Today we talk about our right to liberty and we'll face head-on the worst attack against liberty yet
Hey, welcome back to the Barry Farrell show it's great to have you with us. I hope you're doing well
Today we talk about the right to liberty. This is an absolute right a natural right
But you know witness the world and you know that not all governments believe that you have a right to liberty
There's a leftist argument that liberty is not a right. They believe that the founders were flawed and thus
unqualified to lay a foundation for natural rights
They are wrong about natural rights, but they are right that the founders were human
Today, we're gonna take a look at the first element of the right to liberty the right to be free of arbitrary control
No one should ever be a slave. We'll look at the slavery issue
honestly
next time we're gonna look at the two other essential components of liberty the
philosophy of liberty from the Graco Roman and the biblical thinkers and we're gonna look at the gift that was
Uniquely brought to the world by America's founding but now we're gonna look at the gruesome truth of
Slavery and here in this country if liberty is explicitly defined as freedom from captivity or control
And if that must mean that liberty is freedom from all forms of slavery
false imprisonment or any other form of arbitrary control
Why did we allow for the horrible three-fifths compromise?
Or the Missouri Compromise where we treated people like property
Why if we believe in Liberty did it take until after the Civil War to make slavery illegal?
everywhere in the United States
so on the one hand you have a governing philosophy of the left which hates absolutes and
Teaches that people today are racist based on their skin color at birth
Those ideas articulated through white fragility systemic racism and critical race theory are illogical and they're objectively
Provable to be complete nonsense
On the other hand you have a superficial approach to patriotism
Resulting in a discounted view of slavery in the United States and that opens up the door to an untested youth being swayed by false
Statements, it's much better to understand the truth about the humanity of history's messengers the founders
You can have a perfect message
The message can be absolutely perfect. Even if the person delivering it is very human
The freedom principles really are perfect. It's true that the people that delivered that message had their flaws
If the United States is so great. Why did we allow for slavery for one minute?
That's one of the arguments of the critical race theorists that are indoctrinating the next generation in our public schools
To answer this question. Let's start by using the scientific concept of a clear understanding of the frame of reference
This approach is essential to understanding anything really it creates a space in our minds to be logical in
This approach is particularly helpful when emotion surrounds a topic in
Geometry the frame of reference is the the axes the axes is a starting point from which you can make measurements of size
position or even motion
You can measure the angles of a triangle by starting with a frame of reference
Now if you're saying something's 30 centimeters long your frame of reference is the metric system
It's the way you measure distance or size
In fact all fields of study as it relates to a frame of reference provide a set of criteria from which
Measurements or even judgments can be made
So here's an example from space from astronomy if you want to convey how long it takes for Pluto to revolve
Around the Sun you'll first need to define the frame of reference if you're standing on Pluto
And that's your point of reference you'll discover that it takes about
1920 years or so for one day to go by a
Whole lot longer than the 24 hours that pass in one day from our frame of reference on Earth
So how do you analyze historical issues in a fair and honest way you look back in time?
And you start with the frame of reference of that period the cultural context
so what was the frame of reference of the founders as it pertains to Liberty and
Slavery on an individual basis. We know that some like John Adams were
Pure they were clearly prescient and openly and vehemently opposed to slavery in any form
and they had the moral authority to make their case. They didn't own any slaves.
We also know that many others would talk a good game while in practice they also owned slaves.
A good example of kind of the median view is the very famous founder Ben Franklin. He had slaves.
He even defended the honor of revolutionary fighters who owned slaves. He had this tortured
struggle within himself of the property rights argument and he thought that if he was personally
nice to his slaves that that behavior would somehow exonerate him from the fact that they
were slaves and that it wasn't really his business what other people did. It's hard to stomach given
our modern frame of reference on slavery. To an extent you could certainly argue that Ben Franklin's
rationale at that time was a cop-out but it's probably a little bit more honest in light of
his frame of reference to assume that given the context of worldwide political issues at the time
that the slavery as an issue was not at the forefront of his mind until later. And supporting
this view is what happened to Franklin soon after impassioned speeches by John Adams on the topic.
You can't treat people like property he would say. The property rights argument is invalid here
because of its immorality. So during the preparation of the declaration in 1776 Franklin
is changing. At that time Franklin agreed like many others that slavery should be abolished
gradually. In his mind there was just too much to uncouple property rights and logistics. It had to
be gradual but when Franklin awakened to the coercive component of slavery and actually
thought about it he changed his tune. By 1780 he realized that there's no justification in that
people of all color deserve the same right to liberty in spite of the economic and logistical
issues. Too bad. Get rid of it. So Ben Franklin totally divested himself of slaves by 1781.
