The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Timothy Sandefur - Author of ＂Proclaiming Liberty＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1009)

00:00:00.000 I'm delighted to report that I have joined as a scholar the Declaration of Independence Center

00:00:06.120 for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. The center offers

00:00:12.300 educational opportunities, speakers, internship, and reading groups for the University of Mississippi

00:00:18.340 community. It is named in honor of the United States founding document which constitutes the

00:00:25.340 nation as a political community and expresses fundamental principles of American freedom,

00:00:31.480 including in the recognition of the importance of Judeo-Christian values in shaping American

00:00:37.300 exceptionalism. Dedicated to the academic and open-minded exploration of these principles,

00:00:43.760 the Center exists to encourage exploration into the many facets of freedom. It will sponsor a

00:00:50.640 speaker series, and an interdisciplinary faculty research team. If you'd like to learn more about

00:00:56.540 the center, please visit Ole Miss, that's O-L-E-M-I-S-S dot E-D-U slash independence slash.

00:01:05.900 Hi, everybody. This is Gata. Today, I have a repeat guest, Timothy Sandefur. First, how are you,

00:01:11.660 sir? Very good. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, I think the last time you were here was December

00:01:17.020 2024 where we discussed the biography of this majestic man called Frederick Douglass. Today

00:01:24.200 we're going to be talking about this beauty which is of course very apropos for the 250th birthday

00:01:30.460 of the United States protecting liberty but let me just mention very quickly who you are. You are

00:01:35.380 the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute where you hold the Clarence

00:01:40.580 J and Catherine P. Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government. Some of the books that you've written

00:01:46.520 I think there's maybe nine or ten.

00:01:48.220 You Don't Own Me, Individualism and the Culture of Liberty,

00:01:51.780 Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Man, as I've already mentioned,

00:01:54.360 The Conscience of the Constitution,

00:01:56.240 The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty,

00:01:58.440 and a whole bunch of other books.

00:01:59.620 Anything else you want to add before we drill down to this, Beauty?

00:02:03.160 No, let's just get to it.

00:02:04.800 All right, let's do it.

00:02:05.500 Well, first, I should mention that I realized maybe too late

00:02:09.340 that you and I were recently sharing a same event

00:02:12.720 at the Atlas Society yearly event down in San Diego.

00:02:18.340 I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to meet.

00:02:19.780 How was the event for you?

00:02:21.780 I thought it was very good.

00:02:23.020 I got to talk about some of my favorite loves,

00:02:26.600 philosophy and Star Trek.

00:02:28.900 That was a lot of fun.

00:02:30.480 In fact, my wife took a picture of the stage with me up there

00:02:33.420 with a picture of the Enterprise crew next to me

00:02:35.920 and posted it online saying,

00:02:37.980 these are a few of my favorite things.

00:02:40.260 Now what?

00:02:40.520 Let me see if I can just try to guess how these two things are related. Is it that in a Star Trek episode, there's likely to be some philosophical issues around some decisions that they make, and hence you're marrying these two together? Is that the link?

00:02:56.180 Yeah, sort of. So it was in my recent book, You Don't Own Me, I have a chapter in there about how you can trace the evolution of American liberalism through the history of Star Trek.

00:03:08.740 And that was why I was invited to speak. But instead of talking about that topic, I decided to do a presentation on, as you say, philosophical issues around individualism and humanism as they were portrayed in Star Trek.

00:03:23.040 You know, it sounds fun and lighthearted to talk about a science fiction show, but, you know, Star Trek is every bit as much a part of American culture as Huckleberry Finn or Bart Simpson, and it's a great opportunity to talk about really profound philosophical issues with, you know, examples that people are really familiar with.

00:03:42.920 Well, I love that. Now, I'll mention two points that sort of serve as segues from what you just said. Number one, I've gone to many APA meetings, American Psychological Association meetings, which is really like a mammoth conference, the biggest psychology conference in the world.

00:03:59.660 And they used to have, I don't know if they still have it, they used to have a track on psychology in film. So you're doing an analysis of films using a whole range of obviously psychological principles that professional psychologists will be talking about. So that's number one.

00:04:16.680 But number two, from an even more personal perspective, my main area of research as an academic is in applying evolutionary psychology to study human behavior in general and consumer and economic behavior in particular.

00:04:31.100 Well, there is a field, Timothy, which you may be aware of, called literary Darwinian criticism, whereby you study literature via an evolutionary lens precisely because literature titillates us because it speaks to a few key universal themes that we could all understand.

00:04:53.520 So it doesn't surprise me that by you looking at Star Trek, you're picking up all of these important threads.

00:04:59.500 That makes perfect sense to me.

00:05:01.100 Yeah, and I think those are particularly themes that I think are amenable to Star Trek, or at least how the series originated.

00:05:09.360 It was very much an attempt to apply rationality and humanism and this openness to new scientific discoveries in the post-World War II era to human life.

00:05:20.460 So I think that that would be a profitable way of looking at the show.

00:05:23.780 and I'm gonna come you know to this book in a second but since we're talking about sort of

00:05:29.180 individual rights and you don't own me and economic freedom believe me I've had to deal

00:05:33.440 with some of these issues as I now depart Canada and head off to the United States by the way

00:05:38.220 in case you don't know discussing this book is uniquely apropos to me because I am now going

00:05:45.440 to be housed at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at

00:05:51.720 Ole Miss. So it really resonates with me. What do you think makes you or I resonate with these

00:06:03.000 principles of individual dignity, individual freedom, whereas the great majority of my

00:06:09.860 Canadian compatriots view that as terribly evil, terribly non-empathetic, to use the framework of

00:06:17.240 my latest book, Suicidal Empathy, whereby why should Timothy own more money than another one

00:06:24.360 of his neighbors? Shouldn't there be an empathetic overlord that comes in and equalizes income?

