[upbeat music] Exactly 250 years ago, a bunch of white slave owners gathered here in Colonial Williamsburg, and in a bunch of other colonies that all allowed slavery, crossed their fingers behind their backs, and wrote and rewrote the following, and with a straight face,
"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, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
Some of the cosigners of the Declaration of Independence, like John Adams, were anti-slavery from the jump.
Others, like Benjamin Franklin, followed up this historically righteous group project by eventually turning against the trade that they had benefited from their entire lives.
But some of them, like Thomas Jefferson, who in his original draft of the declaration called the slave trade, "A cruel war against human nature," in fact kept over 600 very well-documented slaves, including his own mistress, Sally Hemings, and all the children that they had together.
The hypocrisy was evident even then.
Biographer Walter Isaacson wrote in his delightful new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, "Shortly after the declaration was signed, the English abolitionist Thomas Day wrote, 'If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.'"
We learned from that, right?
Anyways, despite this tough but fair TripAdvisor review, the Declaration of Independence would not be the last time Americans used a rhetorical flourish and organized religion to cover for their actual sins, when it was required, of course.
Because if there's any standard we've perfected over the past 250 years, it's that masks are optional.
In 1848, though, 72 years after the declaration was signed, lawyer, former New York governor, future senator, future secretary of state, and dedicated abolitionist William H. Seward had enough. He found an opportunity.
Holed up in a Massachusetts motel with the tall drink of water that was the young Abraham Lincoln, Seward gave it to the future emancipator, and his future boss, straight.
He said, "The time has come for sharp definitions of opinion and boldness of utterance." Lincoln got the message, and because Lincoln got the message, the South eventually got the message, too.
But it took a while, and it took hundreds and hundreds of thousands of American lives, and terrible racist, sexist, misogynist, greedy hypocrites never, ever gave up.
Because in 1976, the Catholic Church and its spinoff, the National Right to Life Committee, would co-opt the words of Scottish educator A.S.
Neill, intentionally perverting his original use of pro-life in truly one of the greatest marketing coups of all time, eventually building a massive tent of evangelists and fucking Ronald Reagan and others who in the years prior, frankly, couldn't have given two shits about abortion.
So pro-life, a label that became almost impossible to argue with, changed the world, and for the worse. And here's why. Because if we cannot agree on what it means to save a life, we can't agree on anything.
So today, we're gonna go ahead and take it back, and we are bringing receipts. I'm pleased to reintroduce our research platform, our why, and we're calling it Actually Pro-Life. I'm gonna catch you up on how we got here.
Over the past year, as a gap was opened up beneath all of us and the imperfect institutions meant to protect us, and as we, society, were pushed into that gap, tearing each other to pieces as we fell, unable to agree on almost anything, as the important news of the day moved faster than anyone could reasonably keep up with, which was often the point,
I stopped writing, frankly,
and I stepped back eventually to look at all of our work and our research and our sources and our interviews and our recommendations to try and understand how again we got here and what, if anything, united it all so we can move forward.
And look, this entire project was born out of the 2018 IPCC climate reports and the California fires and the March for Our Lives protests and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and Yellow Vest protests in France, an Ebola outbreak in the DRC, and China's president making himself president for life, and Greta Thunberg's First Fridays for Future protests, and of course, the first Trump administration.
But it was because we were getting that news from Facebook, if we got it at all.
Things were not great, but also full of opportunity, and I wanted to provide a detour, an antidote, by grounding a news roundup email and analysis in the most reputable journalism I could afford, by asking deeper questions about all the topics of the most reputable experts who would actually answer my calls, and eventually,
to base our team's recommended actions on a set of underlying obvious ethics and morals we never put a name on, but felt deep inside of us nonetheless.
Like Justice Potter Stewart squinting at hardcore pornography, even I, someone who barely graduated as an atheist liberal arts major 1,000 years ago,
knew what was important morally and not important when I saw it, because they're morals. It's basic human decency.
But cut to last year, and I'm asking, "What good now is human decency down in this very dark gap, where we've each been made to feel alone, even if we are all actually together?"
We needed real common ground to stand on if we were ever gonna climb back out, if we're ever gonna be neighbors again, even.We have to believe, and yes, have faith that there are more of us out there who hold at the very least the same fundamental principles we do, and who will collectively hold us up as we try to crawl back out and fight back and go on offense.
So I realized I needed not only to organize all the connective tissue of our work and turn it into scaffolding of everything we chose to cover for all these years to go deeper on and to recommend you take action on.
And it took hundreds of hours over the past year, truly, to piece it all together, to identify gaps and connections where maybe I didn't even see them before that were relevant now.
