Principled Perspectives: July 2026

Sunday, July 26, 2026

New Jersey’s Racist John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act

New Jersey has gone full collectivist—especially racist—on the Democratic process. On July 2, 2026, Governor Mikie Sherrill signed the John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act.

What does that law do? According to the AI summary of BillTrack50,

This bill, known as the "John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act of New Jersey," aims to strengthen voting rights and prevent voter suppression and dilution, particularly for "protected classes" which include racial, color, or language-minority groups. It establishes the public policy of New Jersey to maximize voter participation and ensure equal opportunity for all eligible voters, especially those in protected classes, to engage in the political process. [my emphasis]

This is a reaction to the SCOTUS ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which overturned a racially gerrymandered Congressional district because it violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits voter discrimination on the basis of race, color, or membership in language minority groups.

The Left’s hysterical mantra has been that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been neutered, eviscerated, weakened, or even repealed, even though no one’s rights have been weakened, compromised, or otherwise violated. We had, and still have, equal voting rights for all—the proverbial, ironclad rule “one man, one vote” principle.

No one has been restricted from “engaging in the political process,” which involves more than voting, like campaign donations, issue advocacy, campaigning for a candidate, or debating fellow citizens. (It’s interesting that Democrats would use that terminology, since it is they who would restrict people from engaging in the political process, through various campaign finance legal restrictions, and fighting to overturn pro-free speech SCOTUS rulings like Citizen’s United.)

So, what gives?

The Left has snuck in a sinister gimmick—switching the concept of voting rights from the individual to the collective. Reread the summary of the NJ law. There are no, and cannot be, “protected classes” in the United States of America. America is explicitly a nation built on the unalienable rights of the individual, not the group, and for which our government is legally bound to secure equally for all. But by the Left’s standards, certain groups or classes get the special privilege of being virtually guaranteed the election of politicians of its favored race, skin complexion, or language. (What of ideas, policy, character, or political philosophy of the candidates?) And what of the individuals who make up the dissenting minorities within those privileged classes, who have no such guarantee? What of un-”protected” classes? What of the equal protection of the laws? What is the unsaid premise behind such hideous laws as that of New Jersey, which are intended to rig certain elections in favor of certain politically privileged “protected” voting demographics? That unsaid premise amounts to, “All voters are equal, but some voters are more equal than others.”

There are no, and can logically never be, such a thing as collectivized voting rights, or collectivized rights of any kind. As the great American philosopher Ayn Rand has observed,

Any group or collective, large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the rights of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking. Every legitimate group undertaking is based on the participants' right of free association and free trade. (By legitimate, I mean: noncriminal and freely formed, that is, a group which no one was forced to join.)

The notion of collective rights (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that rights belong to some men, but not to others; that some men have the right to dispose of others in any manner they please and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.

Nothing can ever justify or validate such a doctrine and no one ever has. Like the altruist morality from which it is derived, this doctrine rests on mysticism: either on the old-fashioned mysticism of faith in supernatural edicts, like The Divine Right of Kings or on the social mystique of modern collectivists who see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.

Of course, the “protected classes” are created by political fiat—i.e., by force—in which no individual member of that group was given a chance to consent or not. Thus, the “protected classes” are groups of individuals who are forced to join, whether they choose to or not.

Oh, well. It makes perfect sense from the standpoint of the Left’s long-held tribal narrative—That so-called “people of color” are an inferior human breed who need government favoritism to make it in a free society. As I noted in a Facebook post:

The violent Leftist reaction to the ruling also affirms the fundamental racial/collectivist orientation of the Left and the Democratic Party (I deliberately chose the NYT article to demonstrate this). That political block sees every issue through a lens of race. But, MEMO to the Left: dark skinned people are INDIVIDUALS, each with a mind of their own, capable of deciding FOR THEMSELVES how to vote, just like every other person. They are not some homogenous colored herd with some collective brain that they must be told they must follow.

Don’t believe the way most of the press is characterizing this ruling. This [SCOTUS] decision is a great outcome.

To demonstrate how the misrepresentation gets traction, consider the wording of these clips. From Supreme Court no ‘rubber stamp’ for Trump, Kagan says

While standing up for her conservative colleagues, Kagan did express disappointment with many of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, including what she termed the “evisceration of the Voting Rights Act.”

The link connects to a Politico report:

From Supreme Court limits Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court significantly narrowed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in a 6-3 ruling Wednesday, further eroding the impact of the landmark civil rights-era law.

For decades, Section 2 — a provision that broadly outlawed discrimination in voting on the basis of race — has been interpreted to allow, and sometimes demand, the use of race-conscious data in redistricting, to protect the voting power of minorities.

Note the glaring contradiction. The “key provision” that was allegedly “significantly narrowed” was Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But it was not actually Section 2 that was narrowed. It was a particular interpretation of Section 2—an interpretation that actually twisted the Voting Rights Act “to allow, and sometimes demand, the use of race-conscious data in redistricting, to protect the voting power of minorities” rather than individuals, a provision that is not found anywhere in the actual 1965 Act. What does the Act actually say?

Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act “prohibits voting practices or procedures [like redistricting?] that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified in Section 4(f)(2) of the Act. Most of the cases arising under Section 2 since its enactment involved challenges to at-large election schemes, but the section's prohibition against discrimination in voting applies nationwide to any voting standard, practice, or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. Section 2 is permanent and has no expiration date as do certain other provisions of the Voting Rights Act. [My emphasis]

New Jersey’s new John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act, which is intended as a counterweight to the “voter suppressing” SCOTUS ruling, is actually a hideous law that actually weakens the voting rights of individuals.

