by Vince Coyner, All News Pipeline:
Donald Trump and Elon Musk, two men who could easily play it safe, are putting it all on the line for American liberty. This is a first since our original revolution.
Rush Limbaugh used to talk about a story his father told about the signers of the Declaration of Independence:
Of those 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine died of wounds or hardships during the war. Five were captured and imprisoned, in each case with brutal treatment. Several lost wives, sons or entire families. One lost his 13 children. Two wives were brutally treated. All were at one time or another the victims of manhunts and driven from their homes. Twelve signers had their homes completely burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. Yet not one defected or went back on his pledged word. Their honor, and the nation they sacrificed so much to create is still intact.
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The story had something of a resurrection in the early 2000s and was often shared in various iterations on social media. Not surprisingly, a minor industry emerged seeking to “fact-check” them. An example of such is this from Snopes, which first began fact-checking them back in 2005:
Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died.
It is true that five signers of the Declaration of Independence were captured by the British during the course of the Revolutionary War. However, none of them died while a prisoner, and four of them were taken into custody not because they were considered “traitors” due to their status as signatories to that document, but because they were captured as prisoners of war while actively engaged in military operations against the British.
Snopes concludes that the piece they reviewed (not the Limbaugh piece) was “Mixed” in its accuracy. They’re right. Accuracy matters. Particularly in matters of importance. Snopes then add something that backhandedly drives home the basic premise:
So great is our need for simplified, dramatic events and heroes that even the real-life biographies of the fifty-six men who risked their lives to publicly declare American independence are no longer compelling enough.
This is the theme that most of the gotcha fact checkers miss and, indeed, a point that those who seek to debunk the audacity of what those 56 did largely ignore: These men were committing treason. They knew they were committing treason. They knew the penalty for committing treason was hanging. Yet, they did so, risking everything they had.
What’s more, they weren’t committing treason against just some random monarch with a few colonies to protect. No, they were committing treason against the most powerful nation on the planet, which had a navy that dominated the seas and a reach that stretched across continents and oceans.
Whether they ended up dying of old age as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams did—on the same day, exactly 50 years from the date of the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1826—or died during the war itself, as nine of the signatories did, all 56 of them knew they were risking their fortunes, families and their lives if they signed that document. And they did it nonetheless.
Today, there are millions of Americans ready to sign a new Declaration of Independence from the tyranny America has become. Tyranny, you say?
The American government in 2024 is far more tyrannical than the British government under King George III ever was. And it’s not even close.
With the federal government having passed over 88,000 laws and rules just between 1995 and 2016, today, it’s almost impossible for the average American to get through a single day, never mind a single year or life, without breaking the law. In his book Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate suggests that Americans commit three federal felonies daily without even knowing it. And that doesn’t include the countless state and local laws or other authoritarian fictions that tyrants create.
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