In the wake of several Supreme Court decisions that have not gone progressives’ way – especially where Roe v. Wade and “reproductive rights” are concerned – activists have taken to the streets and once again committed acts of violence against property and people. Antifa is once again on the march, and Democratic politicians have seemingly only encouraged it.

In the lead-up to these decisions, there was an attempted assassination attempt of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There have been instances of domestic terror against pro-life pregnancy centers. There has been dangerously violent rhetoric, encouraging many with growing mental instability to do something dangerous.

The Left will proclaim, of course, that they are fighting for their rights, particularly their rights to abridge your constitutional rights to gun ownership, free speech, and free expression as well as their right to kill a child in the womb. The problem is that as we look back today on our Founders declaring independence from Britain and their fight for rights and recognition, it becomes clear that the left is doing less fighting and more throwing a temper tantrum.

When the colonists declared their independence, it was a last resort. They considered themselves Englishmen, citizens of Britain, and they wanted to reconcile with their mother country. The British, however, viewed colonists as less than citizens and denied them the rights the colonists felt they were just as entitled to as every other resident of England.

Progressives, by contrast, protest the very existence of America. They do not want to be citizens of the United States. They continuously decry the country’s existence. They make sure everyone around them knows they hate America. They don’t want to be part of it any more than they think it legitimately exists. There is no love or yearning to actually be a part of the country and what it offers its citizens.

They want to re-write the country – from its history to its present – entirely.

Even now, as Americans celebrate the day our Founders broke it off with England, the Left and the government bodies they’ve managed to not lose hold of have attacked the existence of America.

So, when their ability to actually curtail your rights gets stripped away and when their ability to rule via judicial fiat gets overturned, they throw a tantrum, call everything and everyone supporting the system as it is “illegitimate”, and proceed to burn portions of American cities to the ground in what they call “protest.”

The Founders, in declaring their independence, understood something extremely important. It was something they later codified in the Bill of Rights. They looked through history and saw that, in order for there to be freedom and liberty, there have to be universal rights – rights that transcend time and situation, and that are guaranteed no matter the era.

They understood, for example, that every American can and should have a right to own a firearm, no matter the time or technology. The left claims that there’s no way the Founders could have imagined how guns would evolve, but the point of the right is that it doesn’t matter how things change. You have that right forever.

But that is anathema to what the left actually seeks. They don’t want universal rights. They want to be the arbiters of your rights. They aren’t fighting for the freedom to kill children in the womb. They are trying to intimidate the country into allowing it with no restrictions or else. That’s not freedom. That’s not liberty. That’s tyranny.

In 1776, the colonists in the American colonies decided they had enough and wrote a letter to England saying as much. They did not want a government across the ocean to be the arbiters of what rights they did or did not have. They believed in universal rights and freedoms and strongly believed they (and everyone else) were entitled to them. That is not what today’s progressive movement seeks. They want to be the British crown circa 1776. Don’t let them fool you into thinking otherwise.