00:06:30.660 What do you think makes us so susceptible to that individual selling point, whereas others

00:06:36.580 cannot accept that that's the way to organize society? Well, of course, there's not one single

00:06:43.020 answer to that question, but I would say that probably a big part of it is the propaganda

00:06:47.820 that we are subjected to in childhood, the anti-individualistic propaganda that begins

00:06:55.460 at a very early stage that tries to teach children that their lives are not their own

00:07:01.500 and that to be good people, they ought to serve others and dedicate themselves to the

00:07:08.480 team or the family or the nature or the nation or the the society or the race or things like that

00:07:15.680 these and i think there's a very powerful element of this collectivistic uh propaganda in our

00:07:22.480 culture america the united states i think we are fortunate in that i suspect that we have less of

00:07:27.520 that than just about any other country in the world we have the cultural traditions of things

00:07:33.280 like the the cowboy west in fact in my book you don't own me i start with the example of the

00:07:39.200 cowboy as sort of this the the perfect symbol of american individualism as as consecrated by our

00:07:46.720 culture that's a very healthy thing and it's a very rare thing and teaching our young people

00:07:53.840 that their lives are their own and they have a right to pursue their own happiness even if that

00:08:01.600 comes at the expense of the society or the culture or the family and so forth um that you know that's

00:08:08.980 that is something that ought to be cherished the you know a good example of this actually one of

00:08:12.800 the most subversive movies of all time so subversive that people are stunned when you tell

00:08:17.440 them how subversive it that it is a verse of it all is moana the disney pixar film moana which

00:08:23.500 starts out as this celebration of tradition and culture right moana is supposed to learn

00:08:30.180 that her people stay on the island and so forth.

00:08:35.140 What she ends up doing is discovering that actually her tradition is liberation

00:08:39.820 and the individual going out and pursuing her own destiny.

00:08:44.300 And it's just marvelous the way that that's done so subtly.

00:08:47.980 That's a message that we ought to celebrate and teach our kids much more

00:08:51.540 in order to keep alive the spirit of individualism

00:08:53.840 that I think lies at the heart of our institutions.

00:08:56.160 Do you feel that there is a mechanism, to use sort of my parlance, right, I talk about people are parasitized, and then I administer to them a mind vaccine.

00:09:08.420 Do you think that through not just, I mean, your writings, but all those who many, Hayek and von Mises and Ayn Rand, could you ever administer a mind vaccine of sort that the phoenix doesn't keep re-arising from the ashes?

00:09:28.860 Or do you think it's an indelible feature of the architecture of the human mind that it is a battle that will go on forevermore because there's always a new generation of people that could fall prey to that collectivist mindset?

00:09:43.640 Oh, yeah. Oh, it's definitely the latter. I think it's definitely a perpetual conflict, because what altruism teaches is it takes advantage of envy. And envy, I think, is built into our psychology for evolutionary psychological reasons. I think there is, to some degree, there is a survival value to it in a sort of selfish gene sense. And so it has persisted with us.

00:10:11.680 But, of course, that doesn't mean that we give into it. I mean, you could take another example is lust, right? A man's lust for a beautiful woman that he sees walking down the street. There's an evolutionary psychological explanation for that, obviously.

00:10:24.560 That doesn't mean that he can just attack her and drag her into a back alley.

00:10:28.920 And the same is true of our spirit of envy.

00:10:31.420 What's really tragic, especially in societies today, when it is so unnecessary, is that socialism takes advantage and plays on this sense of envy and transforms it in this pseudo-intellectual lingo into some sort of philosophy, when what it really is is just envy.

00:10:52.740 and it transforms it in it gives it a facade of intellectual respectability that has controlled

00:10:59.880 the destinies of a lot of societies even to this day and i would say i mean the reason why i think

00:11:05.640 once the parasitic socialist ponzi scheme is set in place in a society you can really almost i hate

00:11:13.080 to say that it's intractable but you could almost never eradicate it because the recipients of that 0.78

00:11:18.840 system so greatly outweigh the ones that you have to suck dry in order to support the system right

00:11:25.700 there's there's yeah and not just that yeah it's not just that i've been thinking about this a lot

00:11:29.900 just recently actually that if you think about things in game theory terms you know you you get

00:11:36.180 into a situation when you're in a socialist society where there's a prisoner's dilemma problem

00:11:41.380 that is really insoluble and and it's not the fault of the victims of that society that they

00:11:46.960 can't break out of it because if they were to do so they'd be the first to be you know executed or

00:11:52.160 exiled or whatever it might be and so it becomes necessary for people to hunker down and pursue

00:11:57.340 their lives as best they can and you can't blame them for that they are in fact doing the best they

00:12:01.400 can to pursue their own happiness in such situations but because they can't assemble

00:12:06.060 to create a constitutional system to protect themselves they the victimhood just perpetuates

00:12:12.180 and feeds on itself over time.

00:12:13.860 Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

00:12:14.840 Okay, let's get down now,

00:12:16.520 drill down into this guy.

00:12:17.940 Guys, go out and get it.

00:12:20.220 I'm willing to bet that if we gave sort of a civics test,

00:12:24.080 the classic one, 0.99

00:12:25.040 or when immigrants are about to become American citizens,

00:12:28.460 people would know next to nothing

00:12:30.440 about the Declaration of Independence.

00:12:32.460 So let's presume that all of our listeners know nothing.

00:12:36.540 Walk us through first that,

00:12:38.160 and then the key stories covered in this book.

00:12:41.880 Well, my book is, first of all, it's an attempt to go through the Declaration and explain line by line what the Founding Fathers were referring to.

00:12:49.500 This is the document that the Americans issue that say, here's why we are splitting with Great Britain.

00:12:55.220 And it explains, first of all, philosophical terms, the famous lines about all men are created equal with inalienable rights.

00:13:01.560 And then in much more practical, pragmatic terms, exactly what the British government had been doing that started the whole fight to begin with.

00:13:10.360 And it lists quite a lot of these grievances against Britain.

00:13:13.220 So I go line by line through each of those, and I wanted to explain what each of them is referring to, as well as discussing the philosophical background.

00:13:20.520 What is meant by all men are created equal?

