On This Day: July 3, 1776 — The day after Congress adopted Richard Henry Lee’s resolution declaring the colonies free and independent, John Adams sat down and wrote his wife Abigail one of the most quietly confident letters of his life. He was certain history had just turned. “The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America,” he wrote, predicting it would be celebrated by future generations “with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.” Adams was off by two days. Congress would spend one more day revising Jefferson’s draft before formally adopting the Declaration on July 4, and it is that date, not the second, that Americans have marked ever since. But Adams’s instinct was exactly right. He understood, before the ink was even dry, that what Congress had done was not a temporary political maneuver. It was a founding act, meant to be renewed and defended by every generation that followed.
Two hundred and fifty years later, with Adams’s predicted “illuminations” just a day away, that renewal is being tested again, not by a king’s army but by ballots and ideas. This week brought a democratic socialist’s landslide primary win in Denver, part of a wave of similar victories rippling through the Democratic Party nationwide, and a direct challenge to the premises Adams and his colleagues built the country on. He could not have known the specific shape the test would take. He would have recognized instantly that a test was exactly what it was.
Welcome to Original Intent. If this hits home, pass it on. Freedom is preserved one informed friend at a time.
🌡️ Dangerous Heat Wave Grips More Than Two Dozen States Heading Into Independence Day
A punishing heat wave is settling over the Midwest, South, and East Coast just as millions of Americans hit the road for the Fourth of July weekend, with forecasters warning of heat indexes topping 110 degrees in cities from Philadelphia to Nashville. New York City’s Central Park hit 100 degrees on Thursday, its first triple-digit day since 2012, while the heat index there reached 106. Amtrak canceled more than a dozen Northeast trains because of the heat, and the National Weather Service extended extreme heat warnings across the region through the holiday itself.
The heat has already proven deadly on a national scale in recent years. At least 13,000 Americans have died from heat-related causes since 2018, according to CDC data, making extreme heat the country’s deadliest weather hazard, ahead of hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul both urged residents to conserve electricity by raising thermostats to the mid-70s as grid demand spikes, and cities across the affected region have opened cooling centers ahead of what forecasters expect to be the hottest stretch of the summer so far.
Notice who is actually managing this emergency. It is mayors, governors, and local emergency management offices opening cooling centers and asking residents to conserve power, not a directive issued from Washington. That is federalism working exactly as the Founders intended it, with the people closest to a problem holding the authority and responsibility to address it. It is also worth remembering, as a heat-strained grid strains further still, that an energy policy built on abundance rather than artificial scarcity is not an abstraction on a day like this. It is the difference between air conditioning that works and a rolling blackout in 110-degree heat.
💰 Trump’s Financial Disclosure Reveals $1.2 Billion in Crypto Earnings, Fueling Praise and Scrutiny Alike
President Trump’s annual financial disclosure, a sprawling 927-page filing released this week, showed more than $1.2 billion in income tied to cryptocurrency ventures in 2025, driven largely by royalties from the $TRUMP memecoin and the family-founded World Liberty Financial platform. By comparison, Vice President Vance’s disclosure ran 17 pages. The figures pushed Trump’s total reported income for the year past $2 billion, according to a CNBC analysis, a dramatic jump from the roughly $622 million he reported the year before returning to office.
The disclosure lands alongside less flattering numbers for everyday investors. Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis found that roughly 764,000 wallets holding the $TRUMP memecoin are currently sitting on losses, even as a small number of large holders profited enormously. Asked about the figures, Trump told reporters that outside funds manage his money and that he does not personally direct the investments, while a White House spokesperson insisted neither the president nor his family has ever engaged in a conflict of interest. Trump also credited his broader financial success to what he called a strong market under his own economic policies.