That was just five years after being convinced in a speech from John Adams. He became so convinced
that Adams was right that he went even further. Seeing the horror of the rapid growth of slavery
in the south he became the president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. And right after
the constitution he signed a petition to the first federal congress to abolish slavery and the slave
trade. Not gradually over time. Abolish it now without any qualifications. So by 1790 he's all
in with John Adams against slavery. But the damage had already been done. We already had
to sign the constitution which included the three-fifths compromise. This didn't use the
word slave but it essentially gave the south three-fifths representation for each person who
was in service for years. In other words slaves. There's no doubt that the prominent founders who
were also slave owners had a muddled frame of reference. In the first draft of the declaration
Thomas Jefferson condemned the injustice of the slave trade. That's good. He said it violated
the natural rights of the enslaved. But at the same time he basically absolved Americans of
any responsibility by blaming the presence of enslaved Africans in North America on the
avaricious British colonial policies. And though he thought he was extra special nice to his own
slaves he still owned slaves. So Thomas Jefferson was at that time speaking out of both sides of
his mouth. Let's stop slavery now. But I'm from Virginia and we've had slaves for generations
and I'm super nice to mine. Really nice to one of them. I'll let them go free when it becomes the
law of the land. Almost sounds like the justifications of a lot of politicians today
on any number of politics doesn't it? Another founder George Washington reveals a nuance to the
issue. He was the only southern founder who freed a sizable body of enslaved laborers. He basically
freed all the slaves that he previously had 100 ownership rights to. But there was a serious
complication. Washington's slaves had also intermarried with the slaves of his wife Martha
Custis. When Washington married her he married into wealth. He tried to convince Martha's heirs
to forego their inheritance rights in favor of a huge and celebratory manumission which was this
formal release from slavery. He wanted to ensure that the entire family was set free not just the
individual slave that he had legal authority to set free. The powerful George Washington
could not convince Martha's family and their heirs to set them free. This is stunning,
but it's a historical fact. They wanted the money. They shut down his
attempt to set them all free because they wanted the funds that came along with the
slaves. It's a horrible thing that assets on someone's personal balance sheet, their
personal financial statement, could include property rights to a person. George Washington
wanted out of the whole debacle. It was horrible to him. Martha was wealthy. Her family heirs
wanted to stay wealthy. So they shut down Washington's set them all free now manumission
plan. So he did the next best thing. He made sure his last will and testament set free
any remaining slaves that could be in any way connected to him. You know Washington
believed in a biracial United States where both blacks and whites could live together
as free people peacefully. But not all the founders agreed. Jefferson acknowledged that
slavery violated the natural rights of people, but he thought that conflicts over slavery
might one day lead to the dissolution of the union. The whole union would just get
dissolved because of it. Jefferson was looking at the intensity of the debate from the south
and he was looking at the increased racial prejudice in the north. Jefferson believed
that deeply held prejudices would unleash violent criminal strife between blacks and
whites. So Jefferson came up with this plan that he advocated and it was a horrible idea.
He wanted to link emancipation with removal of the black population beyond the boundaries
of the United States. It's crazy. Basically you're all free, but you need to find another
country to live in. Just go west until you're out of the U.S. territory. The north actually
liked Jefferson's removal proposal. The south shot it down. Meanwhile, founders like John
Adams and Samuel Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who never owned slaves, who were vocal about
the hypocrisy of promoting a free land and owning slaves, still worked alongside those
slave owners that they so strongly disagreed with. How can they justify that? Well, let's
look at an extremely contested issue today to provide a modern day frame of reference
for slavery. The pro-slavery position during the time of America's founding isn't much
different than being pro-abortion today to your typical evangelical Christian. Abortion
has been the law of the land since 1972. If you believe abortion is killing babies, but
you want to be in politics and address other areas besides abortion, or in addition to
abortion, you'll have to work with the large chunk of politicians who are pro-abortion.
In the founders' case, specifically, there are 21 who are widely recognized as the prominent
founders of the 56. And of those 21 prominent founders, only 7 were not slave owners. So
7 weren't slave owners, 14 were. And if you look at the 14 prominent founders who were
slave owners, most of them spoke against slavery at the same time that they were a slave owner.