00:13:22.860 What do we mean when we say that we are endowed with natural rights and so forth?

00:13:26.800 But in order to tell that story, you know, it would be bland to talk about that in just philosophical terms.

00:13:32.080 So I wanted to dramatize it in a sort of narrative fashion.

00:13:35.440 And so I tell it in the way that the friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as they were working on writing the Declaration in 1776 and the background of that friendship.

00:13:47.680 So, for example, most Americans probably are unfamiliar with the century of conflict that led to the American Revolution.

00:13:56.720 You know, it didn't all start in the 1770s. In as early as the 1600s, the American colonists were having these disputes with Britain over who really controls the political system here. Americans had thought that they were ruled by the king as their executive branch, but then that their laws were made by their own local legislatures.

00:14:18.540 and then here comes parliament and says no no we're in charge of everything we can tax and

00:14:22.740 legislate and do all these things it's it would be as if the the legislature of california were

00:14:27.560 to try to pass laws for florida and after a decade of of fighting over that the americans finally

00:14:33.060 said fine we're done with it we are giving up our british citizenship our membership in the british

00:14:39.280 system and we are laying our foundations on the principles of natural rights and then in the

00:14:44.700 including chapters, I want to talk about the influence of the Declaration throughout the

00:14:49.540 centuries and, you know, how it affected the Civil War and the Progressive Era and up to the present

00:14:54.520 day. Yeah, just historical sort of oddities that I'm interested in. So forgive me if they sound

00:15:01.420 too pedantic or not. So, you know, if you and I were working on a paper together, or maybe

00:15:06.140 I'm sending you some changes to a contract, I would use track changes in Word document, right?

00:15:12.740 So what was, do we have a record of the track changes as you went through the different

00:15:21.140 drafts of the Declaration of Independence resulting in that?

00:15:24.700 Here's the final one.

00:15:25.760 This is the one that we are framing.

00:15:27.460 And how many people were involved on that track changes list?

00:15:33.480 Well, we sort of do and sort of don't.

00:15:36.340 So there are some historians who have put heroic efforts into trying to recreate a track

00:15:40.760 changes version.

00:15:41.580 And the declaration went through two stages of editing. So it was it was the responsibility of the committee of five to write the first draft and then submit it to the Congress and then the Congress edited it. So it went through two stages of editing by the committee and then the Congress. And Jefferson did the initial draft and then he showed it to the other four members on this committee.

00:16:00.980 Well, two of them, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston, didn't really have much influence on it, from what we can tell.

00:16:07.020 Franklin probably added a couple suggestions.

00:16:10.480 Adams added a couple suggestions.

00:16:12.260 But actually, there's surprisingly few influences from them on the final draft.

00:16:18.820 And then it was submitted to the Congress.

00:16:20.400 Now, from there, we do know the changes that were made because Jefferson wrote them all out.

00:16:25.400 He got so upset at the changes that Congress made to the declaration that he wrote out several copies of his original version and then put lines in it to show what had been removed and changed and everything, and sent it to a bunch of friends with letters saying, don't you think my original version was better?

00:16:42.300 And as a writer myself, I can very much sympathize with that.

00:16:45.740 But we don't know exactly who proposed which particular change in most cases.

00:16:51.840 How many signatories are there in the final version of the Declaration of Independence?

00:16:56.820 I believe it's 57, I think.

00:17:00.740 Right.

00:17:00.980 Okay.

00:17:01.700 By the way, I was recently, so you and I were both at the Atlas Society in San Diego.

00:17:07.380 Then the next leg of my book tour through California led me to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, where there is actually a copy.

00:17:18.980 I took a photo next to, I don't know which copy it is, but of the Declaration of Independence.

00:17:23.920 And I was there, you know, where President Reagan and his wife are buried and so on.

00:17:29.600 And, you know, I'm Canadian, but I always say that I'm very much American in spirit.

00:17:36.460 And I really did feel, and I'm not a particular, I mean, I'm very wedded to my Jewish identity,

00:17:41.000 but I'm not a particularly religious person.

00:17:42.460 But I really did feel kind of a sense of sort of walking on, you know, hallowed grounds, is that how you say?

00:17:50.720 Yep.

00:17:51.280 Have you been to the Reagan Library?

00:17:53.240 Do you – can you understand what I mean and what are your thoughts on that?

00:17:57.780 Yes, I've been to the Reagan Library many times, although I have not seen the particular exhibit that you're talking about so far.

00:18:04.620 But I have seen, you know, we have Jefferson's personal draft where you can see the cut and

00:18:11.140 paste, literal cut and paste, where he's snipped it out and glued it onto another piece of paper

00:18:14.780 because he's in the business of editing it and all that. And it's impossible not to feel goosebumps

00:18:19.680 when you see something like that. Yeah, absolutely. I totally understand what you're talking about.

00:18:24.640 Do you, in light of the fact that you are obviously steeped in all of these sort of

00:18:29.780 deontological foundational principles that that drive american exceptionalism do you look at the

00:18:35.940 current state of the union and go oh boy what the hell we're doomed or are you okay yes

00:18:42.980 every every five minutes or so i really should get off twitter i i i regrettably i share the

00:18:52.000 same affliction as you do but go ahead i mean yes i think you know your pessimism

00:18:57.720 Well, I don't know if it's fair to call it pessimism. I feel optimistic in the long run, but quite concerned about the short run. I often remind myself of the old saying that Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted every other option.

