Simple as that. US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued an hour-long warning on April 15, making an unusually strong bid for citizens to understand that “progressivism,” which is essentially Marxist, power-centralizing, definitionally atheist, and fundamentally anti-constitutional, is dangerous.
He is exactly right, and as a former federal litigator, investigator, and US Court of Appeals clerk, he allows me to synthesize or summarize why Thomas is so right, his call a clarion one to be prepared.
Our Founding Fathers – whatever their personal religious views – were clear about one thing, made indisputable in the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. These rights that they asserted – against a centralized government and on behalf of individuals – are God-given.
The reason we must concur, and never seek to minimize, endanger, or erase these rights identified in the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights, as well as foreshadowed by the Declaration, Constitution, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” John Locke’s “Second Treatise” and all the natural law thinkers, back to the Magna Carta, is that these rights are immutable, unchanging, given at birth.
In other words, a child born 1000 years from now, will want – just as we want – freedom of speech, worship, travel, an innate ability to protect themselves and their family, a right not to be held captive unfairly, a right to due process, equal protection, fair trail and the chance to defend themselves, as well as freedom from cruel and unusual punishments, and freedom from oppressive government.
This is a timeless awareness, one that predates documents that codify these individual rights, and yet – this is where progressivism is so dangerous – the left (concentrators of power under names like communism, socialism, utopianism) wants to say these rights come from government.
If the government gives them, and not God, then they can be taken away without further discussion. Moreover, and this is another dangerous tenet of progressivism, the idea is put forward that there are no individual rights, only group rights, thus skin color can define rights, which leads to ideas like CRT and DEI, inventions of the left to seek to blur or erase the sanctity of individual liberties.
At no point did our Founders, or any legal scholars before or after who understand and studied the premises of our supporting documents, believe that these rights were other than individual, with the exception of the rights they denied to a class of individuals, which a civil war, the 13th and 14th Amendments, made clear belong to all individuals who are citizens.
So, keeping this observation tight, what Justice Thomas was pointing out – and on one distant occasion, I sat in his chambers and heard him articulate these ideas in person – we are not a nation of people but of laws, not laws unanchored, but anchored to a Constitution, and that Constitution enshrines timeless rights which were and are possessed by individuals not groups, because these rights do not come from government, but from God who has created them in us, us to defend them. Simple as that.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!
