In part III of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” published a few months prior to the Declaration of Independence, Paine made the observation that “a government which cannot preserve the peace, is no government at all”. Reminding readers of this is a perfect place to start off the conversation we need to have about the root cause of our nation’s current state of affairs. And as true as it might be that our current government Has proven that it is incapable of preserving the peace, that is not the root cause of the national crisis in front of us.
In Paine’s era, the dynamic between the ruling classes and the citizenry was one of mutual disdain made worse by the fact that the more the powerless asked for relief the harder the powerful worked to subdue and constrain them. While similar to the dynamic in today’s America, an important distinction must be made; where the King and Parliament were unconcerned with how the colonies felt about their laws and demands, our president and his Congress are working hard to divide us against each other, dispensing provably false narratives and outright lies to the American people while raising up some at the expense of others, and displacing and diluting the populace while obfuscating truths and distracting us with disinformation and a bevy of non-sequiturs. This is how you overthrow a free people.
In order to understand how deeply insidious the Biden administration is, it is important to recognize the bigger picture that motivates their efforts to overthrow the American people. This government behaves as if it has dumbed down and misinformed half of us well enough that we won’t resist, and it fears the resolve of the other half sufficiently enough to have weaponized law enforcement and turned it loose against us intending to crush dissent before we can band together to rise up against it. And while this effort is underway, work hastily and quietly continues with the effort to import millions of people from around the world that are already fully accustomed to life under the thumb of iron-fisted tyrannical rule.
Since the Biden regime came into power, increasing numbers of experts and pundits have been suggesting that the political calculus behind the waving across our open border in the south of illegal migrants was a cynical contrivance to prop up voting outcomes to their advantage, assuming that all immigrants – legal or otherwise- would vote Democrat and assure their political supremacy in perpetuity. As a practical matter, however, not only is this strategy unlikely to succeed, it runs counter to everything we have come to understand about human nature and the long-term effects of so-called “soft slavery” on subclasses of a population over the long term.
Slavery, as a word, is well enough known and has been thoroughly discussed in countless volumes as it relates to the shared experience of the human race. Despite what you hear in every corner of our so-called enlightened societies, slavery has existed from the first days of humankind wherever a ruling Authority has been in power, and slavery continues all around the world to this very day – it is only less frequently mentioned in polite company. The use of the term “soft slavery”, here, is meant to convey the notion that you can be simultaneously enslaved as well as free. On the one hand, you are “mostly” free to come and go as you please while, at the same time, being forced to comply (even if it conflicts with your personal values and moral sensibilities) with the demands of ruling Authorities. This relationship between the governing and the Govern can and does occur around the world every day.
A simple American example of this can be found in the so-called “woke” culture and its head-on collision with a constitutional right codified in the First Amendment. I won’t belabor this point, but I will remind readers that despite our having a right to speak freely, on paper, in practice, we are allowed to exercise it only so long as what we say doesn’t offend a ruling Authority. Failure to comply will be punished therefore forcibly manipulating our behavior (so we can avoid punishment) which inevitably enslaves us to submit to their demands and expectations.
The long-term effects of this dynamic as they relate to American citizens have become increasingly clear during the course of the last decade but as we bring in new people, unfamiliar and conceivably non-compliant with these demands, how will the regime balance the expectations of newcomers at the ballot box against the moral and social values they bring with them to their local polling places?
Of the many things that were in greater supply in Paine’s era than are readily available today, it is perhaps the humble acceptance of human nature, with all its foibles and imperfections, along with interminable respect for the inherently limitless capacity to rise up against enslavement. The willingness to sacrifice life and limb in the name of freedom and self-determination, arguably, played a significant role in finding the courage to declare Independence in the first place. By contrast, today’s ruling classes see the inherent and fundamental aspects of Human Nature as impediments to be overcome by physical and legislative force.
Looking back at Paine once more, much can be gleaned about the relationship between government and society from his observations in 1775 as we try to sort through all the ways our ruling classes today have ignorantly chosen to defy Human Nature in pursuit of an agenda Human Nature simply cannot functionally achieve much less long-sustain:
“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expence and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.”
As well known as the first two sections of the Declaration might be, it is in the bottom portion where much can be learned about the frustration, anger, and bitterness our founding ancestors were experiencing two and a half centuries ago and the extent to which we find ourselves confronting the greatest threat to our Republic since the days it was first assembled. Given the time, effort, reflection, and extensive debate that went into establishing the American Nation, it would have been inconceivable to Paine and the others who helped put this country together, that she would ever find herself facing the day of her collapse at the hands of the very government assembled to protect and defend her against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Let us begin where the second section of the Declaration ends, and consider the words attributed to Thomas Jefferson:
“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
From that point forward there are another 1,000 words or so, listing the grievances of the Colonies that led up to the decision to declare independence from the King. In the interest of time, I will spare you from having to read it here, but I strongly encourage you to read that section, as well as the whole of the Declaration so that you might see for yourselves how similarly many Americans feel today. It is incumbent upon me, bringing this essay to a close, that I leave you with a few of the major ‘calamities’ thrust upon us by the Biden Administration and his corrupt “Parliament” as these things pertain to the ways in which the American standard of living is being destroyed using the very Constitution our current system of government has weaponized against us despite having sworn an oath to uphold and defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Let us, indeed, “let Facts be submitted to a candid world”.