00:19:16.520 uh and i i so in the in the long run in that sense i'm optimistic i think you know i'm often asked

00:19:22.540 what what the founders would have thought if they could come to the present day and i think

00:19:25.920 you know in some respects they would be odd and in some respects they'd be horrified i think

00:19:30.260 jefferson for example would be horrified at the way that we accept things like regular taxation

00:19:36.140 jefferson was of the view that the the what we ought to have is a society of more or less

00:19:41.940 independent people who live by their own hard work and the government leaves them alone and

00:19:47.460 that taxation should be kept to an absolute minimum and should not be regular the idea of an

00:19:52.860 of every april 15th you have to write out a check is a very recent idea in human history and it was

00:19:58.720 not something contemplated by the american founders when they imposed a tax the tax man

00:20:03.080 literally showed up at your door and demanded a check and if you didn't have a check he would

00:20:07.340 take your grandfather clock or your china and in some ways i think that's a healthier system because

00:20:12.940 you see the tax being taken from you whereas with all of the elaborate ways we disguise our taxation

00:20:18.620 with withholding and all these sorts of things americans really have no idea how much of their

00:20:23.580 hard-earned wealth is being taken away to give to people who don't work so in uh in this book

00:20:29.500 in my latest book in suicidal empathy chapter seven is titled as only god's ad can title chapters

00:20:35.980 uh govern me harder daddy and in that chapter i get into parasitic taxation and i you know i start

00:20:42.780 breaking it all down and i explain and i'm sure you know this and this applies both to the united

00:20:48.300 states and canada i think united states might have been 1913 the first time that income tax

00:20:52.860 was levied united in canada it's 1917 it's just going to be a one-time very small temporary thing

00:20:59.740 that's really going to be taken from a very very few people and before you know it it's not going

00:21:04.460 going to apply to anybody. Close your eyes, open your eyes. 120 plus years later, certainly in

00:21:10.440 Canada, you're taking roughly 65% of my income. So when you talk about the title of your book,

00:21:16.760 you don't own me. No, you do own me because from January 1st till end of August, I work as a full

00:21:24.080 fledged slave for you with zero spoils of my labor. And only in September, you allow me to

00:21:31.960 keep my money. Now, when I go on social media and I try to vent about this, the most disheartening

00:21:39.480 thing, Timothy, is to see my fellow Canadians viciously attacking me for being the existential 0.96

00:21:47.140 asshole that I am because I'm actually complaining about the fact that two-thirds of my book royalties 0.97

00:21:54.860 are taken away from me. I know you're not a doctor, but I'm going to call you a doctor because 0.98

00:21:59.200 it looks like I'm sitting on the proverbial couch. Doctor, please help me here.

00:22:04.680 Well, you know, as we said before, I think that people find ways of rationalizing their sense of

00:22:12.040 envy and taxation and supposedly helping the poor with this tax money is the number one go-to.

00:22:21.260 It's sort of like their teddy bear, intellectually speaking. Well, what about the poor? Even though

00:22:26.100 So history proves that the poor can be taken care of and typically are better taken care of by private undertakings than by the state, which, you know, when the welfare state was established in the United States, the theory was, oh, well, we haven't cured poverty with private enterprise.

00:22:42.180 And surprise, we haven't cured poverty after a century of the welfare state either, have we?

00:22:46.960 Instead, we have an entire category of bureaucrats who make their money by taking cash out of your pocket, throwing a quarter of it into their pocket, and then handing the other 75 cents to some third party.

00:23:00.820 Jefferson's reaction to this would have been clear.

00:23:02.660 he said in his first inaugural address the sum of good government is one which shall restrain men

00:23:07.440 from injuring one another and shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of

00:23:12.600 industry and improvement and not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned wow i mean

00:23:19.380 i'm guessing that's a direct quote yes yeah yeah okay so what explains that all these guys seem to

00:23:26.100 be such men of literature and so such polymaths right because all of those guys when i ever read

00:23:32.980 their stuff and i'm hardly a scholar on any of them but enough to know how they wrote and how

00:23:37.400 they express themselves they seem to have been cut of a different cloth than most of men today

00:23:43.920 now obviously part of that is exactly why they are exceptional but is it something in the water

00:23:49.560 or the educational system that led all these guys to be able to on the one hand quote epictetus

00:23:56.060 and then hit you with whatever and can we ever return to that or has has that train left the

00:24:01.960 station well there's a couple different answers to that for one thing um it's sort of a self-selection

00:24:07.740 uh bias in that we don't remember the founding fathers who were less ingenious and so that

00:24:14.680 creates the illusion that the ones we that they're all ingenious because those are the ones we remember

00:24:18.740 secondly though they lived during the enlightenment and this was a time when intellectual leaders were

00:24:24.280 very much into the idea of applying reason to, well, not just human affairs, but obviously

00:24:31.040 to the natural world as well.

00:24:32.620 And so you see this enormous intellectual progress during this time when we are exploring

00:24:37.960 and, you know, Captain Cook's voyages and the discovery of medicine and the invention

00:24:45.100 of these sciences like archaeology and anthropology and tremendous advances because there was

00:24:51.820 a lot of cultural cachet in those kinds of pursuits flash forward to today and what you

00:24:57.980 find is that the intellectual world is dominated or at least is overshadowed by a huge number of

00:25:04.460 pseudo-intellectuals who prioritize mysticism or forms of mysticism that pretend to be

00:25:12.460 scientific and that are in fact shutting down entire sciences the idea that anthropology

00:25:19.100 is the the the is exploitative or that exploration is a bad thing because it's uh cultural hegemony

00:25:27.180 and these sorts of attitudes highly anti-intellectual and are literally ruining

00:25:32.860 science sometimes in the name of racist ideology that says that it is wrong to do science because

00:25:39.820 it it violates the mythological beliefs of some racial group or other etc etc i mean you find

00:25:46.060 a tremendous number of of our universities being really governed by a highly anti-intellectual

00:25:52.780 attitude so that's a large part of it but also there are some aspects to that that we would not

00:26:00.620 like and that is it was a highly anti-democratic society at that time and so aristocrats like

00:26:07.020 jefferson had a much higher chance of getting into government than a hard-working person who's pulling

00:26:13.340 himself up by his own bootstraps you know it was it was still a society that was really rigidly

00:26:19.400 class structured and so there's you know the benefit of that is a high degree of artistic

00:26:24.720 and intellectual achievement but the downside to it is a lot of voices were silenced i mean how

00:26:29.400 many women who could have been just as brilliant as jefferson never had that opportunity because