Conservatives have every reason to value what actually happened here: full, voluntary, itemized public disclosure, filed with the Office of Government Ethics for anyone to examine. That kind of sunlight, not a new layer of federal restriction on what private citizens may invest in or license, is the proper check envisioned by a constitutional system that relies on transparency and public accountability rather than bureaucratic pre-approval of a president’s business dealings. That said, principled skepticism of concentrated financial power sitting this close to the presidency is a conservative instinct too, and nothing about disclosing a conflict resolves it. The right response to both concerns is the same one: keep the records public and let voters, not regulators, weigh what they see.
🙏 American Rescue Teams Help Pull Venezuelan Survivor From Rubble Eight Days After Devastating Quakes
A 43-year-old security guard was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed shopping center in La Guaira, Venezuela, on Thursday, eight days after twin earthquakes devastated the country, in what rescuers called a near-miraculous operation. Hernán Alberto Gil Flores survived by sheltering in a concrete security booth as the nine-story building above him collapsed, and rescue crews spent more than 100 hours tunneling through unstable debris, torrential rain, and repeated aftershocks to reach him.
The rescue drew on an international coalition of rescue teams from Venezuela, Chile, the United States, Portugal, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Mexico, working around the clock in three-day shifts to keep Gil Flores hydrated and stable while they cleared a path to him. More than 300 American search-and-rescue personnel and 23 canine teams remain on the ground in Venezuela, part of a $150 million U.S. humanitarian aid commitment following earthquakes that killed more than 2,200 people and injured over 11,000 more.
George Washington’s Farewell Address warned the young republic against permanent political alliances and entanglements that would drag America into other nations’ quarrels. It never counseled indifference to human suffering. A free and generous people extending voluntary aid to a neighbor in crisis, without ceding an inch of sovereignty or entangling the nation in Venezuela’s internal politics, is precisely the posture the Founders would recognize as consistent with both prudence and charity. The rescue of one man under 140 tons of concrete is a small story in the scope of a national disaster, but it is the kind of story that reminds a free people why generosity and self-government were never meant to be in tension.
Sponsored by: The Tuttle Twins
We’ve trusted the Tuttle Twins books in our own home for years and we’re excited to share them with our readers.
These books teach timeless values like freedom, responsibility, entrepreneurship, and critical thinking in a way kids actually enjoy. If you want resources that help raise informed, confident, liberty-minded children, we wholeheartedly recommend the Tuttle Twins series.
📊 Polling Snapshot: Three Senate Races to Watch
- Georgia Senate (Ossoff vs. Collins): Ossoff (D) 45.0% | Collins (R) 42.2% — Senator Jon Ossoff holds a 2.8-point edge in a race RealClearPolling still rates a Toss Up, an uncomfortably close margin for Republicans in a state Trump carried twice (RealClearPolling)
- Iowa Senate (Turek vs. Hinson): Turek (D) 46.7% | Hinson (R) 46.7% — a dead-even tie in a state Republicans have carried comfortably in recent cycles, with RealClearPolling rating the race a Toss Up (RealClearPolling)
- Ohio Special Election (Husted vs. Brown): Brown (D) 47.8% | Husted (R) 47.2% — former Senator Sherrod Brown clings to a narrow 0.6-point lead over appointed incumbent Jon Husted in a race RealClearPolling also rates a Toss Up (RealClearPolling)
🚩 Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros Stuns 15-Term Incumbent in Colorado, Extending a National Left-Wing Wave
Twenty-nine-year-old Melat Kiros, a self-identified democratic socialist and first-time candidate, defeated 15-term Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette in the primary for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District, a seat Denver Democrats have held for more than half a century. Kiros, a former corporate attorney turned barista who was fired from her law firm job in 2023 for writing a letter defending campus protests, entered the race with just 7 percent support in an early poll. As of Wednesday, with more than 153,000 votes counted, her lead had grown past 13 points, and she is heavily favored to become the first self-described socialist elected to Congress from Colorado.
