She's The Queen Of A Dumb Person Trying To Sound Smart

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the George Washington Broadcast Center. Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty. I'm strong and getty. And now he is. I'm strong and getty. With just eight vessels reportedly passing through the straight in the first 48 hours of the ceasefire, a statement was released via state media from Iran's new Supreme Leader saying, quote, and certainly we are entering a new error with the management of the straight of Hormuz. We did not and do not seek war, but we will not give up our rightful rights in any way. And for this, we consider all the fronts of resistance as one. I find it hilarious. But intentional that the American left likes to bellow about theocracies and then. Criticizes the U.S. When we try to take an evil evil theocracy down, speaking of which. Oh, interesting. Weird. My wife is telling me we're preempted in certain quadrants by a severe storm thing. Great. OK. Because nobody has a smartphone. Anyway, so I want to get to a great piece of writing about how the conflict with Iran is truly a holy war, but nobody wants to say it. One of the delights of this job is I and Jack get to say things that nobody wants to say that need to be said. I love it. Anyway, we have mentioned I've mentioned this guy a couple of times before we get to that this. Abdul. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Abdul al-Sayed, who is leading the Democratic primary in Michigan for the United States Senate. This guy is a dedicated Islamist. And his this made a bit of news. It should have made huge news, huge news, but the media is unforgivably terrible and biased and stupid. And I hate them. The former Marine and top security official for Abdul al-Sayed's campaign, Jordan Daman Domingue, is breaking the political code of silence to warn voters about the candidate's character and profoundly concerning foreign policy positions. He says he's unfit for office. This comes in the aftermath of that campaign call leak to the Washington Free Beacon, during which al-Sayed made a clarity. He didn't want to comment on Ayatollah Khomeini being killed because of support for the regime in Dearborn, Michigan, stating that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad. There are a lot of hardcore Islamists in Michigan who are rooting for the Ayatollahs in all of this. Domingue, who's the only veteran on al-Sayed's staff, details conversations and observations he has that says, quote, give credibility to the claims of al-Sayed's anti-Semitism and pro-Islamist regimes and factions. Painting a picture of a candidate unfit for the United States Senate. This guy consorts with Muslim America haters all the time, including that insane Hasan Piker, who's the anti-American podcaster who's super hot on the radical left. Anyway, they are absolutely among us. So back to the piece, why the West won't call this a holy war. It's written by Yardina Schwartz, who's a writer, thinker, commentator. And she writes the conflict with Iran didn't begin three weeks ago. This is obviously written a week and a half ago. I've been holding onto it. It's a continuation of a decades-long religious war to weaken the West and eliminate Israel. She says, when I'm reading the news and listening to debates, it's nearly impossible to understand what this conflict is truly about. If you ask most of its supporters, this is a campaign to halt the Islamic Republic's march toward a nuclear weapon and end its violent repression of a population that overwhelmingly rejects its extremist ideology. Through the lens of its critics, it's a war of choice over oil and power, one that the United States was dragged into by Israel. And in certain circles, it's framed as an effort to punish Iran for supporting the Palestinian cause. Okay, that's a pretty good description of the various people yelling their various things. Yet zoom out in a very different picture comes into focus. At its core, this is not a geopolitical conflict launched by the U.S. or Israel just over three weeks ago, or five weeks ago. Rather, it is the continuation of a holy war to export Islamist ideals, weaken the West and eliminate Israel, a war that has been waged by the Islamic Republic in its proxies for decades. That war began in 1979 when the Islamic Republic came screaming into existence. From its inception, the regime has made the destruction of Israel a core objective, viewing the existence of a Jewish state on what it considers holy Muslim land as an affront to Islam. This is another thing your big time commentators and press will never talk about. Islamists, that's fundamentalist Muslims, view the very existence of Israel as an insult to Islam, and they can never, ever, ever rest while Israel exists. Because part of the principle of fundamentalist Islam is that Islam's expansion is proof of its rightness, and it conquering the world, and to some extent it has, and it's trying to. Hello, dearborn. That's proof of its rightness. The existence of Israel is an insult, it's a refutation of the trueness of Muhammad's words. They can never, ever, ever come to peace with Israel. Now, you're Saudis and you're UAE types and all who are much more practical and believe in a reformed