00:26:34.120 they just didn't get the education necessary you know so again this is another thing where if our

00:26:39.060 founding fathers were to come forward to the present day in some ways they'd be horrified but

00:26:43.060 in other ways they'd be in awe of the progress that we've made interesting now as i mentioned

00:26:48.980 earlier i'm heading to old miss there is a bunch of sort of let's just call them freedom centers

00:26:56.140 although they may not be called so i mean hamiltonian center university of florida there

00:27:01.020 is at uh i think florida atlanta international university has the adam here in phoenix we have

00:27:06.620 the uh skettle school at arizona state university there you go so is there i mean i think i'm right

00:27:13.360 in saying that there is a movement that manifests itself in slightly different ways largely coming

00:27:19.320 from southern american universities where these freedom centers economic freedom political freedom

00:27:25.440 and so on are sprouting first of all yeah does that seem like there is such a trend and if so

00:27:31.580 why do you see it sprouting a lot more in the south than anywhere else in the country i

00:27:36.520 I do think that we are seeing a movement in that direction.

00:27:39.480 Now, you've got to remember, I always got to remember that history is not made by majorities.

00:27:44.000 History is made by well-motivated minorities.

00:27:47.480 And so our goal in trying to rescue the world from the forces that threaten it is not to change everybody in the world. 0.99

00:27:56.620 That would be an impossible goal.

00:27:57.880 Our goal instead is to try and reach those college kids or whoever who have the potential in them to be the next generation of great writers and thinkers and inventors and scientists and so forth.

00:28:11.700 And so don't worry yourself too much about the fact that this looks like a small movement at present.

00:28:17.180 The goal is to get to the right people, not to get to everybody.

00:28:19.960 But I do think that we are seeing this movement.

00:28:22.420 As for why it's located largely in the South, I think part of that is because there's just, historically speaking, Americans living in the South tend to be much more wedded to tradition, and the American tradition tends to be the American founding fathers.

00:28:37.480 Now, there are good sides and bad sides to that. Some of those traditions, I think, in order to celebrate the American founding, I think there are some people out there who tend to overlook or blind themselves to the negative things about the American revolutionary experience. But the fact that people are even talking about it in a serious way is a good thing. And I hope there are all sorts of new organizations, like you're speaking of, that spread up all across the country.

00:29:06.160 you know on a personal level when i so last year i was being i was fortunate enough to be

00:29:11.720 courted by several universities that were trying to convince me to join them and when i started

00:29:17.040 the process with old miss i mean they would have been maybe last on my list if only because i

00:29:21.660 didn't know much about them and then i went and visited there and when i came back my wife said

00:29:25.760 so how did it go and i said you know i think maybe we should be moving to oxford mississippi

00:29:30.480 she's like what oh it's a beautiful place i i oxford the university mississippi campus is one

00:29:35.320 of my favorites it's just gorgeous exactly and so but i was going to actually link it to an

00:29:40.460 evolutionary principle and so one of the things that i loved in mississippi very very quickly

00:29:45.720 is that when the mississippians took you in as theirs so once i said okay all right guys i'm

00:29:52.580 coming to mississippi i was no longer a lebanese jew that has resided in canada i was a mississippian

00:29:59.760 and therefore i can pick up the phone and speak to really really high-ranked people who would pay

00:30:05.180 attention and then get the ball rolling to make you feel welcome. And that, now the evolutionary

00:30:10.580 principle there is that in societies that mimic what's called the environment of evolutionary

00:30:16.100 adaptiveness, which is a smaller group of people, right? Like most of us were born in villages

00:30:20.940 where exactly we're going to die. So our word is our honor. If I renege, if I shake the hand

00:30:26.900 of Timothy and say, I'm going to do X, Y, Z, and then I cheat you out, there's only going to be

00:30:30.860 one chance that I'm going to cheat you out because there's going to be no repeat interaction.

00:30:34.080 everybody knows i'm a scammer i'm dead and so i felt a sense of hospitality in oxford mississippi

00:30:41.580 that made me then decide in one of the addresses i was giving there it was actually in jackson

00:30:46.580 mississippi i said i hereby declare all of you honorary lebanese because the lebanese are very 0.98

00:30:53.640 very much reputed for their over the top generosity you come to our house we're going to kill you by 0.97

00:30:59.140 food right because otherwise that would be a death i would be happy to endure well i absolutely love 0.87

00:31:05.540 lebanese food i will invite you uh to old miss i don't want to miss it's a date okay good and then 0.93

00:31:12.420 you and then we we shall kill you through at least a seven pound gain of lebanese food so i think for

00:31:18.760 me i felt very very comfortable right away because it spoke to sort of what i'm used to 0.99

00:31:24.220 Now, interestingly, when I would then speak to someone, either an American or a Canadian, say, oh, we're moving to Mississippi, the idiotic stereotypes that would come out, like, are you sure you're, I mean, don't, you don't, there's no chance that they would lynch you like the kid. 0.96

00:31:41.560 But I mean, these were not guys who were being facetious. 0.97

00:31:45.280 They genuinely thought there was an imminent threat that if it got out that we were Jewish, our days were numbered in Oxford. 1.00

00:31:54.620 How do we fix such stupidity, Timothy? 1.00

00:31:57.440 Well, I mean, well, first of all, it has to be said it is true. 1.00

00:32:01.620 There are still people out there who are discriminatory in that way.

00:32:05.320 And there are still, you know, nasty sides to all of our societies.

00:32:09.760 Everybody has them.

00:32:10.600 But, first of all, at risk of distracting us even further from the American Revolution, I must say that your very first assignment, if you're going to Mississippi, is to read the works of one of my very favorite writers, Florence King.

00:32:26.800 Oh, sorry?

00:32:27.860 Florence King. Are you familiar with Florence King?

00:32:29.640 I'm not. Tell me more.

00:32:31.320 Her great masterpiece is called Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady.

00:32:35.140 It's a memoir that she published. She was herself an Ole Miss student, and she wrote a number of other great books.

