James Freeman’s July 3 “Best of the Web” column for The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, timed to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, had one job: convert a national holiday into a liberty-frame editorial. The piece is a standard cable-years operation — a fill-the-page column that runs the Founding Fathers as scenery and closes with the standard American-exceptionalism gesture. The mechanics are recognizable to anyone who has worked inside the apparatus. I helped build versions of this for two decades. I am going to walk you through the trick on the page.
A note on the genre before we get to the mechanics. The Fourth of July opinion column is the most reflexive beat in American political writing. Ninety percent of these are muscle memory. The columnist sits down, pulls up the file of approved quotes, and fills the slot. The piece was never going to be an argument. The piece was going to be a feeling. The genre specialists I worked with called these “holiday traffic” — content produced to harvest the predictable spike in patriotic attention, not to move the needle on any specific policy question. The fact that this is muscle memory does not mean the muscle is not doing work. The muscle is the apparatus. The apparatus is the recruitment.
This weekend America celebrates the 250th anniversary of what a foreign admirer once called “the noblest, happiest page in mankind’s history.”
The unnamed-foreign-voice is doing real work here, and Freeman is careful not to name the admirer. The unnamed-foreign-voice is the classic reach for a non-American source — the appeal-to-authority subspecies of appeal to nature/tradition/popularity that George Lakoff and the framing-scholarship tradition have documented as a recurring persuasive form. When the columnist cannot lean on an American source without sounding like a press release, the columnist reaches across the Atlantic. The non-American’s testimony has the felt quality of objectivity — the admirer is not biased toward the country being admired. The trick is older than cable. British Whig writers of the 18th and 19th centuries — the long parade of writers who had to be coaxed into admiring the American experiment because the British ruling class did not want to — supplied a steady stream of quotable phrases for American patriots who did not want to sound like American patriots. The phrase Freeman reaches for is in that lineage, though Freeman does not bother to name the source. The unnamed-foreign-voice is the receipt that confirms the line is generic — the columnist is reaching for a tradition, not citing a source. Same move every July 4th.
In time, the words became even more beautiful as our God-given rights were extended to all Americans. Joyce Lee Malcolm wrote in the Journal on this day in 2007:
Two moves here, both small, both standard. The first is the contested-term-as-descriptive move — “God-given rights” is a contested reading of the Declaration. The text says “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” which is a Deist formulation, not a Christian one. The Constitution is explicitly secular. The “God-given” framing is the 19th-century Protestant gloss that became the liberty-frame default. The second is the long-arc-collapse move — “extended to all Americans” elides nearly two centuries of struggle, from 1776 to 1965, in which “all Americans” was a contested category whose expansion required blood. The technique is frame-engineered relabeling in the sense Frank Luntz documented and Lakoff theorized: take a slow, contested historical process and render it as a single sentence that ends with the Founding. The grammar collapses the story at 1776; the reader who absorbs the grammar absorbs the conclusion.
Now look at the adjacency. Freeman places the Joyce Lee Malcolm citation immediately after the “rights extended to all Americans” line. Malcolm is the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment at George Mason — she is a specialist in gun-rights history, not a general historian of the founding era or of civil-rights expansion. The architecture pastes her gun-rights scholarship onto the abolition-and-suffrage frame. The reader’s brain, primed for the legitimate celebration of civil-rights expansion, absorbs the contemporary Second Amendment agenda as part of that lineage.
The historical record is clear and the suppression is specific. The “rights extended to all Americans” line refers to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, women’s suffrage — the hard-won, blood-paid expansion of personhood and political membership. The individual-rights reading of the Second Amendment was not established in constitutional law until the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 — more than two centuries after the Founding, and articulated in a 5–4 decision that explicitly divided the Court along ideological lines. Joyce Lee Malcolm’s own scholarship, including To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Harvard University Press, 1994), is the work that Heller and McDonald v. Chicago (2010) leaned on most heavily. The doctrine is contemporary; the framing of the doctrine as a civil-rights milestone is the column’s contribution.