version of Islam that's a lot like religion as you understand it, they're fine with it. But the hard coreists in Tehran, never, never, never, never going on with the peace. Iran has never hid its ambitions. It has openly and proudly established, funded, armed, and trained terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East. I prefer the term Islamist to terrorist. Terrorist is too imprecise. Everybody uses it. It's practically lost its meaning. So I'm going to say they have openly and proudly established, funded, armed, and trained Islamist proxies throughout the Middle East. For decades its rallies have featured chance against the great Satan in the U.S. and the little Satan Israel. There is literally a clock in the central square in Tehran counting down the days to Israel's destruction, which the now deceased Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei predicted would occur by the year 2040. It's a large electronic billboard right in the middle of the main square in Tehran. It was bombed by Israel last year, appropriately. Even the most cursory look at the forces aligned with the Islamic Republic reveals the ideological nature of this war. Hezbollah, funded by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, right there in the name, is a self-described jihadist organization whose name means party of God. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic jihad are likewise backed by Iran. So are the Houthis, who triggered a civil war in Yemen that's killed an estimated 400,000 people, led to the displacement of more than 4 million others, and produced one of the world's most acute humanitarian disasters? The Houthis official slogan is, God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam. When people tell you over and over and over again who they are and what they are, it would take an American intellectual to deny it. Moving along, there are also Iran-backed Shiite militias in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, where tens of thousands of militants operate under the umbrella of, quote, the Islamic resistance in Iraq. These militias, like Hezbollah, also chose to join the war with Iran. Meanwhile, the IRGC's Quds Force is explicitly dedicated to, quote, the liberation of Muslim land. Its primary focus is Jerusalem, whose Arabic name is Al-Quds, hence the name, the Quds Force, because Jerusalem was conquered by Islam, ruled by Muslim leaders for nearly a thousand years, and is now the capital of the Jewish state, a reality that is sacrilegious to Islamists everywhere. This is why Al-Quds Day is one of the most important dates on the regime's calendar. Jerusalem Day is one of the holiest holidays in Tehran, established by Khomeini in, oh, Khomeini, I think in 1979. It falls on the last Friday of Ramadan and is dedicated to asserting Islamic claims over Jerusalem. Two weeks ago, regime officials risked their lives to commemorate this day in Tehran. That's how important it is. It would be the last public appearance for Ali Lari Jani, the former secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, who was widely considered the most powerful man in Iran after Khomeini was blown apart. He was killed in the Israeli air strike three days later, blah, blah, blah. So yes, according to the Iranian regime, and every single one of its proxies, this is a holy war. And the reality is nothing new, she writes. The problem is that most Western outlets have hidden it for years, which has made me insane. I spent a decade reporting from Israel and the West Bank for some of the world's leading news organizations. During those years, I experienced firsthand the voluntary censorship of stories and even elements of stories that illuminated the religious nature of this conflict. When I asked why parts of my story that crystallized these driving forces were removed by my editors, including direct quotes from Palestinians I interviewed, saying, for example, that Jerusalem is purely Muslim land to which Jews have no right. I was typically told that the story should focus on the news at hand, or that those details amounted to unnecessary context. In many of my stories, I included details about how Israel's war of independence began with the Arab leaders of Palestine and every Arab state rejecting the UN partition plan that would have created the first ever independent state of Palestine. They rejected it. Then their immediate declaration of jihad against the Jews. This context was always removed, leaving leading readers to think that the war of 1948 began with the establishment of the state of Israel. It didn't. It began with the Muslim rejection of the plan and what she just described. And she describes how through the years she had repeatedly pitched stories about the various clashes at Al Aqsa Mosque, the religious drive behind those clashes. These ideas were rejected by editors who normally accepted my pitches. Stories that include inconvenient facts like Palestinian stockpiling weapons inside Al Aqsa Mosque and attacking Israeli police were spiked. She was there. She interviewed the people. She saw it. But editors like, no, we're not printing that. In the articles that were published when I noted that only Muslims are permitted to pray at Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, it was almost always removed. And during the current war, she writes, these distortions have continued this month that the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount was closed to protect worshipers from Iranian missiles, which obstruct Jerusalem several times in the last few weeks. Last week, the fragments of one of those intercepted missiles fell just 400 feet from Al Aqsa. And yet the closure of the site was misleading and predictably depicted by various news outlets as some sort of cruel Israeli scheme. Oh, man, there's there's so much more to this. I'll just hit you with a little bit more. It should not need to be said that the Middle East is not the West. We are not dealing with an opponent who views victory and defeat through the short-term lens of lives lost or territory one. What we are up against is something far more menacing and far more difficult to confront. A fanatical drive to fulfill a vision of the world that is inherently contrary to liberal values and to do so by any means necessary. We might come back with a little more of this. It's so important and it's one of the things that frustrates me so much as I watch the news being presented the way it is, including a lot of people who ought to know better. And I think in a lot of cases, their intentions are good, but they're misguided. They don't want moderate Muslims, people who just grew up with Islam. And like, you know, I grew up with Protestantism. I became a Protestant. Okay, I've thought a lot about religion and I've, you know, kind of changed my course, but most people on earth just fall into whatever their parents say is the right religion and they worship devoutly or kind of sorter or they're entirely secular. And people are afraid they don't want good nice Muslims who just want to make a living and raise their families to be put on the other side of some sort of global conflict. I understand that impulse, but it's gone way too far, way too far. Beware hiding the truth because we're all better off if I hide the truth. That always leads to a bad place, including a situation where only radicals are willing to speak the truth. And so people tend to go over there and not, you know, the, the, where they're, they're better served by more mainstream politics. Anyway, more on this to come. It is a holy war. It's absolutely a war against Islamic fundamentalism and Jihad and Sharia law. And the more people who know it, the better more to come. I want to get back to this very, very smart article about how the current war is actually a holy war. But speaking of very, very smart ladies and gentlemen, I give you Kamala Harris talking to Al Sharpton. America's strength in the context of the globe and the world relies on a number of things. Yes, it relies on the fact that we have the most lethal fighting force in the world, our military. And it relies on what we call our soft power, which is the importance that we have placed in being a participant with other democracies around holding up international rules and norms, such as human rights, such as the importance of respecting relationships. Foreign policy is a lot like your friendships in your personal life. She is one of the most annoying people I have ever encountered. For real Class A, Moran. She may be the queen of a dumb person trying to sound smart and intellectual. I will say she is good for if you're ever feeling like a dumbass, just listen to something she said and you're like, okay, I'm not that bad. In the context of the globe and the world. And the world, both the globe and the world. Because there are two things. Interesting. Oh, yeah. Wow. Wow. My God. And she ran for president. Okay, that's enough of that. It's just, I feel like I've been hit by a blow, a body blow. I need to recover my, I think I lost an IQ point or two right there. And Al Sharpton nodding along. You couldn't see him, but oh boy. So getting back to this terrific piece about this is all a holy war because I want to finish the thought. And this, the writer goes into the fact that there were strangely fawning obituaries about the Ayatollah in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which waxed poetic about the Supreme Leader's literary affinities and easy smile while failing to mention his undeniable quest for global Islamic domination. You'd think that might have been the headline. Or consider the recent Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon. Those targeting Hezbollah have been portrayed by much of the Western media as an opportunistic expansion or unprovoked acts of aggression under the cover of the war with Iran. But this is not a separate conflict. It is the same war. It's a continuation of the war that's starting on October 7th, 2023, when the militants launched what they call the Al Aqsa flood. Remember we were talking about the Al Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem, Muslim Holy Ground. It's all the same war. It is a holy war. It is extremely coincidentally appropriate that we're going to next segment talk to Tim Sandifer about his book on the Declaration of Independence. And I can't wait to talk to Tim about that because this, this holy war, the other side of it rejects every single one of the sacred founding principles