Recently, Jay Cost wrote that “The Declaration of Independence was more radical than any of the men who signed it.” Once you understand that important point, you can give more credit to the document than it currently receives on most college campuses.

The standard line is this: Thomas Jefferson wrote that all people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” but he was a slave owner. There is a significant disconnect between his words and his deeds.

Jay Cost (author of the new book The Price of Greatness) argues that the Declaration set in motion the means to remove all governmental privilege. Over time, the Declaration was used to eliminate “property restrictions for voting, then abolition, women’s suffrage, and voting rights of African Americans — the justification for each of these revolutions was grounded in the philosophy of the Declaration.”

Now to be fair to Thomas Jefferson, he actually wrote in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence that the King “waged cruel war against human nature itself” against “a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” Those words were rejected by representatives from the southern colonies.

Jefferson also expressed his opinion that slavery was a “hideous blot” and that it constituted “moral depravity.” He also led an effort in the Virginia legislature to ban the slave trade. Later he proposed a program of slave emancipation and even urged federal legislation that would have banned slavery in the territories.

None of that is to defend Jefferson, but at least provide some context that is often missing in both academic and popular discussions of Jefferson and the Declaration. The document may not have banned slavery, but it did provide the foundation for the changes we enjoy today.

As we approach the November midterm elections, it is worth mentioning once again the need for states and local jurisdictions to clean up their voter rolls. The recent special election in Ohio was yet another reminder of the fact that there is still lots of work to be done.

The race between Republican Troy Balderson and Democrat Danny O’Connor ended up being very close. That means that counting of absentee ballots and provisional ballots will be important and could make the difference.

Close elections like this illustrate the need for accurate voter rolls and the need for voter ID. One expert with the Government Accountability Institute reports that there were 170 registered voters in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District that were listed as being over 116 years old.” In case you are wondering, the world’s oldest living person is a 115-year-old resident of Japan.

You would think that fact alone would be reason enough to start cleaning up the voter rolls and to implement voter ID. But just look at the responses on Twitter when Shannon Bream of Fox News posted her tweet about “170 Voters in Ohio Race Over 116 Years Old.” Or look at the responses when talk show host Kevin McCullough posted that this was an argument for voter ID.

The responses range from claims that voter ID is racist and elitist to those who point to voter fraud that led to the election of Donald Trump. That one got me. On the one hand, they believe that Russian tampering led to the illegitimate election of the president, but also believe that there is no possibility that election fraud could occur in the recent congressional special election.

One report estimates that there are 248 counties in this country that have more names on their voter rolls than the total number of people of voting age in those counties. That is too much opportunity for mischief. It is time to clean the voter rolls.

What started out as a slogan and a bumper sticker has essentially become a platform of one political party. I am talking about the call to “Abolish ICE.” ICE stands for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

In some respects, the call to abolish ICE is not new. Fifteen years ago, you could find some activists calling for the dismantling of ICE because they perceived that the agency violated civil rights. But the call to abolish ICE has new energy because some Democrats are trying to move the party further to the left.

By the way, we aren’t just talking about self-described socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Many Democrats who will be running for the presidency in two years also call for the abolishing of ICE. That is why it is likely that this idea will make its way into the Democratic platform.

Republican candidates around the country have seized on this political slogan in order to paint their Democratic opponents as extreme. And it is likely that the “Abolish ICE” slogan may indeed hurt some of those candidates in the midterm elections, especially when some in the Democratic Party compare immigration officials to the Nazi secret police.

But Republicans might also want to be prepared to answer some important questions. If you think the idea of abolishing ICE is such a bad idea, why have so many Republican candidates called for the abolition of the IRS as well as the abolition of the departments of Energy, Education, and Commerce? I think there are good answers to such questions, but they better be prepared if they want to ridicule the idea of abolishing ICE.

Democrats in the House and Senate are preparing how they would go about abolishing ICE once they flip the House and Senate to Democratic control. Of course, this presupposes that Democrats take both the House and Senate. But first, we will need to see if this slogan helps them take control of Congress. It’s possible that this slogan will cause them to lose elections.

Addiction is hard to escape. Whether we are talking about drugs and alcohol, or gambling, or a variety of other addictions. Dennis Prager says one of the hardest addictions to escape is the addiction of getting something for nothing.

The addiction he is talking about is the entitlement addiction. He reminds us that we have lots of examples of people voluntarily giving up drugs, alcohol, or gambling. We don’t have many examples of people giving up their addiction to entitlements.

They are alluring. Giving up cash payments for food stamps, subsidized housing, and free or subsidized health insurance is very hard to do. Liberal politicians know this and thereby enable the behavior by making it relatively easy to obtain and fairly hard to quit. Often the withdrawal symptoms are too much to handle.

Dennis Prager says that is another reason that entitlements addictions are hard to break. It is unique among addictions. Very few drug and alcohol addicts believe they are owed drugs. “Entitlement addicts, on the other hand, believe that society owes them every entitlement they receive—and often more.”

If you think about it, the word “entitlement” sends a message that you have a right to a particular government benefit. So there is a moral component involved in this particular addition. I might mention that many of the callers to my radio program hate that Social Security and Medicare are called entitlements because they rightly point out that they paid into the system.

Entitlement addiction is also hurting the country. The financial cost is significant. The amount spent on entitlements in the last 50 years ($22 trillion) is nearly equal to the US national debt (almost $20 trillion). And the social cost of putting many generations in a position of dependency on the government will have long-lasting effects. This is why it will be hard to break the entitlement addiction.