There is a deeper history here that the column’s architecture works to suppress, and it is one that the legal-history scholarship — Carl T. Bogus, The Hidden History of the Second Amendment (2018), and Lawrence Rosenthal’s work on the post-Reconstruction period — has documented in detail. The individual-rights reading of the Second Amendment was first articulated not in the Founding era but in the post-Reconstruction period, and some of its earliest scholarly advocates were white Southern jurists who were seeking constitutional grounds to invalidate the very Reconstruction-era gun-control laws that had been specifically designed to disarm the Ku Klux Klan and to protect freed Black Americans from organized paramilitary violence. The doctrinal lineage the column is borrowing — and the doctrine that Heller eventually adopted — has, on this contested reading, roots in opposition to the civil-rights project for Black Americans, not in continuity with it. The contested reading is a defensible scholarly interpretation, and the column’s framing asks the reader to absorb the opposite conclusion.
Of course before he could refuse to seize it, he had to ensure it existed in the first place. On July 2, 1776, as the Continental Congress was voting for independence and working on the Declaration, Gen. Washington was at his New York headquarters, wondering when he would be attacked by numerically superior British forces. Many of them were at that moment landing on Staten Island.
The deniable payload. The column withholds the antecedent of “it.” Read in isolation, the sentence is about the Continental Army’s supply crisis — a matter of logistics, of collective defense against an imperial power. But the surrounding architecture — the Malcolm citation preceding it, the “outgunned patriots” framing, the general-orders context — makes the intended referent unmistakable to the reader who has been primed by the gun-rights frame. The ambiguity is the point: the column can stand as patriotic pageantry to the casual reader while seeding the gun-doctrine payload in the reader who is already inside the frame. The historical record is clear: the Second Amendment as written was a collective militia provision. The Founders’ repeated references to a “well-regulated militia” were references to organized communal defense against empire, not to the solitary armed citizen confronting his own government. The modern individual-rights reading is a doctrinal innovation, not a founding principle. The column’s operation is to use the Founders’ logistical anxiety about arming a continental army to service a partisan agenda that the Founders’ actual constitutional text does not support.
Two days later, with Washington’s position no less precarious, the Continental Congress bravely approved the Declaration of Independence.
The manufactured-urgency pivot. The narrative arc is designed to make the reader feel the existential precariousness of the founding moment, priming them to accept whatever policy conclusion follows as a matter of civilizational survival. The reader is positioned inside the Founders’ vulnerability, and from that position, the column’s implied policy preferences read as necessary rather than partisan. This is the threat-inflation move — the WSJ Catalogue §4.13 and NR Catalogue §4.5 “civilizational frame” deployed at full capacity. The reader is invited to feel the stakes are cosmic so the closer lands.
The military-mythology frame is doing parallel work on the same paragraph. Washington is constructed as a worried, prescient commander; the British as numerically-superior existential threat; the patriots as “outgunned.” The frame is the underdog-victory template, and the underdog-victory template is the column’s actual product — the reader absorbs the saintly-club membership by identifying with the outgunned patriots. The title’s scare-quotes around “Pep Talk” are the visible editorialization. The columnist is treating Washington’s actual military orders as a “pep talk,” which is a slight demotion of the orders from serious-military-document to feel-good material for a July 4th column. The real July 2, 1776 general orders are operational documents — troop deployments, the arrival of General Mercer’s reinforcements, the positioning of the army, the construction of defensive works, the rotation of duty. They also contain the famous passage where Washington told his troops that “the General hopes and trusts, that this great and important event, big with consequences, will, in its operation, render his Troops, by the politeness of their behaviour, the more respectable in the eyes of the Inhabitants.” That morale-building line is the substance Freeman is reaching for when he calls the orders a “pep talk.” The demotion is the move. The orders are scenery; the morale line is the work. The reader walks away with the pat-on-the-back, and the war is never engaged as substance.