00:32:41.080 The one that you particularly should pay attention to is called Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, which is her sociological analysis of the New South.

00:32:49.340 She was a humor writer. She wrote for National Review. She used to write the back page of National Review every week.

00:32:54.740 And she was, in my opinion, until her recent death, the finest nonfiction writer in America.

00:33:01.540 Just a master of prose and a model to follow.

00:33:07.760 So, yes, definitely pick up the works of Florence King.

00:33:11.020 But the bottom line answer to your question is nothing cures these things except time and forgetfulness.

00:33:16.420 and you know people they have these stereotypes that in some cases were earned through pretty

00:33:22.780 nasty things that that happened in the past and they have a hard time believing that things could

00:33:27.160 change and the only way to to get past that is to show them that things have changed i'm reminded

00:33:32.880 of a line in cyrano de bergerac when uh christian asks the the captain of the guard how do we how

00:33:40.440 do we uh deal with discrimination against people like me and he says show them your courage right

00:33:46.200 beautiful uh you've written is it nine books or ten books how many books uh this one is my 10th

00:33:51.760 this is your 10th okay then let me put it up again people go out get it protect uh

00:33:55.520 proclaiming i said protecting sorry proclaiming liberty my apologies you were too polite to

00:34:00.300 correct me thank you for that uh proclaiming liberty walk us through your writing process

00:34:06.100 and i ask this uh because there are many people i know for a fact who listen to the show who watch

00:34:12.300 the show who are aspiring authors who say, you know, how do I go about opening that laptop and

00:34:17.260 starting? Walk us through your process. Well, how do you go about opening laptop? I will give you

00:34:23.560 the answer that my ninth grade English teacher, Mr. McCafferty gave. He used to say, the words

00:34:28.780 are in the pen. When you open the pen and put the pen on the paper, the words will come out.

00:34:34.080 So the answer is just start writing. Most of the work is in the editing process anyway. Just start

00:34:38.540 writing the stuff, and then eventually you'll have stone soup. But my writing style, for

00:34:44.840 my early books, like I wrote a book on property, for example, and that was largely adapted

00:34:50.740 from legal briefs that I wrote as an attorney, because that's my day job is I'm practicing

00:34:55.760 lawyer defending individual liberty, private property rights, and economic freedom in courts

00:35:00.480 across the country. And so I had written enough briefs on enough subjects that I could kind

00:35:04.560 of massage them together into a book and so that explains some of them this book

00:35:09.540 though this one I had to write from scratch and this one I had a one-year

00:35:14.400 deadline so I had to kind of plunge into it and fortunately I have I'm so

00:35:18.840 obsessed with the American founding with Thomas Jefferson and that history that I

00:35:22.800 was able to just immediately start and so much is online so many research

00:35:27.240 research resources are available online now that it's you can accomplish in a

00:35:33.320 year what would have taken you a decade in a previous generation so uh in the end then the

00:35:39.620 bottom line answer is obsession yes you have to be obsessed with the topic it might drive you and

00:35:46.740 your friends and your family a little crazy but you have to make it a nine to five job you sit

00:35:52.280 down in front of that keyboard and you write and you do your research and you do not just tinker

00:35:56.740 with it now and then a little bit when you feel like it and you don't you god forbid do you wait

00:36:01.200 for inspiration. Inspiration and the reverse writer's block are myths that are promulgated

00:36:09.440 by non-writers. No real writer experiences either to any significant degree, because to really write

00:36:15.280 just means to be obsessed with getting the sentences right and saying what you want to say.

00:36:19.960 I love the fact that you said the word obsessed, because that perfectly describes

00:36:24.540 uh the mindset that i'm in when i'm working on a book project it it's a need that is akin to

00:36:31.640 needing to go to the bathroom or i'm thirsty and i have to drink or i'm hungry and i have to eat

00:36:37.540 i just need to express myself so i wake up and it's i'm autopilot get me to the coffee shop so

00:36:43.800 i could start writing and then i almost feel like a sense of relief i just wrote 600 words okay i

00:36:49.680 could take a break now and get on the treadmill do you and once you discover this about yourself

00:36:53.800 you can manipulate yourself by forcing yourself to become obsessed with something so i recently

00:36:59.480 have taken up the project of trying to revive my dormant high school french after 30 years

00:37:05.960 you know i took it in high school and i've forgotten it you know for for three decades

00:37:09.640 and my wife signed us up for this app called duolingo where you you we work on your foreign

00:37:14.120 language skills so what i've done is i'm trying to force myself to be obsessed with it so i'm

00:37:18.840 getting i'm trying forcing myself to read books in french and watch tv shows in french and listen

00:37:23.240 to podcasts in French and do it all as thoroughly as I possibly can, because once that snowball

00:37:29.880 starts rolling, then eventually it'll start feeding on itself in my mind.

00:37:34.120 So you have to start finding ways to make yourself obsessed with things in order to

00:37:38.380 accomplish big projects.

00:37:39.700 Now, without putting my esteemed guests on the spot, I am a fluent French speaker.

00:37:46.260 Do you want to take a shot and speak to me in French, or you're not comfortable enough

00:37:50.280 to do so?

00:37:50.780 Ah, je pense que mon accent est très pauvre et je peux que tu ne comprendes moi si j'essaie, mais peut-être à quelle heure, je ne sais pas, le temps pour finir le podcast.

00:38:13.320 well you're very kind let me let me uh for even playing along let me just uh some or translate

00:38:20.460 what you just said uh i think that my accent is very poor and i'm not sure how much time we have

00:38:27.280 for us to to do this uh if i could just do one small correction forget yes please the the t in

00:38:34.420 it's accent not accent so the t is silent but otherwise uh but i was trying to do my liaison

00:38:43.720 with the t and the a at the end uh i see okay now i can't remember what i said

00:38:49.340 but that's okay i mean listen the fact that you've got the self-assuredness to even

00:38:54.320 try it listen i speak fluent french and when i'm asked to go on french shows i hesitate

00:39:00.240 because academic life has been in English.

