Senator: The Founders Were Same as Ayatollahs? UPDATE: Americans Disagree

Senator Tim Kaine may seem like a nobody–he is so relatively anonymous that Saturday Night Live spoofed him right before the election as forgettable. But if you can remember all the way back to 2016, you might remember that he came close to becoming the Vice President of the United States. 

Yes, that was a long time ago–back when Hillary Clinton was somebody, sort of. But it’s true. The Democrats put this man on the ticket because he was seen as a moderate who could appeal to middle America. 

Moderates no longer exist in the ranks of the Democratic Party elites. Being at or near the top of the pile means rejecting basic American values. 

This is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen from a Senator.

Tim Kaine apparently just discovered the idea of inalienable rights and thinks the defining principle of the Declaration of Independence is “extremely troubling”. https://t.co/k1im7y8cF6

— AG (@AGHamilton29) September 4, 2025

Kaine made his remarkable performance in which he rejected the founding principle of the United States, as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was chastising Riley Barnes, a Trump administration appointee to the State Department. 

Kaine’s performance–that smug lecturing tone comparing the Declaration of Independence to Sharia law–is emblematic of the fundamental principle of the left: the rejection of God’s will and replacement of it with a very human will-to-power. 

To be fair, the author of the Declaration did indeed own a Koran. It was used by Keith Ellison for his swearing-in ceremony when he became a congressman. But I am pretty sure that when he wrote the Declaration, he was not referring to Sharia law:

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 of 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. 

A lot of people will see the “gotcha” element in this exchange. Tim Kaine appears to be making a gaffe, and it looks stupid. 

But if seen in that way, the bigger point is missed. Tim Kaine and Democrats really DO find the idea that God, or as Jefferson put it “Nature and Nature’s God,” creates a standard higher than that of man’s will very troubling. To accept that idea is to destroy the fundamental principle upon which leftism is based: reality is what we say it is. 

Alphabet ideology falls. Critical Theory evaporates. Marxist theory goes out the window. 

God and nature must be discredited, or reality reasserts itself. Men are men and women are women. 

That cannot be. 

They don’t even have to go back that far, but they should. pic.twitter.com/1G5wyZdHBc

— Official Leftist Translator. – AKA Tony (@tony4mrht) September 3, 2025

So when Tim Kaine says he finds the founding principle of the United States, upon which our entire system of government rests, “troubling,” he is committing a “Kinsley gaffe”– saying what he believes out loud to his embarrassment. 

Democrats, when they speak of God, are performing (to be fair, that is true of many politicians). Catholicism, to Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, means celebrating abortion and gender transitions, which is to say that Catholicism means what THEY say it is–Man is the ultimate authority. 

The Declaration does not impose a stringent theology–it merely asserts that the Rights of Man are prior to those of the state because human beings are created free. We have Natural Rights that precede government, and the government exists to protect those rights, not dispense whatever rights the rulers want. Our right to free speech, or self-defense, or to govern ourselves, derives from our basic human nature. 

Kaine and the Democrats don’t believe that. We know that not only because Kaine says so–saying so was a “gaffe”– but because they govern that way. They do not believe in a higher truth. They find the idea offensive, or as Kaine says, “troubling.” 

The essential argument in the contemporary West can be boiled down to the principles of the American Revolution versus those of the French Revolution. Both made claims about the nature of man and government, and those claims were fundamentally at odds. The American Revolution was built on the concept that government exists to help men realize their essential nature as free beings; the French Revolution was about wiping away all that came before, including religion, and replacing all with Will. 

1789 became year zero–literally, they rewrote the calendar to erase history–and dismantled the Church. They asserted that rights are granted by men and could be taken away by them–hence the Terror. They wrote a very pretty “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” and suspended it immediately because they could. 

Tim Kaine and the left are committed to the latter vision–out of which modern totalitarianism derives. It is the scariest and most murderous ideology the world has ever seen. 

UPDATE: Scott Rasmussen just sent me the results of a poll he recently did on this issue:

🚨78% of voters say people have “natural rights” that cannot legitimately be taken away by any government.
✅Just 15% disagree and say Individual rights and freedoms come from the government@NapolitanNews survey of 1,000 RV conducted by @ScottWRasmussen June 17-18, 2024 https://t.co/Z8x4Tk4KGj

— Scott Rasmussen (@ScottWRasmussen) September 4, 2025

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