Kiros’s campaign relied on the Denver chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, along with national backing from Justice Democrats and an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders, and volunteers said they knocked on more than 115,000 doors in the campaign’s final weeks. Her win follows a similar wave of DSA-aligned primary victories in New York, and Senator Michael Bennet, who lost his own bid for Colorado governor this cycle, warned during the campaign that younger voters simply “don’t believe” the major parties are standing for them anymore, citing an affordability crisis that has fueled support for more radical alternatives. A 2025 Colorado Polling Institute survey found that two-thirds of Denver Democrats under 35 hold a favorable view of socialism outright.
Whatever affordability pressures are driving this discontent, and they are real, the Founders left no ambiguity about how they viewed the alternative on offer. Samuel Adams put it plainly in 1776: “The Utopian schemes of leveling, and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.” The American system was built on the conviction that liberty and private property are inseparable, that a government empowered to redistribute wealth by force is a government empowered to seize it in the first place, and that no policy failure, however real, justifies abandoning that founding premise. The proper conservative answer to an affordability crisis is more growth, more housing supply, and more economic freedom, not the very collectivism the Founders explicitly rejected when they built this republic.
🐘 Victor Marx Edges Ahead of Barbara Kirkmeyer in Colorado’s Nail-Biter GOP Governor Primary
Colorado’s Republican primary for governor remains too close to call, with political outsider Victor Marx overtaking state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer by a margin of roughly 2,000 votes out of more than 500,000 cast as of Thursday. Marx, a former enlisted Marine, martial arts instructor, and self-described “high risk humanitarian” with no prior elected experience, trailed Kirkmeyer by about 8,000 votes when polls closed Tuesday before later-arriving ballots shifted the race in his favor. State Rep. Scott Bottoms finished a distant third with roughly 21 percent. (Note: the Denver Post’s article was unavailable for direct retrieval; this account draws on parallel reporting from Colorado Politics, the Colorado Sun, and Sentinel Colorado, and the original Denver Post link is preserved above.)
Colorado law triggers an automatic recount whenever the margin between the top two finishers falls within half a percentage point of the leader’s total, and this race is on track to meet that threshold. Marx has campaigned on lowering income taxes, cutting red tape on home building, and overhauling public safety, while Kirkmeyer, a longtime state legislator from Weld County, has emphasized legislative experience and coalition-building. The winner will face Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser, who defeated Senator Michael Bennet by nearly 9 points in the Democratic primary, in November’s general election.
A margin this thin, decided county by county and ballot by ballot under procedures written into Colorado statute, is republican self-government functioning precisely as intended, messy and slow as it can be. The Founders did not design primaries, but they designed a system in which the people, not party bosses or national committees, decide who carries a movement’s banner, and they trusted that a contest fought out to the last vote would produce a legitimate result even when it frustrates the impatient. Whoever wins this recount will do so because voters, not insiders, made the call.
📬 Democratic Governors Demand Postal Service Drop Rule Tied to Trump’s Voter Data Order
Nine Democratic governors, including those of California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, sent a letter this week demanding the U.S. Postal Service withdraw a proposed rule that would implement a March executive order from President Trump directing federal agencies to compile a citizenship list of eligible voters and restrict mail ballots to those on it. The governors argued in their six-page letter that the rule would “undermine trust in elections, needlessly complicate voting processes, arbitrarily disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, and undermine states’ constitutional role in ensuring free and fair elections.”
A federal judge has already blocked the underlying executive order, ruling that only states and Congress, not the president, hold the power to set election rules, though the Postal Service filed its proposed rule before that ruling took effect and the case implementing it remains under appeal. The American Postal Workers Union has separately objected, with its president stating plainly that mail carriers’ job is to move mail, not verify voter eligibility. A 2025 Brookings Institution study found mail ballot fraud occurs in roughly four cases per 10 million ballots cast, undercutting the scale of the problem the order claims to address.