America is turning more into a secular society. But this post-Christian nation has not turned into a kinder, more tolerant place to live.

Peter Beinart, writing in The Atlantic, reminds us that a vast majority of Americans still believe in God, but they are fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The percentage of people with no religious affiliation jumped from 6 percent in 1992 to 22 percent in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure is 35 percent.

Many secular people would have predicted that this trend would end the culture wars and lead to greater harmony in society. Just the opposite has happened. “Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal.”

Non-church goers have adopted a bleak view of America, more so than their churchgoing peers. He wonders “Has the absence of church made their lives worse? Or are people with troubled lives more likely to stop attending services in the first place? Establishing causation is difficult, but we know that culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful.”

I think you could make the case that without the peaceful influence of the Christian faith, Americans gravitate to a darker view of the country and of other citizens. Trust and civility decline while anger and animosity increase.

We should not be surprised that as many Americans leave the church and organized religion that the conflicts in society are intensifying rather than diminishing.

If you have seen any of the videos posted showing leftist mobs confronting conservative leaders, you know that we may be just one wrong move away from mob violence. The most recent video posted involved Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens (Turning Point USA). They were eating breakfast in a Philadelphia café and were verbally assaulted with whistles and bullhorns pushed into their faces. Water was thrown on Kirk, and Owens had to tell one woman with a bullhorn to get out of her face.

I have said on my radio program that the slightest move or gesture could become misinterpreted and violence could erupt. Sometimes the perpetrators even seem to be trying to provoke a physical reaction. When Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi attended a movie with her male companion, they taunted him by saying things like “what are you going to do about it?” They seemed to be looking for an excuse to retaliate if he chose to defend her.

In a recent commentary, Brandon Morse raises the same concerns I have been voicing. He says that if he was with a colleague, he might not react but merely put his hands up to show he would not retaliate. But what if he was with a mother or girlfriend? What if a small child was with him?

He acknowledges that it is easy to ponder these questions while sitting in your office behind a keyboard. But change that to a time when adrenaline is pumping through your system and your heart is pounding in your ears. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how incidents could ratchet up into violent territory very easily.

One more point. The leftist mob threw water on Charlie Kirk. But until it hit him and he could feel it, how did he know it wasn’t acid or some other liquid? No one was arrested. What’s to keep another leftist mob from raising the stakes? The bottom line is this: people are going to get hurt unless law enforcement begins to provide some deterrence against leftist mobs.

We are in the midst of a battle over socialism. This isn’t an academic debate about socialism. It isn’t even a discussion about the impact of socialism on Venezuela. The battle over socialism is taking place in the mid-term campaigns led in part by self-proclaimed socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Two of the key talking points have been free college tuition and “Medicare for All.” These are not just fringe topics only discussed by a few radical leftists but are becoming mainstream in the Democrat Party. Now let me hasten to add, that not all Democrats embrace these ideas. But most of the Democrats who will be running as presidential candidates in less than two years do propose such ideas.

Voters need to be asking these candidates some important questions. Do we really want more government involvement in healthcare? Do we really think we can force doctors and hospitals to accept Medicare-level payments, which are about 40 percent lower than what is paid by private insurers?

Perhaps the most important question is cost. One recent study found that “Medicare for All” would increase federal spending by more than $32 trillion during the first ten years. By the way, total federal spending during that same period is projected to be about $56 trillion. So a good question for these candidates might be How can we afford an additional $32 trillion?

Rarely are such questions asked. But when they are asked of candidates, you get suggestions like raising the corporate income tax, cutting defense spending, and implementing a carbon tax. Then another question comes to mind: Won’t that completely destroy our growing economy and crush manufacturing and other industries?

This election and the next will be awash in socialist slogans about free tuition and free health care. Responsible voters need to ask these candidates some important questions.

Michael Barone asks a troubling question: “Why is it considered liberal to compel others to say or fund things they don’t believe?” He raises this question in light of the three Supreme Court cases that struck down compelled speech but in two cases by the narrowest of margins.

He wonders why liberals on the court and progressives in society aren’t disturbed by attempts to compel speech. In the past, liberal justices like Oliver Wendell Holmes supported free speech and freedom of association. Today liberal Supreme Court justices “don’t see a constitutional problem with compelling crisis pregnancy centers to send messages they find repugnant . . . or forcing people to participate in ceremonies prohibited by their religion.”

David French is concerned that liberals don’t understand why conscience is so important to Christians. He mentions two articles that lament the fact that Catholic hospitals have restrictions because they hold to Catholic doctrine. He has said this before in other contexts. The secular society essentially says, we appreciate you feeding, housing, and caring for the poor but you must do it by advancing the worldview we prefer. If you don’t, we will “pass laws that violate your conscience. We’ll call you bigots and misogynists when you resist.”

He uses an analogy to illustrate how liberals and progressives misunderstand religious faith. He says, “it’s almost like some folks believe a religious worldview is like a Jenga tower — you can pull out a few planks without causing the whole edifice to collapse.” For critics of religion, they see any religious belief based on conscience as disposable if it contradicts the current politically correct view in society.

These narrow Supreme Court rulings as well as articles complaining about Catholic hospitals that hold to Catholic doctrine illustrate why it is so important that the right judges and justices are nominated and confirmed to the federal courts.