But I realized I also needed to put a name on it for the first time, to clarify the complexity of actions required to unfuck the world, to unite those of us that give a shit under a single banner, to say boldly and clearly what we all give a shit about, table stakes, no matter what else we might disagree on.
It is time again for sharp differences of opinion and bold utterance. It's time to say the quiet part out loud for the first time again, whatever.
It's time to go back on offense and attack bad guys and hypocrites where they live.
So I chose Actually Pro-Life, not simply out of spite for actual baby and women and minority killers, and obviously organized religion has excelled at all these for centuries. And not only because the term pro-choice
was always going to be reactionary and has basically failed, but also because when you use it correctly, literally, Actually Pro-Life is not only intentionally provocative, but actually measurable.
And if you require it, it's actually deliberative, even if only for a moment.
Because look, what other weird shit you're into, all of which I totally respect, these things are either your core beliefs like mine, whether or not, and you all have told us that you need help finding a shared basic identity, right?
What unites those of us who give a shit at the most fundamental, inalienable level, however you find us, and to go back on offense, to hit back. And for us, and maybe you, it starts with an inarguable foundation.
And this was popularized, fortunately, unfortunately, I don't know, by the late Paul Farmer, a man I never got to meet, who's been a model for all of my work here the past few years. And it's pretty simple.
No life is worth more than another. That's our foundation. But so we're not hypocrites. How do we guarantee every life is served equitably? We developed eight principles.
None of these are new, but saying that they're what we'll fight for are.
So we hold that every person actually deserves a home, clean water, clean air, healthy food, quality healthcare, quality education, safety, and equal standing. These are our principles. They're non-negotiables.
You can take them all and join us, or you can get the fuck out, honestly. We believe your identity is what your core principles are, and even more so, what you'll do to defend and advance them.
Because how you defend them matters too. So we've got some guardrails. One, evidence matters more than opinion. Wow. Two, profit should never come before people.
Three, the vulnerable deserve protection, not exploitation. Four, innovation should serve humanity, not replace it. And the last two are we owe the future as much as we owe the present,
and cruelty for profit is never justified.
So these are built into every action we recommend in our app and in our newsletters and our essays and our podcasts, and they always have, but now we're really, we are codifying these.
But listen, if you take these as yours too, beware. Again, no hypocrites allowed. We're not doing it. I said we're bringing receipts.
And so what that means is we're measuring not only our progress, but your commitment and through what we're calling positions. So not goals, positions. A position is I'm going to take this position. It's real world.
It's going to be this or that. It's a line in the sand. Show evidence. Thomas Jefferson could never. So actually pro-life includes for now 160 plus positions.
These are measurable outcomes like one, replace all lead pipes.
Two, childcare costs capped at 7% of income, hot meals in SNAP, end felony disenfranchisement, no Medicaid work requirements, restore and expand PEPFAR and universal perinatal mental health screening and treatment.
We didn't just choose any metrics for these. We didn't make them up ourselves. Every single one of these positions has to answer to one, is it measurable? Two, is there evidence it actually works?
Three, does it flow down from those eight principles? And four, of course, can we track progress? And that's a complicated one, but we're doing our best.
There's 153 more of these positions to start with and to choose from. And since every action in our database is matched to at least one position now,
and each position matched to a massive reorganization of our hard-earned research and metrics, you can actually tell what you're working on when you choose an action.
You can tell what we're all aiming for and you can try it out starting this week through the app. What can I do?
There's a little piece in there you can see on each action card says your position and there's much, much more to come. To be petty again, to evangelize for a moment.
I like to think of actually pro-life as our soul and what can I do as our body, right? It's the instrument and everything else we make and that we publish and everyone we work with, you are our voice.
It's a collection of voices, an increasingly wider, more diverse set of people and interests and messages who are fucking done, right? Who can all trace their why back to a single statement.
No life is worth more than another. And frankly, a set of principles that are either one, definitely for you or two, definitely not for you.
If it's two or if it's too deliberative, we're not clear, then this is probably not the place for you. As one happy customer said a few years ago, and I couldn't stand by this more, we are extraordinarily biased.
On the other hand, if you read these words and say, yeah, that's me, obviously, whether you've even had to think about it before, much less fight for these things. If this is for you, saddle the fuck up
because we're not just reclaiming this iconic phrase. My goal is for it to be a genuine reframe.
From now on, actually pro-life means contributing to actions and policies that measurably improve and protect lives all over the world. But it's going to take all of us, or at least all of us that aren't asshats.
If you're not on board, good luck. We'll see you out there. But for everyone else who's still here, still listening, still watching, we've got much more to come on all this, so much. But for now, thank you for listening.
Thank you for giving a shit. And remember, no matter what, it's together or nothing.