00:39:04.160 So I don't know how to say epistemological empathy.

00:39:08.020 I could try to put it together.

00:39:10.520 And I mean, I learned French before I did English.

00:39:12.580 So I really appreciate you playing along.

00:39:15.320 Is there anything as you were researching,

00:39:18.020 proclaiming liberty that you discovered

00:39:21.440 that really threw you for a loop?

00:39:23.820 I never could have imagined that this was the story.

00:39:28.440 Well, I wouldn't say threw me for a loop, but I was very – I did learn a ton writing this book.

00:39:34.640 And I had known some of the outlines of the story but not a lot of the detail about some things.

00:39:40.520 For example, the American Revolution started out as a fight between the colonists and parliament.

00:39:47.220 It was not between the colonists and the king.

00:39:49.380 And the legal theory – now, as a lawyer, as a constitutional lawyer, I was interested in the legal and constitutional theories behind the revolution.

00:39:56.340 And it was really this constitutional fight over Parliament's authority in the colonies, and it was really only in 1776 that the Americans gave up asking the king to protect them against Parliament and decided that he was never going to do that and that the only open route for them was to declare independence.

00:40:17.340 And I also found a lot of aspects of the Declaration that I had read many, many times that I'd found new insights into.

00:40:26.820 For example, at the end of the Declaration, it says these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.

00:40:35.360 Why is that phrase ought to be in there?

00:40:37.880 That sounds kind of odd to a modern lawyer.

00:40:41.000 We don't usually use terms like that nowadays.

00:40:42.960 And the answer is that in 1766, Parliament passed a law called the Declaratory Act, in which Parliament claimed that it had authority to legislate for the colonists in all cases whatsoever.

00:40:55.460 And the language it used, it said, Parliament has and of right ought to have the power to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever.

00:41:02.780 So the Americans are turning that phrase around and sort of slapping Parliament in the face with its own language.

00:41:08.680 And I thought that was really interesting.

00:41:10.360 And it's an aspect of the Declaration that I don't think anybody else has written about before.

00:41:14.260 So there were a number of little things like that that jumped out at me that were new.

00:41:18.940 Mostly what I really wanted to do was to say things that I had been storing away for many years as a student of the Declaration.

00:41:28.300 And, you know, you read this book and they have this mistake in it.

00:41:31.220 You read that book and it's got that mistake in it.

00:41:33.040 And finally I had the opportunity to set the accounts straight.

00:41:38.680 after all this time nice i often ask people uh both in formal settings but even just kind of

00:41:45.840 hanging around with friends if you had 10 historical uh figures that you could invite to

00:41:51.060 your ultimate uh party who would they be now i could ask you that or maybe we can adapt it

00:41:56.800 slightly out of all of the founding fathers you have one individual that you could go for

00:42:03.280 tete-a-tete one-on-one with who would you choose and why oh easy it's easy to answer that question

00:42:09.460 be thomas jefferson i've been i've been obsessed with thomas jefferson since i was in ninth grade

00:42:13.040 and it's kind of a funny story so we you know i we didn't have a lot of money when i was growing up

00:42:17.920 and so we would go to these if we found something in the newspaper where there was something going

00:42:22.320 on that was interesting that was free we would go to it and we found out that there that thomas

00:42:25.940 jefferson was going to be giving a speech in a town near where we lived uh it was actually a guy

00:42:31.200 named clay jenkinson who does a show where he dresses up like thomas jefferson and he

00:42:35.440 gives a speech and he answers questions from the audience and we went and by the time the show was

00:42:40.100 over i was i was deeply in love and i've never i've never been out of love with jefferson i think

00:42:44.340 he's an endlessly fascinating creature and um so i would definitely want him there whether or not

00:42:49.940 we would speak french is an is another question i i rather suspect that my french is only slightly

00:42:57.920 worse than his he was was he ambassador to french he was he was and and he actually um i joke about

00:43:05.960 his french not being great his his teacher was scottish and so he is said to have spoken french

00:43:11.300 with a scottish accent um fortunately one of the podcasts that i listen to coffee break french uh

00:43:17.760 the narrator is himself scottish so i am hoping to have the same lousy scottish accent to my french

00:43:24.380 that Jefferson had. But here's an interesting tidbit. So late in life, when he was in retirement,

00:43:28.960 Jefferson translated a book by a French author named Destoute de Tracy. It's a book on economics,

00:43:35.880 and it's basically a defense of Adam Smith. And Jefferson thought it was important enough

00:43:41.360 that he translated it into English for the American audience. And, you know, Jefferson

00:43:46.420 does not get enough credit as a defender of economic freedom and laissez-faire. He really

00:43:52.560 was a very strong advocate of laissez-faire. And people today say, well, you know, he hated cities

00:43:57.860 and factories, so he wasn't really a capitalist. On the contrary, Jefferson was very much a defender

00:44:02.460 of economic liberty, to the point where he would take it upon himself to translate this entire

00:44:06.820 book on economics. I think that's a really interesting note to his life that is overlooked

00:44:13.320 a lot of the time. Again, that speaks to an earlier point I mentioned when I said, what was it in the

00:44:17.920 water that made these guys so special you could again can you imagine now a typical politician

00:44:23.740 having sort of the intellectual chops to say hey in my free time i'd like to translate this french

00:44:30.640 economist's work never right i am i am reminded of the british politician who once said that 0.97

00:44:36.320 american politicians are so dumb they have to have ghostwriters for their own memoirs 0.66

00:44:40.640 well i know i know of a few gavin newsome who uh that that story might fit well uh what are some 1.00

00:44:50.440 things that you hope to accomplish i mean do you already have a vision i mean i know that

00:44:55.020 right now this just came out i think actually this one came out one week last month yeah may

00:45:00.320 5th mine came out may 12th uh do you already have sort of a planned out trajectory here are the next

00:45:06.680 three stories that I'd like to tell in these books? Or do these kind of come up in your mind

00:45:11.260 organically? How does that process go? Well, so first of all, I should say it's bad luck to talk

