Neil Gorsuch

with my co-author, Janie Nitsi, and it was just so much fun to relearn some things I'd forgotten and to learn some things I didn't know.

But you're right about the radical nature of those ideas, that all men are created equal, that each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not by government, and that we have the right to rule ourselves.

Nobody in Europe thought any of those ideas was correct.

It was a threat to the social order everywhere, to monarchs, to kings and oligarchs, dictators around the world.

And it kind of remains so today, if you think about it.

And it was it was highly contingent.

There was nothing guaranteed.

You point out on June 7th when the resolution was introduced, even then the delegates were split and the country was split.

Only about 40 percent supported independence.

Another 20 or 30 percent were were loyalists and the rest were pretty eager to stay out of it.

You go through the Bill of Rights and every one of them really traces its way back.

ability to have independent judges decide your case.

Instead, it was the king's agents who were deciding cases in the colonies and a jury of your peers.

They wanted to take cases over to Britain so that you wouldn't even have a jury in Massachusetts say, decide your case.

Well, they knew that they were planting the seed for a completely different form of government than anything that was known.

And it is kind of amazing to think about those three ideas in the Declaration.

We've appealed to them throughout our history, during the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Suffrage Movement, because they're perfect ideas.

They speak to every human heart.

They exclude no one.

And they've been the model for freedom movements across the world as well.