They believed they had an excuse to be muddled. They inherited the slaves along with their
vast land, which was true in most cases. They were in the process of setting them free,
like Washington actually was. They wanted to abolish slavery, but in some cases the
estate was so vast, and some of these guys were kind of professorial, and they were inherited
their trust babies, they inherited all this wealth, they didn't believe they could swiftly
set them free without economic collapse. And some people sincerely believed there was no
place the slaves could go that would be better for them economically. The ugly truth of the
culture at that time is that slavery was as ubiquitous of a worldwide evil phenomenon
then as abortion is today. It was everywhere and among every race. And at that time, this
period 1776 to 1787, where our founding documents are being prepared and finalized and ratified,
the voices speaking against slavery were both slave owners and non-slave owners at the convention.
And those in favor of it were everywhere. The culture of the world was tolerant of slavery.
All of Europe, all of Asia, even indigenous New Zealanders are on record as pro-slavery
and violently so. No government was pure. Dr. Thomas Sowell, a black scholar from Stanford,
has researched slavery extensively. In his book, The Real History of Slavery, he demonstrates
how if you take a snapshot of the median number of slaves in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries,
the slave trade was at least 10 times larger in the rest of the world than in the United
States. Prior to the transatlantic slave trade, way back in the Middle Ages, the white slobs
were so widely used as slaves that that's where the word for slave is derived. North
America endured slavery way before any European arrived. The indigenous people of North America
enslaved other indigenous people of North America. You know, people were enslaved.
because they were vulnerable, and people with power
used them as free labor.
Many of the ancient European castles
that today's woke actors own were
built with white slave labor.
In fact, at least 600 years before the first slave
was brought to the United States,
the vulnerable people of the Balkans
were enslaved by fellow Europeans.
The poor white Balkan people were also
enslaved by powerful brown people from the Middle East.
For most of the history of the human race,
slaves were chosen from among the closest vulnerable people
that the more powerful people could enslave.
And it wasn't until the late 16th century
that the technology existed to go to another continent,
capture the slaves from a different country
and a different race, and transport them.
And when that happened, we had the horrible transatlantic
slave trade.
This process was brutal, and it was businesslike.
The first evil participant was the tracker,
kind of like an evil bounty hunter en masse.
These were the Africans who tracked down and captured
vulnerable Africans.
The captured Africans were treated brutally
and summarily killed, I mean just, boom,
killed right there on the spot, by the African trackers
if they tried to escape, as they were brought in chains
and cages to the second evil culprit, who was the broker.
These brokers were also largely Africans,
but there were also a mix of English and Europeans.
The brokers sold the African slaves
to the various buyers, most of whom
were from up and down the Atlantic.
The third culprit was the shipper.
These guys shipped the African slaves
to their final destination, usually in horrible conditions,
and they got paid for that.
The fourth evil culprit was the buyer
who took possession of the slave and put them to work.
There's a few others in there, like the auctioneer
on the other end.
But the range of treatment here from the buyer
is just all over the map.
Some provided decent food and shelter,
and others were treated horribly.
But it doesn't really matter.
None of them were free.
The distribution of the buyers were
specific to the Western Atlantic.
And the buyer distribution there might surprise you.
So along the Atlantic, 3.6% went to North America,
43.2% to the islands, 53% to the mainland of South America.
Now, it was still horrible, but the US buyer
was not the only sinner and, in absolute numbers,
the minority participant.
It's called the transatlantic slave trade,
but it should be called the African slave trade era.
That's because, according to the Purdue Black Cultural Center,
2,550,000 black slaves went from Africa
to the north part of Africa in the Middle East.
In other words, more than 6.5 times as many African slaves
went from Africa to Africa in the Middle East
than went to North America.
So greater than 90% of the slaves
shipped from Africa across the Atlantic
went to the Caribbean and to South America.
This was to serve the European imperialistic ventures
in sugar, indigo, and tobacco.
And as horrific as slavery was in the United States,
there were much larger raw numbers
of black Africans enslaved in Islamic and African countries
really at the same time, as well as down in South
America and the Caribbean.
Slavery was a terrible human rights violation,
and it abused whites, blacks, and browns around the world.
For example, over 1 million white Europeans
were enslaved by North African pirates from 1500 to 1800,
some over the same time frame in which the transatlantic
trade was happening.
These guys would be pillaged and plundered
all along the Mediterranean coast.
These Christian white slaves were
brought to the sultan in the Middle East
and treated brutally.
I mean, we know the details of a Moroccan sultan
who built the huge city of palaces
called the Meknes Tafalat.
He was crazy.
He forced his wives to pull him around in his chariot,
and he would just behead someone on a whim.
The sultan thought it was funny to cut off someone's head
to keep the fear level high.
You know what's wild is the lack of response
by the governments of the home countries
during this white slavery period.
The United Kingdom removed the documentation
on this white slavery from its history books.
You want to know why?
