that human human beings are capable of being devilish and so you actually want to check them

and if human beings were angels you wouldn't need anyone to govern them in the first place right if men were angels no government would be necessary government itself he says the structure of government is a reflection on the variegated nature of human beings that we can be both good and bad and so we ought to have ambition to counteract ambition checks and balances

forbid it almighty go

not what course others may take but as for me give me liberty or give me death that's patrick henry At the Virginia Convention 1775, Patrick Henry ended up being the governor of Virginia.

But this was one of the sort of clarion calls toward revolution.

This became obviously an incredibly popular phrase in colonial America.

Schoolchildren, if they learned anything today, would know this.

But the Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death formulation was one of the calls for war.

If liberty would not be provided by the British government, it would have to be taken at point of gun.

If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and a happy people.

May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants, while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

This is George Washington's letter to the Jewish congregation, correct?

Yep.

George Washington's letter to a Hebrew congregation in Newport, Rhode Island.

This is a very, very famous letter in the Jewish community.

America has been historically the best country in the history of mankind to Jews.

That started from the very beginning.

So the basic principle here is religious toleration for those who value virtue.

And this is sort of seen by Jews in America as the foundation stone philosophically of American tolerance for Jews in America.

Speaker Johnson actually had, I believe, an original copy of this letter that he showed me.

Right on.

Very cool.

Very, very cool.

That's cool.

We'll get to more of this in a moment.

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Our new constitution is now established.

Everything seems to promise it will be durable.

But in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.

My health continues much as it has been for some time, except that I grow thinner and weaker so that I cannot expect to hold out much longer.

Or that's Benjamin Franklin,

Benjamin Franklin writing a letter to a friend in France a few months before his death.

That's a very famous phrase.

Nothing is certain but death and taxes.

Fascinating that that phrase comes in the context of a discussion about whether the Constitution will prove durable.

The Constitution, as it turns out, has proved pretty durable.

And he's talking about it being written in 1787, 1788, 89.

And it's still around, governing the most powerful country in the history of the world.

But he is correct, certainly, to doubt the durability of of any man-made institution.

Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.

Decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch would generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number.

Alexander Hamilton?

Federalist 70.

I mean, that's very Hamiltonian.

So Hamilton, of course, was accused of essentially being a monarchist, wanting tremendous powers in the executive branch.

And when he was stumping for the Constitution, one of the big arguments made for the Constitution was that it was not the Articles of Confederation, which had a very, very weak executive branch.

The Constitution made the executive branch, Article II, significantly stronger than it had been under the Articles of Confederation.

That was something that Hamilton pushed forward.

He was arguing here against the idea that there should be a three-man executive branch, that you should have essentially a triumvirate in which the executive branch would be governed by three guys who would have to vote in majority for anything.

He said, no, no, no, you need one because you need one guy who's answerable, who is going to be able to act with alacrity without all of those checks and balances, at least in the executive.

You want a legislature and a judiciary to check him, but not within the executive branch.

It's a very doge thing that he's saying here.

Also, however, it was later read by people on the left as a sort of precursor of Wilsonian government.

The executive is the most important branch.

That's not what he's saying there.

He's saying one executive compared to three executives is better.

But it was used later by people who wanted an imperial presidency to sort of argue that the presidency ought to take the lead.

Our consolation must be this, my dear: that cities may be rebuilt, and a people reduced to poverty may acquire fresh property.

But a constitution of government, once changed from freedom, can never be restored.

Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

When the people once surrender their share in the legislature and their right of defending the limitations upon the government and of resisting every encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.

Hmm.

This one I'm not sure of.

It was I, John Adams.

I was going to say it was Adams.

I mean, I was going to say,

I was going to say it was Adams.

Normally, I can identify Adams like that.

That is typical Adams.

That's early Adams.

What's fascinating about Adams' life is that he's speaking in the language of this like very, very ardent desire for liberty.

Of course, later, he would become kind of disillusioned with the American people and he would want much more power in the executive branch.

He would want the people to essentially have to work through their elected representatives much more.

So earlier on in his his career, he was much more of a populist.

As he got older, he became significantly less of a populist.

So this is very early Adams.

So obviously, ambition must counteract ambition is the best quote among these, in my opinion.

The Mattisonian checks and balances description of government.

The best quote that's not in here is the John Adams quote, in which he talks about how our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and it would be insufficient to the cause of any other, because any document would be torn asunder by a people who are immoral the way that a whale tears through a fishnet.

I think all the founders would be pretty upset with how all of the presidents use executive powers at this point.

The founding fathers never expected that the federal government would have remotely the kind of power that the federal government currently wields.

Remember, the founding fathers revolted against a British government over taxes that they believed were in violation of their rights as Englishmen.

And so you can make the argument that the violation of the rights of the American people by the regulatory state, an unelected branch of government that basically makes policy over every aspect of their lives, is significantly more onerous than anything the British were doing at the time.

If you transported the Founding Fathers to America today and they looked at the radical left, people like Zora Mamdani or Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, they would not even remotely believe what they were watching.

There's not an aspect of what these people say that has any relation whatsoever to the original ideas of the Founding Fathers, not one single aspect, not one.

It's astonishing that there's a major political movement in this country that is so antithetical to literally everything the founders possibly could have believed.

One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

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