Before getting to today’s essay, I want to say a few words about Charlie Kirk, who, in what Governor Spencer Cox called a “political assassination,” was shot and killed on Wednesday in an event at Utah Valley University in Utah by a shooter on a rooftop several hundred feet away.
I also pin a note to the end this essay on the matter of political violence.
Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA, was instrumental in mobilizing young conservative voices on college campuses across the country. His energetic presence captivated audiences nationwide. He played a major role in Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025.
Kirk’s murder serves as a solemn reminder of the perilous state of political discourse today in America, where the political left has increasingly resorted to what anarchists call “propaganda of the deed.”
There are still many facts to be determined—the shooter remains at large and we do not yet know his identity or his motive (although there is some indication of his ideology in the evidence he left behind)—but whatever we may learn about these facts in the coming days, we can say now that there is an urgent need for civility and the safeguarding of public dialogue.
There are many posts and videos on TikTok, X, and other social media celebrating his death and condemning the man for his “divisive rhetoric.” But words are the opposite of violence, and Kirk, like every one of us, should be able to voice opinions without fear of harassment, intimidation, and violence.
Kirk leaves behind a wife and two small children.
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The recent claim by Virginia Senator Tim Kaine that rights come from government, not from God, should not reignite—if Americans have their heads on straight about the matter—one of the oldest debates in political philosophy: where do rights originate? The answer matters, to be sure, because if rights are granted by government, they can be taken away by government. If, instead, they are inherent in human nature, then government’s role is not to bestow them but to protect them—and limit them only where the actions of particular citizens and governments interfere with the unalienable rights of the individual. But since Kaine raised the matter, I want to take a moment to clarify the matter (which I did last seek in my essay Tim Kaine and the Enemies of Liberty and Rights).
The American founding documents speak with remarkable clarity on this issue. The Declaration of Independence asserts that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” these being the rights to “life, liberty, and happiness,” and that governments are instituted “to secure these rights.” Rights, in this vision, are pre-political. They exist before constitutions, before judges, before kings, before legislatures. Governments do not create them, but arise because they exist, and are only just governments as long as they recognize and defend these rights. Otherwise, the people reserve the right to overthrow unjust governments.
The “Creator” invoked by Jefferson and the committee that penned the Declaration was not the interventionist God of clerics or theocrats. To be sure, some of the founders of the American Republic were Christians, but many of the founders were deists or skeptics, and most were Enlightenment rationalists. They drew on John Locke, who argued that natural rights flowed from the “state of nature”—from what it means to be human. Thus, when the Declaration invokes “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” it points not to dogma, but to principles discoverable by reason and observation. No priest is required to interpret these truths. Indeed, by separating government and matters of conscience, no priest can interpret these truths.
This framework also explains the language of the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment does not grant free speech; it recognizes it and its obligation to defend it. The Article declares, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” Such phrasing assumes that freedom already exists. The same is true for matters of conscience. The same is true of the rights to bear arms, to be secure against unreasonable searches, or to due process of law. The Bill of Rights restrains government precisely because rights precede it.
Anthropology and history confirm this point. For most of our existence, human beings lived without formal states. Yet they cooperated, shared food, and protected one another. These social instincts—cooperation, mutual protection, sympathy— were essential for survival. Thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume described this moral sense as natural to humanity, while Darwin recognized its evolutionary advantage. Whether one believes these rights come from a creator who set the universe into motion, one observes that creator’s handiwork in nature, its signs determinable by reason and scientific observation.
eIn this light, rights reflect not arbitrary convention but enduring features of human existence. The right to life reflects the need for survival; the right to liberty reflects the need for autonomy and flourishing. The right to happiness follows logically from these rights, since one is not happy when his life and liberty are compromised by his fellows or governments. Even nonhuman animals demonstrate this fact: bears and wolves confined in cages do not thrive—not because they have a subjective sense of freedom but because they are objectively unfree. This is the fact that inspired Abraham Maslow to chart the hierarchy of needs. This is the fact that inspired the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration rejected by Muslim-majority countries, countries run by panels of clerics who interpret matters handed down by a supposed prophet of a theocratic conception of god. The creator in the Declaration is not a theocratic conception. It is a euphemism for nature.
Understanding this is crucial for the future of freedom. If rights are natural, then government is permanently limited. It cannot legitimately abolish free conscience or speech or any other unalienable right because doing so would violate what people are by nature. But if rights are merely governmental, then they are contingent: they last only as long as the state allows. That is the logic of tyranny. The founders understood this distinction, which is why Jefferson could write that when a government becomes destructive of these ends, “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.” Natural rights provide the moral standard by which governments are judged. The upshot is that Senator Kaine is admitting that his standpoint, one shared by his party, seeks to realize in life the totalitarian desire.
Let us make this as clear as our founders did 250 years ago: The American experiment rests on the premise that rights are not created by government but recognized by it. They are rooted in human nature, discernible by reason, and essential for human flourishing. Government is legitimate only insofar as it secures these rights. In this, the founders aligned with both the ancient natural law tradition and modern psychology: human beings require freedom, life, and the pursuit of happiness, not as privileges conferred, but as necessary conditions of existence and thriving. If we lose this, it won’t be just Americans who will lose their freedom and happiness. The world will lose its best hope for establishing the principle of natural rights in societies around the world.
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Political violence comes in different forms and necessarily presumes an ideology. Democrats want us to not think about what lurks behind the violence by chanting “gun violence.” But Jihadists used planes on September 11, 2001. And Decarlos Brown used a knife to kill that “white girl” in Charlotte.
Today there is an affinity between left progressivism—“woke”—and Islamism. What unifies these ideologies is a loathing of Western Civilization, its core rights and values, among them free speech and tolerance for open dialogue; an inability to suffer the opinions of others; a belief that snuffing out the lives of those who offend them is righteous action—that it’s morally justified.
Folks on social media are wondering whether we are entering a new era of political violence. We’ve been here for a while now. We know what’s fueling it. It’s neither liberal nor conservative.
freedom and reason 