00:45:16.040 about a book until it's done. But this is going back to what we were just talking about. One of

00:45:21.720 my French projects is I've been working lately on translating the poetry of Edmond Rostand,

00:45:27.600 the author of Cyrano de Bergerac. He published three volumes of lyric poetry that has never

00:45:34.280 been translated into English before. And so as part of my practice, I've been working on that,

00:45:40.240 and I'm trying to put together a manuscript of that, and I might go ahead with that. But otherwise,

00:45:45.020 as far as my legal and historical writing, no, I don't have any specific plans at present. I have

00:45:49.780 some vague ideas, but the problem is writing about the Declaration of Independence is very hard,

00:45:55.520 because how many books are there on the Declaration? I mean, there's tons, and coming up

00:46:00.000 something new to say can be very challenging and if i were to write about the the constitution of

00:46:04.960 the united states for instance which is the obvious next step i would want to find something

00:46:09.040 new and original in my approach i also have been working on a number of pieces on state constitutions

00:46:17.760 which is a fascinating subject because very few scholars have done the historical research about

00:46:23.680 the origins of provisions of state constitutions and especially the arizona constitution where i

00:46:29.120 live. Ours is a very recent one. It was written in 1910. And it has a lot of really unusual and

00:46:35.640 interesting aspects to it. So I've been writing a series of scholarly articles about that. And

00:46:40.900 maybe someday that might make a book. I don't really know. How much if one were to look at all

00:46:46.740 50 state constitutions to conduct a content analysis of how much overlap in their foundational

00:46:55.320 content there is versus to your point unique things that are found in the arizona constitution

00:47:00.060 what would i mean i i know you you've you've probably not done that exact analysis but just

00:47:04.340 off the top of your head is it mostly the same stuff with slight little changes yeah yeah it is

00:47:10.160 because we're it's not only is it 50 state constitutions but a lot of them have had numerous

00:47:15.180 constitutions over the years and they borrow stuff from their previous iterations and then

00:47:19.700 they overlap and copy from each other and so it's a it's a very rich history of a lot of borrowing

00:47:25.460 To take one example, I wrote an article recently about the eminent domain provisions of the Arizona Constitution,

00:47:32.700 which was it was borrowed from Washington, Missouri, New York, Ohio.

00:47:38.960 And and those were developed over the many years and so forth.

00:47:42.980 And so it's a very rich history there.

00:47:46.680 And, you know, they in between 1865 and 1900, almost every state in the Union wrote a new constitution.

00:47:53.860 so that amounts to a revolution and yet it's a revolution that most historians overlook we tend

00:48:00.060 to think of just having had one revolution but in that sense you know our state governments are

00:48:05.080 where most of the power still resides and you're talking about a lot of change over the over time

00:48:10.220 so there is a lot of overlap but there's also a lot of really interesting development and a lot

00:48:14.840 of new ideas that have been incorporated in there as we face new challenges to take one example the

00:48:20.180 Arizona Constitution contains the private affairs clause, which says government may not intrude into

00:48:25.980 your private affairs. Well, there's a number of reasons why that was written. One of them was to

00:48:32.040 try and hold off the movement for the income tax. You're just talking about taxes. One of the

00:48:36.920 concerns about the income tax when that idea was being floated was that it would require you to

00:48:41.520 submit a report to the government every year about where your money comes from and what you spend it

00:48:45.300 on and that that violates your right to privacy and a lot of people were outraged by that and so

00:48:50.460 the arizona and washington constitutions include this provision promising that the government will

00:48:54.580 never do that oh well do you ever foresee could there be a cataclysmic movement a cataclysmic

00:49:04.240 agent of change that comes along i'm not gonna i dare not say it returns us to 1913 pre-income tax

00:49:12.220 But that really alters the way people view the inherent features of what constitutes fair taxation.

00:49:19.960 Or once we've reached where we are, it's path dependent never to go back in the other direction.

00:49:26.080 Oh, you've offered me a false alternative because I do think it's possible for us to fix these problems, but not through a cataclysmic response.

00:49:35.460 It has to be a slow progressional change.

00:49:38.900 Because a cataclysmic change, like the American Revolution, the reason why we celebrate the American Revolution is because it's so rare for things to work out as well as that did.

00:49:47.560 And a cataclysmic change is usually very, very bad.

00:49:51.000 Much more often, the Saturn of revolution devours its own children as with the French Revolution.

00:49:56.680 So we would want to avoid that.

00:49:58.280 But yes, actually there are a number of states that are currently working on plans to eliminate the income tax and to try and adopt a much more rational tax system.

00:50:09.760 Arizona a few years ago adopted a flat tax in the state.

00:50:13.880 So we are working on trying to solve these problems, but they have to be solved slowly.

00:50:20.020 And to go back to your very first question, ultimately, the only real solution is to cure

00:50:26.200 ourselves of the altruistic, collectivistic notion that it is your obligation as a citizen

00:50:32.640 to labor for the benefit of other people and to instead embrace the individualistic idea that

00:50:38.620 you have the right to pursue your own happiness in peace and safety.

00:50:42.620 Beautifully stated.

00:50:43.700 Last question.

00:50:45.400 July 4th is coming up.

00:50:46.960 Big birthday.

00:50:48.020 250.

00:50:48.540 what is the sandifer family going to be doing so my wife and i do we have an annual tradition where

00:50:54.000 we spend july 4th in a different state every year and this year we're going to charlottesville

00:50:59.020 virginia and we're going to hang out at monticello jefferson's house and of course uh yep so we're

00:51:05.140 very much looking forward to to to having some some free time with the old man himself wow amazing

00:51:12.000 okay people go out there proclaiming liberty get it from the cato institute timothy what a pleasure

00:51:18.960 having you on please come back when the next book comes out please stay on the line so we can say

00:51:23.800 goodbye offline and thanks so much for being on the show merci beaucoup merci à bientôt

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 26, 2026

Timothy Sandefur - Author of ＂Proclaiming Liberty＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1009)

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