This is the same structural problem Original Intent flagged when a federal judge first blocked this order weeks ago, and it has not resolved itself simply because Democratic governors are now the ones raising it. The Constitution assigns the mechanics of federal elections to the states, subject to congressional oversight, and gives no role whatsoever to the executive branch or the agency that delivers the mail. Conservatives who want tighter safeguards against noncitizen voting, and there are good reasons to want them, should want those safeguards written into statute by Congress, where they can survive a change of administration and a change of party. A rule this consequential should not rest on the signature of whichever president happens to hold office, regardless of which party currently objects to it.
Sponsored by: Zivolife
The Founders believed a free people had to be a healthy, self-reliant people, capable of providing for their own households without depending on anyone else to do it for them.
Zivolife builds on that same conviction, offering clean, whole-food based nutrition designed to help your family thrive without relying on processed shortcuts. It is a simple idea with old roots: take responsibility for your own health, feed your family well, and you strengthen the household that is the true foundation of a free society.
🔍 What Adams Foresaw
On July 3, 1776, with the ink barely dry on Congress’s vote for independence, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail with a confidence that still reads as remarkable given how little was actually settled. The war was not won. The Declaration itself had not yet been finalized. British troops were, at that very moment, landing in New York. And yet Adams was certain enough of what had just happened to predict, in writing, that Americans would celebrate it “from this time forward forever more.” He got the date wrong by two days. He did not get the substance wrong at all. Adams understood that Congress had not simply won a political vote. It had founded something meant to outlast every one of the men in that room, something that would require each future generation to actively choose to keep it.
This week supplied a fresh reminder of exactly what that choice looks like in practice. In Denver, a 29-year-old democratic socialist who started the race polling at 7 percent won a landslide primary victory over a 15-term incumbent, part of a wave of similar wins for candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America stretching from Colorado to New York. Two-thirds of Denver Democrats under 35, according to one recent survey, now hold a favorable view of socialism itself, not merely of particular policies that carry the label. Adams could not have foreseen the specific candidates or the specific ballots. He would have recognized the underlying question immediately, because it is the same question every generation of Americans has faced since his own: whether the structure his generation built is worth actively defending, or merely worth inheriting.
The Founders were not vague about where they stood on the substance of that question. Samuel Adams, writing that very same year, called schemes to level property and hold goods in common “arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.” James Madison went further still, arguing in his 1792 essay on property that government exists to protect the property of every citizen precisely so that no citizen’s labor and possessions can be seized by the will of a majority, however popular that majority’s cause. These were not offhand remarks. They were foundational convictions, embedded in a constitutional structure built on private property, limited government, and the presumption that liberty and centralized economic control cannot coexist for long.
None of this means the frustration fueling today’s socialist wave is manufactured or unserious. Senator Michael Bennet, no conservative, spent this primary season warning that an entire generation has watched asset prices climb while wages for ordinary work stagnated, and that warning deserves an answer. But the answer the Founders would counsel is not the one Denver just nominated. It is more housing built faster, more competition unleashed rather than restricted, and more opportunity extended through growth rather than redistribution. Adams predicted bonfires and illuminations because he trusted that what Congress had founded was worth an eternity of active defense, not passive inheritance. Two hundred and fifty years on, with those illuminations set to light up the sky tomorrow night, that defense remains every bit as much an active choice as it was in 1776.
As Leviticus 25:10 instructs, the verse inscribed on the Liberty Bell itself: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” That liberty was never framed by the Founders as freedom from want guaranteed by the state. It was freedom to own, to build, to fail, and to try again, unmolested by a government empowered to level the results. Adams saw that clearly enough to bet his own name on it in a letter home. The country he helped found is still deciding, generation by generation, whether to keep that bet.
“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort… This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.”
— James Madison, “Property,” 1792
Question: On this day in 1776, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife Abigail predicting that future generations would celebrate American independence with “pomp and parade… bonfires and illuminations.” Adams believed this anniversary would be marked, but he named the wrong date, the one on which Congress had voted for the Lee Resolution rather than the date we actually celebrate today. Which date did Adams predict Americans would celebrate forever?
A. July 2
B. July 4
C. August 2
D. September 3