What Was Touré Neblett Thinking?

Many of my fellow wingnuts have been criticizing the following from Touré Neblett:

“He loves this line of ‘our rights come from God and nature’, which is so offensive to so much of America,” pontificated the MSNBC personality. “Because for black people, Hispanic people, and women, our rights do not come from God or nature. They were not recognized by the natural order of America. They come from the government and from legislation that happens in relatively recent history in America. So that line just bothers me to my core.”

I have a theory about what he was thinking. You just remember the following: 1) Nowadays, the Left is the logical home of collectivists; 2) some leftists, especially the older ones, started out as conservatives. (Others have made an apparent change when the major issues changed from X to Y, in which they agreed with conservatives on X and liberals on Y; in related news, if there were an election in which the only issue were open borders, I'd probably vote Democrat.) Try to consider what sort of conservative a collectivist would be. He would be someone looking back at a society where white folks were secure (i.e., did not have to live in fear of their neighbors), and could basically pretend non-whites don't exist. These people are rare among conservatives nowadays—because most of them have gone Left—but they used to be common. These ex-conservatives would regard an environment of closed borders and legally-mandated segregation as part of a “natural order.” (I have discussed a liberal who thought conservatives were fans of the 1950s here, a liberal who was trying to attract votes from such conservatives here, and argued with such a conservative here.) It's easy for a liberal to mistake such the former opinions of such ex-conservatives for those of current conservatives.

This was probably combined with ignorance of the fact that the anti-slavery movement was started by religious fundamentalists … back in the days when Unitarians were compared to Wahhabi Muslims by people who weren't being ironic.