What Is El-Sayed Trying to Say About Our Rights in This X Post?
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
Abdul El-Sayed's post is one of those things that sounds nice until you actually think about what it means in practice. Calling healthcare, housing, food, and education "rights" polls well, but rights that require someone else's paycheck to fund them aren't rights in any sense the Founders would recognize. A right is something the government can't take from you.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Democrats have an odd definition of rights. The things they like — usually things that require massive government spending and control — are "rights." This is why they say healthcare, education, housing, and food are "rights." Meanwhile, our actual rights are constantly under attack.
Democrats want to abolish the Second Amendment, and they wage war on the First. Whether it's colluding with social media companies to censor critics of the COVID response or unconstitutional anti-Catholic laws targeting the confessional in Washington state or Arizona, or dragging nuns through court to force them to use trans pronouns or pay for birth control.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Abdul El-Sayed's post is one of those things that sounds nice until you actually think about what it means in practice. Calling healthcare, housing, food, and education "rights" polls well, but rights that require someone else's paycheck to fund them aren't rights in any sense the Founders would recognize. A right is something the government can't take from you. What El-Sayed is describing is a government service, delivered by force through taxation, administered by the same bureaucracies that already run the DMV and the VA. That's not liberty. That's a subscription plan with a mandatory sign-up.
Meanwhile the rights that actually appear in the Constitution keep getting treated like inconveniences. Washington state and Arizona have pushed laws aimed squarely at the seal of confession, telling priests they must report what they hear from a penitent or face jail. Nuns have been dragged into federal court and told to pay for birth control coverage against their faith, or use pronouns that violate their beliefs, all under the banner of "equality." Add in the well-documented collusion between federal agencies and social media platforms to flag and suppress dissenting COVID commentary, and you have a pattern, not a coincidence.
The trick here is definitional. If you can redefine "rights" to mean "things the government provides," you can also redefine them to exclude the ones that actually restrain government power. That's the game. El-Sayed isn't confused about rights. He's trying to move the goalposts so the conversation is never about the First or Second Amendment again, only about what new entitlement Washington can dangle next.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.