Prescient as Washington was, he may have understated the consequences of the American Revolution when he said that the outcome would determine the fate of only Millions.
The civilizational frame of the closing completes the operation by elevating the contemporary reader’s political alignment to the stakes of 1776. The implicit argument is that the heirs of Washington are the very people who share the Opinion page’s current policy preferences, and the enemies are whoever opposes them. This is Carl Schmitt’s friend-and-enemy apparatus, the friend-and-enemy distinction that Schmitt theorized in The Concept of the Political (1932), deployed on a holiday. The reader is told that supporting the modern liberty-frame agenda is the moral equivalent of fighting the British Empire. The architecture is standard-issue: you take the foundational myth, you inflate the threat, and you trap the reader in a binary where dissent is treason. The “fate of only Millions” formulation is a strange minoritization that is actually a kind of inflation — the column is using the minoritization to set up the inflation. The reader is invited to feel that the Revolution’s stakes were the entire human future. The technique is older than the Republic, and it works because it works: the reader who walks away with the stakes cosmic walks away ready to defend them at any cost.
So here is what the four paragraphs actually are, taken together.
An unnamed foreign admirer who can’t be dismissed as a partisan of the country being admired. A “God-given” framing that turns the secular Founding into a religious document. A rights-extension frame onto which a contemporary gun-rights scholar’s name is pasted, with the gun doctrine’s actual twentieth-century origin and its contested post-Reconstruction lineage quietly left out. A military-mythology frame that makes Washington a worried saint and the British an existential threat, with the substance of his actual military orders reduced to a “pep talk” morale line. A deniable payload — the antecedent of “it” left conveniently open — for any reader who has been primed to read the war as a Second Amendment parable. A manufactured-urgency pivot that primes the reader to read the next sentence as a matter of civilizational survival. A closing gesture that inflates the stakes of the Revolution to cosmic dimensions. Four paragraphs, six moves, one standard holiday column.
This is not a calculated psychological operation. This is muscle memory. But muscle memory is the recruitment poster too — the column does not need to be cynical to be doing the work, because the work has been done so many times that the columnist can do it on autopilot. The apparatus does not require a sinister operator. The apparatus requires a sincere one with a deadline.
The clients this serves are not hidden. The contemporary Second Amendment lobby — the NRA and its affiliated 501(c)(4) networks, the donor ecosystem that funds the Federalist Society’s judicial pipeline, the cable-news booking machinery that propagates the liberty-frame talking points on a daily rotation — is the constituency whose doctrinal priorities benefit from a column that frames the individual-rights reading of the Second Amendment as a continuation of the abolitionist and suffrage tradition rather than a contested 21st-century doctrinal innovation. The Media Matters / framing-research literature on Fourth-of-July coverage, and the broader academic work on holiday-themed political content, has consistently documented that patriotic framing is the most reliable entry point for moving Second Amendment messaging to audiences who would resist the same message delivered as policy argument. The cable-years research tradition — Lakoff, Luntz, the Berry & Sobieraj Outrage Industry line of work, the framing-effects literature more broadly — supplied the apparatus for that finding long before anyone needed to test it.
Apply the columnist’s own test. The Founders’ words were “beautiful.” The Founders’ rights were “God-given.” The Founders’ struggle was the hinge of history. Apply the same test to the policies the columnist’s page endorses. If the test works both ways — if the policies that followed the Revolution get the same benefit of the Founders’ prestige — the test was a real test. If the test only works when the conclusion is the liberty-frame conclusion, the test was a pep talk.
The product is theft. The altar is the republic’s birthday. And the operators who built this apparatus are still pulling the same scam they were pulling in the cable years, because the scam works, the client pays, and the reader — drunk on patriotism, on a long weekend, with the grill already going — keeps falling for it.
— Phukher Tarlson