of the United States of America. They want to end them by force. All of it. And that's why it's so important that people understand who the opponent is and what they believe and what's at stake here and not get caught up and worried about worrying about offending somebody. All right, stay tuned. We've got Tim Sandifer from the Goldwater Institute. Next, if you can't stick around, just grab it later via podcast Armstrong and Getty on demand. Armstrong and Getty. Long time friend of the show, Tim Sandifer, Tim the lawyer, who is a big wheel these days at the Goldwater Institute. We'll talk about that in a minute. Also an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, among other things, and the author of a number of fine books, which I recommend heartily one and all, including a brand new book, Proclaiming Liberty, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. Can't wait to read it. Tim, Sandifer joins us now. Tim, how are you? I'm just great. Been too long. Yeah, it really has been. I hope you and your beautiful, brilliant writer, both doing well. I'm looking at what you wrote about your new book, Proclaiming Liberty, and you describe it as a biography of the Declaration of Independence. I love that. What do you mean? Well, I tried to tell the story of the Declaration of Independence in order to cover the legal and philosophical background of the Declaration, but to tell it in sort of a story format about the friendship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and the issues that they were facing in 1776. So I wanted to make it not just a boring recitation of philosophical or legal issues, but to try and tell it in the context of all the controversies that were going on at the time, which I think a lot of people don't know about. I mean, I think today people read the Declaration of Independence and they get to that long list of complaints about what Britain was doing, and they don't really know what those things are all referring to. And so I wanted to clause by clause through the Declaration and say exactly what it was that Parliament was doing that bothered the Americans and how that connected to the lives of the people who wrote the Declaration. Yeah, two points. Number one, I have always been inspired by, for instance, Adams and Jefferson. There are plenty of other examples of guys who disagreed with each other vehemently. I mean, like red faced spit flying, but they stuck together and they said, we will work this out. We will figure out a compromise, which I think is a lesson all of us could follow. And the second thing is, I love the idea of going through the various clauses and helping people understand what they mean and why they were so serious. They married launching a new country because I'm certain people will say, wait a minute, I can relate to that in my business, my family, my town. Oh, definitely. And you know, one of the reasons I wrote the book is because it annoys me so much when you hear people say, well, the American Revolution was just about a little three penny tax on T. And you know, people were saying that back in 1776, too. And it really annoyed people like Jefferson and Adams when people would make that claim because it just was not true. The issue was how much power, if any, does Parliament have over the colonies of North America? And the answer was no, zero. It was the king who governed them, but the laws were made by their own local legislatures. And Parliament would not accept that. So really, the rebellion was a rebellion against Parliament at first, not against the king. It was only when King George made clear that he was not going to do anything about it and that he sided with Parliament that the Americans said, well, then we can't, we can't even be loyal to the king either. And that's why the Declaration is aimed at the king and doesn't even mention Parliament by name. They couldn't even bring themselves to mention the name Parliament in the Declaration because they were just that angry. Wow. But you're right about, you're right about compromise and negotiation with people who disagree with each other because, you know, we have this idea that all the patriots reunited, but they really weren't. They had a lot of internal disagreements and it took a lot of patient negotiation and argument. And sometimes they got very angry at each other. My favorite example is Thomas Jefferson. Later in life, Thomas Jefferson said about Patrick Henry, we must devoutly pray for his death. Oh, I've always wondered whether that was cool or not in the eyes of whatever concept of the Almighty. So why did you go with Jefferson and Adams in particular, since there are many fine founding Papas that you could have focused on? Well, I've always been a big Jefferson fanatic ever since I was a kid, but you can't really write about the Declaration and just about Jefferson. He was very young. He was one of the youngest members of the Continental Congress. He was 33 years old at the time that he wrote the Declaration. And he showed up at the Continental Congress pretty late in the day. John Adams had been there the entire time and he was really the champion of independence from an early day. And their friendship, you know, everybody knows that they ended up having a lot