Hey you, yeah, you.

What gives you the right to make your own choices?

No, seriously, what gives you the right?

I want to try to answer that question today because it's a question that is newly

live in our public discourse.

Your right to make your own choices is under threat.

Our president effectively said that when he announced his vaccine mandate.

This is not about personal liberty, not about personal freedom.

And we've kind of lost the thread a little bit when it comes to this great western tradition,

this idea that you have the right to choose for yourself, to rule yourself to self-govern,

and that people together in groups and especially in nations have the right to self-govern,

to elect their own representatives and to govern themselves locally and so far as possible.

All of these things are deeply, deeply rooted in a long history of western thought.

And because we've lost our grasp on that history, we've kind of lost our grasp on the very idea

that we should be free. People sometimes talk about this as if it only ever came into being,

like magically during the Protestant Reformation or during the Enlightenment, right?

Liberalism suddenly occurred and then people suddenly had the idea that, oh,

maybe people should be allowed to choose for themselves.

And it's true that this idea developed over time, but it's not true at all that it's some kind

of like bolt from the blue that only occurred like at the founding of America or, you know,

when Luther nailed his D.C.'s to the door.

In fact, it's one of the oldest and deepest developments in western thought,

...