During this period, many slaves were
able to get letters off to the United Kingdom government
pleading for help.
Though sometimes a brave friar would buy back a Christian
slave, the government ignored the issue.
So white European people were forcibly
taken from their homes and their churches in broad daylight
and taken into slavery by the Muslims.
They were brought in by the batch, suffered brutality,
often tortured until they renounced their Christian faith
or died.
This reality in the
Middle East was on full display during the slave trade in the U.S.
and the islands and South America. So after the U.S. won the Revolutionary War it
lost protection from the British Navy for its merchant ships.
As a result, the United States actually paid tribute, a type of honor, to the
Sultans.
An entry tax of sorts to keep the Americans from being enslaved
or held for ransom when entering the Mediterranean. They all knew about it.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams didn't want to pay the tribute
but they felt they had no choice until they could build a navy of their own.
Everyone knew about those Islamic slave masters.
You know, Dr. Sowell reminds us that white European slaves were still being sold
on the auction block in Egypt for two decades
after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the United States.
That does not minimize the horror of slavery in the United States.
Absolutely not. But it does put the issue of slavery in a historical frame of
reference.
Much has been said about how evil the Founding Fathers were
and since they owned slaves in some cases, none of their documents
should be recognized is how the argument goes. But that's not a fair view.
The Union was almost not formed because of the moral dilemma at our 1787
Constitutional Convention.
If they didn't come up with the compromise the South was gonna walk
and we would have no Union. At this time George Washington wrote,
There's not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan
adopted for the abolition of slavery.
In a Constitutional Convention speech, James Madison
argued against slavery and he took notes from the other speeches and in his notes
of the convention he wrote,
The convention thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there
could be property in men.
James Madison inherited his slaves from his dad
and at the same time he's on record multiple times being very much against
slave ownership. Maybe this is like a sincere environmentalist believing that
gas-powered airplanes are bad
but he still flies to get from point A to point B. I don't know.
John Jay said, It's much to be wished that slavery may be abolished.
The honor of the states as well as justice and humanity
in my opinion loudly call upon them to emancipate
these unhappy people. To contend
for our own liberty and to deny that blessing to others
involves an inconsistency not
to be excused. Now John Jay was the first Supreme Court Justice
and he owned 17 slaves
but he was a persistent and vocal advocate of liberating all of them.
So what's in his head? Some suggest that it was similar to others who
live this hypocrisy. A simple competitive
strategy economics. He didn't want to let
his slaves go unless everyone else had to at the same time. Yet he spoke
eloquently and seemingly sincerely about getting rid
of slavery. He thought he treated his slaves respectfully and
in reality he just didn't see the boulder in his own eye.
Patrick Henry, the give me liberty or give me death guy,
he said, I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be
offered to abolish this lamentable evil.
Now Patrick Henry was a leading spokesman against slavery. We can find a
bunch of other quotes.
He was opposed to slavery on a number of grounds. His faith,
it was against the teachings of the Bible. His personal decency and belief of
how moral he was, it was immoral. His politics, it was against liberty
and he was way for liberty. He's credited with actually stopping the Virginia
slave trade
so Virginia couldn't take him anymore when he shut it down.
Yet he didn't release his own slaves. He treated them really well.
He partly justified it that that was part of the reason. He did teach them how to
read
and to read the Bible. They were also taught specific traits
such as carpentry, distilling whiskey, tanning leather, or blacksmithing.
He felt he was giving them a chance to succeed once they were free.
But why not just set them free after he trained them?
He's famously quoted as saying he was,
and this is the quote,
drawn along by the general inconvenience
of living here without them. In other words, economics.
Founding father George Mason said,
the augmentation of slaves weakens the states
and such a trade is diabolical in itself and
disgraceful to mankind. George Mason was a fourth-generation Virginian
so he was steeped in the culture of slave labor. At 21 he
inherited his father's large estate which included
thousands of acres of farmland in Virginia
and Maryland as well as thousands of acres of uncleared
land further west. And it included his father's
slaves. He hated slavery. He spoke out against it consistently.
thought all slaves should be freed, but he didn't know how to practically extricate himself from it.
Madison wrote, the magnitude of this evil slavery among us is so deeply felt and so universally
acknowledged that no merit could be greater than that of devising a satisfactory remedy for it.
So what was his remedy? Well, essentially he wanted to tell everyone they were free right now,
but allow them a first right to work for the same place at a negotiated wage
and then give the slave owner a transition period of sorts.
So there you have it. That gives you a pretty good picture of those who were opposed to slavery
during the Constitutional Convention, but muddled in their personal moral authority.