of very serious disagreements, but that wasn't until later on. In 1776, they were both very radical and they were really good friends at the time. And so it became, it started out as a book about Jefferson and as I wrote it, it turned into a buddy picture, you know. And from that point, I had to tell the story about what happened to the century before that because people don't know much about the English Civil Wars of the 17th century, 100 years before the Revolution, that the Americans were already demanding a certain degree of autonomy at that time. And it was those wars that set the background for the American Revolution. This isn't something that just, you know, everybody woke up in 1775 and were like, hey, we're tired of being British, you know. This was something that had been simmering for 150 years before the Declaration. I was going to say, steeping in honor of the Tea Party, but yes, well, that's, and that's one thing that I don't want to get off on the tangent about Jeffersonian democracies in Middle Eastern countries. But we were steeped in the principles that gave birth to this country for a hell of a long time. I mean, it was truly in our DNA. Yes. And that was a point that John Adams particularly was very emphatic about. You know, when the French Revolution broke out, you know, more than a decade after the American independence, Adams was very cynical about the possibilities of the French Revolution because he said, you need this long cultural development of the ideas of freedom before you can have political freedom. And he thought the French were acting too quickly because they didn't have that tradition. And there's a funny thing. Adams was one of these guys who liked to write in the margins of his books like I do. And so he had a copy of a book about the French Revolution and he wrote all these angry comments in the margins. And there's one part where he says, how could anybody expect for millions of Frenchmen who had known nothing but absolute tyranny and absolute monarchy for centuries to go overnight into a modern democracy is totally insane. And I mean, it's amazing how that lesson is something we could still learn a lot about today. Yeah, it's half a cliche, but man, I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that everything is downstream of culture, everything and people, whether they're attractive, half wits serving in Congress who declare there's no such thing as Western culture or just people who failed to even notice that it exists. It makes me insane, but that's part of the reason I get up and do this job. So when you, I'm sure you occasionally run into somebody who clearly has either no understanding of the Declaration of Independence or tends to think it's like not one of the important founding documents. It's the constitutions are founding document. What do you lead with? What's the most, what's your lead pitch that, whoa, whoa, whoa, you need to wake up and understand this? You are absolutely right. I have encountered this for decades ever since I was a teenager. This issue has bothered me, especially there's a lot of conservatives who like to downplay the importance of the Declaration say, Oh no, the war was really about the traditional rights of Englishmen. It would all that stuff about equality and liberty, that was just put in there to interest the French. It really, the Americans didn't really care about those abstract principles. And that's total nonsense. The Declaration of Independence is the cement of our union. In fact, even Jefferson said when he was an old man, he said that the Declaration was the fundamental act of the union of these states. And Jefferson was a state's rights guy and he still said that. So the Declaration is part of our Constitution. And that actually, that's another reason I wrote the book is I was really bothered when Justice Barrett was being going through her confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. One of the senators asked her, is the Declaration part of our law? And she said no. And that's completely wrong. Of course, it's part of our law. It was passed by what was the legislature of the country at the time. It had legal consequences by separating us from Great Britain. It still has legal consequences. It's in the statute books. If you pull down volume one, page one of the statutes at large of the United States or the United States Code, there it is. What else is necessary to make it a law? It is the basic law. It's the frame in which the Constitution exists. See, I didn't even know that last part about it actually being in the code. It's bizarre and troubling to me that she would say that. I don't think I fully appreciated it at the time. She's not the only one either. Justice Scalia said the same thing. In fact, when he was on the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia would frequently refuse to join opinions that cited the Declaration of Independence because he says it wasn't the law. Of course it's law. And the reason that it's important that it's law is because it's like the 9th and 10th Amendments. If those are law, then the Declaration is law. And the role of the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Constitution plays, they teach us how to read the Constitution. And