When Joe Biden took his oath of office as the 46th US president on January 20th, 2021 Covid-19 was running rampant across the American Nation. Further, the response to the pandemic was beginning to bring the economy to its knees as a result of school, church, and business closures along with lockdowns, massive job losses, and extensive abuse of emergency executive powers at the state level, and the terribly misguided Congressional lust for throwing money we didn’t have at a problem they were never going to solve at the federal level. As he swore to uphold and defend the US Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic, he announced to the world that he was going to bring America together, heal her wounds of bitter division, and gather us around an American “greater good” while assuring us he would bring back unity, peace, and cooperation to the American people. He went on to suggest that the greatest threat to our democracy was political extremism, white supremacy, and domestic terrorism which he assured us “we must confront and we will defeat.”
With 18 months of the Biden regime in America’s rear view mirror, what can we honestly say we have to show for allowing his ascension to power?
By executive fiat he crippled and continues to systematically dismantle, our fossil fuel energy industry – in the name of climate change- thereby artificially creating shortages, driving up prices, and bringing inflation higher than it has been in decades.
He has inflicted vaccine and mask mandates that have cost jobs destroyed small businesses and interfered with our ability to freely exercise our right to practice our chosen religious faith while dismantling the quality of life for middle and lower-income Americans.
He has driven a government wedge between parents and children, has placed the power of school boards above the wisdom of parents, and has weaponized the Department of Justice to surveil and threaten them while categorizing them as domestic terrorists. Worse, he has intervened in the matters of gender and sexuality of children, taking on a role government was never granted in the Constitution nor has any business getting involved in.
He has overseen one of the greatest waves of illegal migration in American history, simultaneously experiencing amounts of illicit drugs, numbers of humans being trafficked, and violence against local law enforcement at rates greater than at any other time in our history.
He has allowed crime to rise at record levels, with drugs, armed assaults, rapes, and murders overtaking our streets and public transportation causing the whole of our society to feel insecure and Afraid for their personal safety. Notably, this dramatic downturn in the quality of American Life has all occurred simultaneously with his embrace of defunding, dismantling and denigrating law enforcement – both the police and the prosecutors.
He has bastardized our system of justice, usurping the powers granted in the Bill of Rights by stripping the rights of due process, legal representation, speedy trials by a jury, the ability to face your accuser, and protection against illegal search and seizure from some, waving others through the system at no cost or consequence to them.
He has ignored the sovereignty of the co-equal branches of government, ignoring judicial branch decisions or issuing executive orders to circumvent them, and routinely skips over the Legislative branch’s duties to write and enact laws using the same power of Executive Order.
He has impugned the sovereignty of the “some several States”, constraining the access of some States to therapeutic medications to deal with Covid-19 while, simultaneously, publicly denigrating them for rejecting Federal guidance that has provably questionable efficacy.
He has engaged America in foreign proxy wars, at great cost and to the extreme detriment of the American people, our quality of life, and our access to food, energy, and basic necessities for our own survival.
His has been an Administration of misleading the American people, disinforming them with half-truths, and outright provably false narratives. Further, he has shown great inflexibility to changes in matters of Medical science and Biological truth, economic reality, and the degradation of the quality of our everyday American life as well as the crumbling dynamic shift between the citizenry and its relationship with government and law enforcement. And wherever there has been dissent or attempts to offer opposing views, he has used law enforcement, social and corporate media, corporate entities, and non-governmental organizations to malign, isolate, crush and repress it.
These are the actions taken by those with an intention to overthrow a free people.
This nation stands on the shoulders of great men and women possessing great knowledge and wisdom who planted the seeds of freedom for what was intended to become the greatest nation on Earth. Despite everything they passed down to us, and everything we have improved upon in the nearly two and a half centuries hence, the ruling authorities and leadership classes currently in charge of America’s future, have fallen prey to the weeds of their own vanities and self-indulgences and, with willful ignorance and stunning defiance of the truth, have endangered the very survival of America.
And though it might be that our garden of knowledge and wisdom has been allowed to lie fallow in recent years, ripping out the weeds at the root and turning over fresh soil in the 2022 midterm elections will go a long way toward re-planting the seeds of freedom, liberty, and self-determination in the hearts and minds of the American people.