Do we know of any politicians today who can talk a good game, but do not live so purely
behind the scenes? There was an attempt by many of the founders to eliminate slavery out the gate,
but the South had too much leverage and the North caved to get the Constitution finalized.
John Adams was totally downtrodden over the matter. He thought for sure he could get it
done at the Constitution. He wanted to abolish slavery explicitly 11 years earlier at the
Declaration of Independence stage, but the South just had too much power and they could foil the
whole union. So the North had to either accept an unholy political compromise or be left with no
union at all. That was the context. That was the frame of reference. Though our generation is on
the other side of that horror, we should judge previous generations with a little humility.
For example, how many of the mainstream media condemn on a regular basis the current sex
trafficking slave trade in the United States? Almost never hear about it. So the next time a
left-wing Democrat tries to convince you of systemic racism, please remind him of a few tidbits.
In the South, Democrats wanted to continue the slave trade all the way up through and after the
war, but they lost that battle during the Civil War. So after the Civil War, they invented Jim Crow laws.
Jim Crow laws were designed, promulgated, and executed by Democrats from the South to continue
discriminating against the blacks. This is after they lost the Civil War and this is after the 13th
Amendment gets passed. Against our right-to-life declaration in the Declaration of Independence,
Jim Crow laws were a system of state-enforced laws that relegated blacks to inferior status.
Back of the bus, can't use that washer or dryer, can't go over here to this drinking fountain,
it was horrible. Later, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson segregated the entire Federal
Civil Service. Had blacks working over here, whites working over here. And then Democrat
President FDR appointed Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. He was a member of the ultra-horrible
Ku Klux Klan. Before LBJ took up the cause of civil rights as president for political reasons,
he blocked the GOP 1956 Civil Rights Bill when he was Majority Leader of the Senate.
And when he finally took up the bill in 1964, more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil
Rights Act. Before that historic signing, GOP President Eisenhower introduced the 1957 Civil
Rights Act, but Democrat LBJ gutted it. Democratic Senators filibustered the GOP 1960 Civil Rights Act.
You know the Great Society programs that they devised? They were all devised by Democrats in
the 60s and they created a welfare state that assaulted the American black family. Later,
you got Robert Byrd, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and became the Democratic leader in the
Senate in the 1980s. The current Democrat president that's in office right now was cozy
with high-ranking members or past members of the KKK. So here's a final thought for discussion.
How did worldwide slavery end? I mean, for goodness gracious sakes, we have whole classes
on the fall of the Roman Empire. Aren't the academics curious on how a worldwide evil was
eradicated? Does your eighth grade civics class answer this question? Evangelical Christians like
Wilberforce and Catholic leaders provided the moral outcry that eventually ended it all over
the world. Documented. It's history. And after slavery was defeated in the United States,
how long did it take to end elsewhere as a comparison? Up to a century. And finally,
what evidence is there that slavery came under attack in any country,
anywhere in the world before the 18th century?
There was none, no political leaders, no religious leaders, no journalistic leaders, no outcry.
Now there were these three Quakers who were abolitionists in the 1700s, but no one really
knew who they were.
But they did lay a foundation.
But the first political heavyweight was John Adams, who had the moral authority to make
the case against slavery.
By the 19th century, the leading slave trader, Britain, became the leading slave destroyer.
When Britain stamped out slavery, they were at the zenith of their power and they had
all kinds of diplomatic muscle to influence decisions upon a quarter of the world.
So the Africans, the Asians, the Arabs, and others bitterly opposed dropping slave trade.
But Britain was powerful and insisted.
So all the other non-Western countries wanted to keep slavery going.
In fact, for more than a century after Britain officially ended their slave trade, the other
non-Western countries kept the practice.
And where is the outcry now of today's slaves?
Where's the research, the investigative journalism on today's slaves?
There are an estimated 30 million slaves today.
This isn't officially sanctioned slave trade like in times past, where you actually had
a law that allowed for it.
But there are slaves in remote parts of India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan.
And without remorse, there's over a million slaves in North Korea.
And according to Operation Underground Railroad, two million of those 30 million are child
sex slaves.
Where's the outcry?
Don't take the bait of the left.
They have no interest in setting people free.
You were not born a racist.
The right to liberty was firmly established in the American Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, and with the 13th Amendment more perfectly completed.
You are created equal.
All people can be lifted up.
No color is better than another.
The right to liberty is a powerful reality, and it did not previously exist by law for
all people.
To your freedom.
God bless you.
Hi.
I'm David Farah.
Thank you for listening to my dad's podcast, The Barry Farah Show, Culture Shift.
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