Hey y'all, this is Amanda, coming to you with a special short edition of We Can Do Hard Things,

all about doing the hard thing of remembering what Independence Day is about.

250 years into the American experiment, let us be very, very clear about what Independence Day is and what it is not.

It is sure as shit not about declaring yourself a loyal subject.

It is about declaring your right to self-determination. It is about the collective power of

resistance to authoritarian rule. It is about overthrowing a tyrant to preserve

liberty. The Declaration of Independence was then and is today not a symbol of loyalty, but the best

breakup letter ever written.

July 4th was a bold, dangerous, defiant moral action by a people who were so heartbroken and enraged by abuses of power that they became ungovernable.

It was don't tread on me. It was, we will ask you not to tread. We will beseech you

not to tread. And when you do not hear us, when your lust of unchecked power stands between

us and our innate right to life, liberty, and the pursuit

of happiness, we will stop asking for our rights and instead exercise our right, end duty,

to remove your boot from our neck. In the Declaration, would-be American said that legitimate political authority is derived

not by edict of those in power, but only by the consent of the governed, that there is

an implied social contract between the government and the governed, and when in the course

of human events the abuses against the people's liberty

become intolerable, that contract is broken. That's what Patriots did. They listed the abuses

of power that broke the social contract. They withdrew their consent to be governed by a tyrant,

and they declared that they would instead govern themselves.

Don't tread on me was real then, and it's real now. Like our patriot forebears, we are living

through taxation without representation, obstruction of self-governance, the arbitrary use of power,

...