Clearly, Politico’s reporting is the most accurate. Note that the Act refers to “the right of any citizen to vote,” NOT the “right” of any citizen to rig an election so someone of his race or color can win. No citizen’s right to cast his vote was denied, abridged, or “eviscerated” by the SCOTUS ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. What was eviscerated was the hideous practice of race-based redistricting—a resounding victory for the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the equal right of all citizens to vote.

Friday, July 3, 2026

July 4, 1776: Words that Will Never Be Erased

“It is . . . from the perspective of the bloody millennia of mankind's history . . . that I want you to look at the birth of a miracle: the United States of America. If it is ever proper for men to kneel, we should kneel when we read the Declaration of Independence."—Ayn Rand

The Fourth of July is a national holiday that, to me, stands far above all of the others. It represents the greatest political achievement in world history. More than that, the birth of the United States of America represents a towering and unprecedented philosophical achievement. America, born of the Enlightenment, is the first nation founded on the principle that man the individual has a fundamental, inalienable right to his own life, and that government’s responsibility is to protect that right…that the people act by right, while the government acts by permission.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

So opened the document that marked the starting point of the United States of America as a sovereign nation. Above are the most radical words ever written as the foundation for a nation. For the first time in human history, a government was to be the servant of the people, by conscious design and on principle. “The people” were understood to be, not a collective, but a collection of sovereign individuals recognized as possessing unalienable individual rights to his own life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness. America was the triumph of reason, which was understood to be a faculty of every individual. The government would now be charged with the task of—not ruling—but protecting every individual’s freedom to act on his own sovereign, reasoning mind … as a matter of unalienable right.

The birth of America was the culmination of Mankind’s long tortuous philosophical journey that began with Aristotle, and continued through his rebirth via Aquinas, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment. Tribalism was to be swept into the dustbin of history, along with “The Divine Right of Kings” and all manner of omnipotent ruler. Men—meaning all people, average people, the “common man”—would be set free from the forcible domination of other men. Every individual would be free—not by permission of some King, cleric, lord, oligopoly, majority, or tribal chief—but by moral right. Rights don’t come from government, the Founders held. Rights precede government; then “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”—“just powers” being understood to be only those limited powers required to carry out the job of protecting individual rights, not the power to violate rights by redistributing private wealth, regulating our lives, and the like.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence, America’s Founding Fathers, were not conservative in any fundamental sense. They were radicals in the complete and honorable sense: They represented a concept entirely new to mankind. Standing up against the tide of history, with only the winds of the ideas of John Locke and the Enlightenment thinkers at their backs, and reflecting the moral revolution that had taken place in the American mind in the decade prior to 1776, this unique group of intellectuals took action. Indeed, the ideological radicalism of the ideas to which they pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor turned to actual armed rebellion. The rest, as is said, is history.

America’s Founding was flawed in many respects - the failure to eradicate the ancient evil of slavery from American soil until 7 decades after the ratification of the Constitution being the most obvious and most egregious. The anti-slavery forces simply did not have the strength to defeat that vampire at the outset, and so slavery lingered into the young nation. But the moral groundwork had been laid – that all men are created equal – and the fate of the slave states was sealed. 89 years after the signing of the Declaration, America’s Founding ideals caught up with the slave states. Reactionaries have pointed to America’s early history of slavery as proof of its basic depravity—its “Original Sin.” In fact, slavery was a birth defect, inherited from Mankind’s past. In fact, the defeat of slavery represented one of America’s finest hours, and a testament to the formidable power of its ideals. There were other birth defects, most notably the second class status of women. Indeed, those ideals underpinned freedom’s progress in regards to women’s suffrage and property rights, the defeat of Jim Crow segregation laws, the mid-20th Century Civil Rights movement, the end of black voter suppression laws, and marriage equality for gay people.

America’s Founding was the most monumental political achievement in world history. America is currently backsliding from its Founding ideals, heading in the direction of collectivism and statism. But we have the means to reverse that trend, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, which serves as the philosophic blueprint for our Constitution. As Harvey Milk, one of the early leaders in the “Gay Pride” fight for equal rights for gays, said at a 1978 speech,

In the Declaration of Independence it is written 'All men are created equal and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights . . . .' That’s what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence.

Indeed, the words of July 4, 1776 have been written. Ratified on July 4, signed on August 2, the Declaration of Independence will never be erased. But its ideals can be forgotten, twisted, evaded, or ignored. We can not let that happen. The Fourth of July reminds us that the fight for freedom is a philosophical fight—a long term, never-ending fight—fought not on foreign military battlefields but right here at home, on the intellectual battleground of ideas. Freedom can not be won and secured by the sword. It can only be won by the pen. It’s not enough to merely uphold the U.S. Constitution, either in its original form or in its current allegedly “living” form. We must remember and reassert “The Conscience of the Constitution,” as one scholar called the Declaration of Independence. It is indispensable intellectual ammunition for those of us fighting to establish the fully free society that the Founders envisioned and came close to achieving.

Proof of the moral and practical power and viability of individual liberty is written across the brief span of the past 250 years. The ideas of reason, individualism, and capitalism have been unleashed. The philosophical foundation for an American rebirth has been laid by a Twentieth Century philosopher/novelist whom I call America's Last Founding Father—quoted above—and the final route of statism is tantalizingly close—yet still so far.

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

By closing out the Declaration with that pledge, those great men of 1776 declared that they would accept no substitute for the ideals in which they believed. As the world watched, they laid it all on the line—their property, their families, their lives—for those ideals. They would succeed or perish. That utterly uncompromising stand gave us the United States of America. The least we could do in honor of these Founding Fathers is to pledge to recommit to and uphold those principles, to roll back the compromises that are undermining them, and to accept no substitute.

Happy Birthday—and long live—the United States of America.