that's what the Declaration does also. We're talking to Tim Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute. His new book is proclaiming Liberty, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence. I meant to ask you, when we were talking about this, Jefferson Young showed up late to the party. How did he get the gig of being the head of the Writing the Declaration Committee? Well, he had written two documents that really impressed people at the time. He wrote a response to Lord North's conciliatory proposal. So what that was was Lord North was the prime minister, and he had sent what he claimed was an offer of compromise to the American colonies. But if you actually read it, it turns out it was just an illusion. There was no actual offer to compromise at all. And so Jefferson, in Virginia, he was given the opportunity to write a response to that and did such a good job of it that he later went to Philadelphia and they asked him to write a second response to Lord North. And then the second thing was he had written a pamphlet called The Summary View of the Rights of British America. And that also was so impressive to people, so well written. Jefferson was a really gifted writer and they liked it so much that in fact, Jefferson used whole phrases from that pamphlet in the Declaration of Independence itself. So he was a young gifted scholar. And that was the other thing was he was really knowledgeable about the history of law. He was really good at looking up old law and explaining what the old laws meant because he was a very scholarly guy. I mean, there are these legends about him as a college student staying up late in the night reading to the point where his friends got annoyed. And at one point, they wanted to go out and have fun and they came and they overturned the desk he was trying, he was working on in order to get him to go out and have a good time with them. And, you know, it's funny to read stories like that and be like Jefferson was a guy like everybody else. He, you know, he flirted with the girls when he was in college and he went out with his friends and had a good time. But he also wrote the Declaration of Independence. That's just incredible. Yeah, yeah. Tim Sandefur, Tim, can you hang around for a little bit? Absolutely. We'll do a short break and then continue the conversation. Would absolutely love to do that. I want to talk about Adams and how he was such a wonderful balance to Jefferson. After a word from our friends at Simply Safe, apropos in that in a lot of parts of the country, the executive branch, specifically law enforcement, DAs, whatever, mayor, city councils are not taking care to execute the laws. They're not putting criminals behind bars. They're not keeping you safe. So Simply Safe is a great way to enhance your personal safety and that of the people you love and the stuff you treasure. It's significant that Simply Safe has no lock-ins, no hidden cancellation fees, no long-term counteracts. They earn your business every single day and people love it because Simply Safe is not just a camera that'll text you an alert. It's a comprehensive ecosystem of sensors, cameras for inside and out, and 24-7 professional monitoring. In the event of a break-in or a fire or a flood, Simply Safe's agents are ready to take action for you. Right now you can get 50% off a new Simply Safe system at SimplySafe.com slash Armstrong. That's simply safe.com slash Armstrong. 50% off won't last forever. Simply safe.com slash Armstrong. There's no safe like Simply Safe. Back with more with Tim Sandifer in seconds. Don't go around. What a pleasure as we near the 250th anniversary of our founding to be talking about Tim Sandifer's brand new book, Proclaiming Liberty. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence with the author, Tim. Thanks for hanging around. Thank you. So I think a lot of people who are at least history nuts are familiar with John Adams as a balancing guy against your Thomas Paines and Thomas Jefferson's, believe more in federal power as opposed to pure states rights, blah, blah, but what was Adams' effect on the drafting of the Declaration? Well, so Adams tells this story when he's an old man, he told this story about how he had chosen Jefferson to write the Declaration because he was so busy and because he says, he says, I was very much disliked at the time and I was afraid that everybody would pick on it if I tried to write it. So I gave it to Jefferson to write instead. And that probably is not true because at the time, actually, Adams was not disliked. John Adams was very much admired and respected at the time. It was only later that he became unpopular and so that's why he had that misremembered what had happened. But he was the older and much and more experienced guy and he was really a trial lawyer. I think, you know, for, since I'm a lawyer, this is how I think of it. John Adams was a trial lawyer and Jefferson was an appellate lawyer, meaning that John Adams loved to get in there and argue with people and he gave the speeches and he persuaded people and Jefferson liked to get behind the books and start looking into the history and writing stuff, but he didn't like to talk and he hated public speaking. Jefferson all his life hated public speaking. So