From a January 20, 2024, speech by Kevin Roberts

KEVIN ROBERTS: Pride depends on degrading others. Unlike the agnostic who’s clouded by doubt, or the atheist blinded by hatred, the devil himself knows firsthand he cannot deny or replace God. Old Screwtape, as you know, learned long ago that the surest path to corrupting the souls of the strong is denying the humanity of the weak.

This, rather than the comparable body counts, is the evil that underlies mankind’s greatest horrors. Every slave auction, every lynching, every concentration camp, every abortion mill, every pogrom, every terrorist bombing from the Middle East to Kermit Gosnell, from Herod to Hitler to Hamas, has been justified on the same inhuman pretense that the victims aren’t really people. That human dignity is not universal, not inherent to our nature, but contingent on the convenience to the powerful.

And the butcher’s bill of history is chillingly clear. Once a society deems certain individuals not fully human, it soon treats them as if they weren’t human at all. And it never stops with one group.

Consider the telling example of the pigs on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, who declared some animals are more equal than others. Is it any surprise that the same party of death celebrating violence in the womb also justifies, and even cheers, the surgical mutilation of children, the euthanizing of the depressed, the persecution of parents and churchgoers, even a genocidal war to exterminate the Jewish people?

Make no mistake: This idea of human inequality — that some people count and some people don’t — doesn’t come from the media or the government or the elite or the left or even Planned Parenthood. It comes straight from hell.