The Anglosphere’s concept of individual liberty first found voice in a single seminal document: The Magna Carta of 1215. It truly is what its name says: A “Great Charter.” Small surprise then that two crazed climate activists, one an Anglican priest and the other a biologist, tried to destroy a copy of this great charter.

Thomas Jefferson neatly defined our American concept of liberty in the Declaration of Independence:

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...

Neither Jefferson nor the Founders created these ideas. Instead, they were demanding rights that had been painfully eked out in Great Britain for centuries. These rights represented a fusion of ideas from the Bible, the Greek philosophers, the Roman Republic, and Anglo-Saxon tribes.

The first expression of that unique fusion was in England in 1215. That was when English barons forced a reluctant King John to acknowledge that he did not have unlimited power but was constrained by legal principles greater than he was.

Thus, the Magna Carta holds that abstract legal privileges are inherent in each individual and that these privileges transcend even the king himself. Although these inherent principles were written to apply only to a very small band of high lords, the mere act of recognizing that these rights exist was still the moment that led directly to America’s Bill of Rights, which extended these ideas to all citizens, not just to the favored few.

Because it limits the government, the Magna Carta is the antithesis of tyranny. Or, as Lord Denning explained, the Magna Carta is “the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”

Given the Magna Carta’s extraordinary symbolic importance as the foundational document upon which the Anglosphere’s ideas about individual liberty rest, it was no surprise to learn that a couple of crazed climatistas tried to this ancient manuscript—and ironically, they justified doing so by claiming that the “rule of law” required them to do so:

Two protesters, aged 85 and 82, cracked the glass case surrounding the royal charter at the British Library in central London on Friday morning.

The library holds two of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta, with the others at Lincoln Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral.

Rev Dr Sue Parfitt, an 82-year-old Anglican priest from Bristol, and Judy Bruce, an 85-year-old retired biology teacher from Swansea, entered the British Library at 10.40am.

After they cracked the glass, Rev Parfitt and Mrs Bruce glued their hands together, demanding an emergency plan to stop oil by 2030.

A Just Stop Oil spokesman said: “Clause 39 of the Magna Carta is one of four clauses still enshrined in UK common law, a so-called ‘golden passage’ that states: ‘No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or in any other way ruined, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.’

“Contrast that with civil law as it stands in 2024, where corporations are buying private laws in the form of injunctions that circumvent the people’s rights to a trial by jury for speaking out against the crimes of oil companies.”

Just Stop Oil, of course, was proud of this assault on a tangible manifestation of core abstract rights, recording and disseminating the crime:

Do not get distracted by the women’s age. Focus on the fact that they are leftists who undoubtedly have carried their values forward intact from the 1960s and have now found the latest vehicle for their efforts to overturn Western values.

The women’s leftism has effectively transcended the rationality of science (for one is a biologist) and the dictates of the Anglican faith, which was inextricably intertwined with the developing idea of individual liberty in the Anglosphere. Imagine what they were preaching from the pulpit and the front of the classroom. Both these women desperately want the totalitarianism of a system in which the government controls carbon dioxide output...which means the government controls everything.

The takeaway is to remember that no matter what progressives here or abroad are seemingly talking about, that’s not what they’re actually talking about. Their hysteria about the climate, insistence on the end of borders, embrace of Islam, obscene focus on abortion, and every other leftist shibboleth are all directed toward one single goal, which is the end of individual liberty. It’s very fitting, therefore, that two leftist fishwives would strike at the very heart of individual liberty in the Anglosphere: The Magna Carta.

Image: X screen grab.