he wrote and then let John Adams go and defend the thing. And as for the contents, most of it was stuff that Jefferson already knew or that had already been circulating for many years, but there were some things that Adams added to the declaration and particularly there's a complaint in there that says that the king has moved our legislatures around and made it difficult for our legislatures to meet. And that happened to Adams specifically. The governor of Massachusetts had gotten annoyed at the Patriots and so he ordered the Massachusetts legislature to meet in Cambridge instead of in Boston, which was a real hassle, but most of all it was upset the Patriots because it was like well, the king can just ignore the legislature and boss us around, tell us what to do, violate separation of powers and that's not right. And so Adams got Jefferson to include that in the Declaration of Independence. And then once the thing was finished, Adams stood up and defended it against its critics line after line after line and it took two days for them to finally decide on the final wording of the Declaration after Jefferson had written the first draft. Were there any real sticking points, serious points of contention between say Adams and Jefferson or other folks, I mean real bare knuckle brawls over what the declaration should say? Not between Adams and Jefferson, but definitely between them and the other delegates and the most obvious example is the one about slavery. So Jefferson had included this long impassioned attack on slavery at the end of the declaration. It was the longest passage in the declaration and it was the most emphatic. Jefferson was using all caps and underlining words and things because he was so angry about slavery. I want to stop you, I want to stop you right there. Did you hear that? Products of America's beleaguered, perverted public schools. Jefferson hated the institution of slavery. Anyway, back to you, Tim. All his life he hated, he hated the institution of slavery and the idea that Jefferson was somehow pro-slavery or something like that is just a ludicrous lie that has been foisted on a lot of America's school kids, I'm afraid. Jefferson had written this long denunciation of the king so that when you read his version of the declaration, it sort of like rose to this rhetorical climax where it starts out with, well he did this and he did that and then he did these worse things and then these even worse things and then these even worse things and then worst of all is he prohibited the colonies from limiting the importation of slaves and slavery is this horrible thing and that's how it ended and Adams loved it and years later he said, I loved every word especially the attack on slavery but the other delegates at the Congress would not allow that in there and Jefferson later said that it was South Carolina and Georgia in particular that were such heavy employers of slaves but also the northern states which were heavy transporters of slaves also had qualms with it and so they ended up taking that entire paragraph out and Jefferson was so upset about that that he went back to his apartment and wrote out his version of the declaration and sent it to a bunch of friends and said, don't you think my version is better and then 50 years later in his memoirs he did the same thing copied out his version of the declaration in order to make sure that everybody knew that he had tried to do this thing you know. Jefferson was very much against slavery, the problem was later in life he just gave up on the issue when he really shouldn't have and I think he does deserve blame for that but in 1776 he was an emphatic enemy of slavery. You know Tim, someday we'll have to impose on your time a little more and bring you back and talk about the founding fathers in slavery and the truth about that. Now I have to my credit I have not read the whole thing but I have a copy of the book arguing about slavery which is wonderful but are there any other books on the topic you'd recommend? We've barely got a minute by the way. Oh yeah I do love arguing about slavery by William Lee Miller absolutely marvelous book. There are some really good books by uh oh gosh Liz what's his name I'm I'm forgetting the name you know drop me a note we'll post it at uh at the website at armstrongygetty.com. Tim Sandofer the Goldwater Institute the new book is proclaiming liberty John Adams Thomas Jefferson the Declaration of Independence I truly can't wait to read it. Tim always enjoy it so much great to talk to you. Thanks Joe. All right thanks we will talk again soon. Next hour if you are privileged if you are if you have fourth hour privilege we've got a great conversation coming up with Gordon Chang about China not only in the wake of the conflict in the Gulf but just what they are up to because everybody's kind of been looking away including the shocking fact that the Trump administration seems to have gone a little soft on China and why that might be so that's hour four if you don't get hour four you got to go somewhere that's fine uh just grab it via podcast later subscribe to armstrong and getty on demand it downloads automatically and you get the one more thing podcast as well thanks for being here more to come. Armstrong and Getty