Neal's Soapbox

Last week President Trump ordered the U.S. military to conduct strikes against sites in Syria that had been identified as possible locations for the production or storage of chemical weapons; the very weapons Syrian President Assad is accused of using in recent attacks upon his own people. Working in conjunction with the UK and France, these attacks were meant to send a message to President Assad; “Stop using chemical weapons or face the consequences.” I can almost hear the ghost of Ronald Reagan saying, “He counted on America being passive…he counted wrong.”

While I deplore the use of chemical weapons, I have a problem with the U.S. using its military to force it’s will or enforce some UN Resolution upon another country. Before I continue, I need to backstop that a bit with some personal information.

I served in the military, specifically the Air Force, for almost 14 years before choosing to separate and return to civilian life. At any time I could have been ordered into combat where my life would have been on the line for whatever reason our government felt it best to send US troops into harm’s way for. The thought of dying by gunfire didn’t frighten me nearly as much as the thought of being exposed to chemical or biological weapons.

I recall, as if it were yesterday, the annual training classes I had to attend on the proper use and maintenance of the gear designed to protect U.S. fighting men and women against chemical weapons attacks. I remember the training films which described the effects of chemical weapons on the human body, and I especially remember the discussions about how to use the Combo Pen in case you were exposed to them. I don’t know what worried me most; being exposed to some horrific nerve agent or stabbing myself in the thigh with that big assed needle to inject the atropine which would counter the effects of a nerve agent.

So yeah, whenever I hear of one country using chemical weapons against another, or of a government using chemical weapons against its own people, the recollection of my training and what chemical weapons can do to people still sends chills down my spine.

The international community has pretty much banned the use of chemical weapons in war, due to the horrific nature of them and the fact that they are indiscriminate in nature; meaning they do not discriminate between combatants and non-combatants; they kill everyone who are exposed to them.
Now you may question my patriotism on this, but I don’t think America has any high moral ground to stand upon when they go around accusing other countries of using weapons that are indiscriminate, or questionable in nature.

If I recall, isn’t America the only country in the world to have used nuclear weapons in a war? Now you can wave all the flags you want and praise how President Truman saved hundreds of thousands of lives by dropping the two Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I would say that the use of those two bombs was pretty damned indiscriminate as to who they killed; not to mention the horrific after effects suffered by those exposed to the fallout created by those bombs.

Almost immediately after these bombs were dropped on Japan reports began coming out of the blast areas of radiation sickness suffered by people downwind of the attack sites. These reports were stifled by the government, with it telling the media that all reports of a scientific nature must first be approved by the War Department. That almost reminds me of the scene in the movie Good Morning Vietnam in which the twin army flunkies had to pre-approve every story Adrian Cronauer was allowed to report on to the troops.

But yeah, I’d say the use of nuclear weapons to end the war in the Pacific was pretty damned indiscriminate if you ask me. But it was not the only time the U.S. has engaged in indiscriminate bombing. How many of you remember Nixon’s bombing campaign against Cambodia?

We may remember Pol Pot’s merciless genocide against over a million of his own people, but what about the U.S.’s indiscriminate bombing of Cambodia; do you remember that? The justification for these bombings was the fact that the North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front, (The Viet Cong), were stationed in Cambodia and launching raids into Vietnam, and the only way to get them was to bomb them where they were hiding; which was Cambodia.

In his book Ending the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger estimates that there were 50,000 Cambodian non-combatants killed by these bombing attacks. A survivor from one such attack reported, “Three F-111s bombed right center in my village, killing eleven of my family members. My father was wounded but survived. At that time there was not a single soldier in the village, or in the area around the village. 27 other villagers were also killed. They had run into a ditch to hide and then two bombs fell right into it.”

This indiscriminate bombing, where bomb runs were based upon supposed intelligence provided to the military, lasted from 1965 to 1973, and although Kissinger says that only 50,000 were killed, while other estimates places the number at around 150,.000. That fact remains that the US dropped almost as much ordinance on Cambodia as it did upon the forces of Japan during the entirety of World War II; almost half a million tons of explosives. I suppose a bit of collateral damage is to be expected when you drop that many bombs on a country. Still, that seems pretty indiscriminate to me, not to mention that neither Vietnam nor Cambodia had ever attacked the United States.

But I’m not quite done yet. What about the bombing of the city of Dresden, Germany during World War II. Dresden was targeted based upon its supposed infrastructure which was providing materials for the German war effort; yet some claim that the attacks were not proportionate to the significance of the targets. Yet the attacks happened, and they were horrific and indiscriminate as to who was killed.

The bombing of Dresden was a two-stage attack in which both incendiary and high explosive bombs were to be dropped upon the city. A survivor from that fateful day writes, “As the incendiaries fell, the phosphorus clung to the bodies of those below, turning them into human torches. The screaming of those who were being burned alive was added to the cries of those not yet hit. There was no need for flares to lead the second wave of bombers to their target, as the whole city had become a gigantic torch. It must have been visible to the pilots from a hundred miles away. Dresden had no defences, no anti-aircraft guns, no searchlights, nothing.”

But that was not all, the joint force bombers dropped heavy explosives designed to blow off roofs and doors which created air flow to fuel the fires caused by the incendiary bombs. The city was turned into one raging inferno where the oxygen was sucked out of the air and people either suffocated or were burnt to a crisp.

And that’s just what our country has done in times of war against other countries. People don’t remember the radiation testing upon American servicemen or the Tuskegee Experiments where poor blacks were monitored as syphilis ravaged their bodies; even though treatment was available to cure the disease. There was the use of Agent Orange during Vietnam, which affected not only the Vietnamese, but the U.S. troops who were exposed to it. And let us not forget that after World War II, under the program Operation Paperclip, the U.S. allowed war criminals to come to America just because they had knowledge our government wished to exploit.

Oh yeah, the U.S. has got all the high moral ground it needs to condemn other nations of committing atrocities against humanity. (That was sarcasm by the way) I suppose it also doesn’t matter that many of these so-called enemies we fight are monsters of our own creation either. The U.S. has this uncanny ability to go in to a country and stir things up so that later they can claim that the groups that arise out of the ashes are our enemies and we need to go in and defeat them to preserve democracy.

Do you think Al Qaeda would have been a problem had not the U.S. supported Bin Laden and the other Mujahedeen freedom fighters in their fight to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan? Then there is the photo of Senator John McCain standing alongside freedom fighters in Syria who have been identified as members of ISIS. Let us not forget the mess we had to clean up in Panama after Manuel Noriega, another useful U.S. stooge got out of hand.

The U.S. just can’t seem to stop going into other countries and creating situations that later turn around and bite us in the ass. After all, didn’t we provide intelligence data to Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran regarding Iranian troop movements; fully knowing that he intended to use Sarin gas against the Iranians? But that’s okay, we got rid of Saddam too, and left a power vacuum in Iraq that has left the entire country unstable and open to groups like ISIS to come in and create more problems for us.

Either those who establish U.S. Foreign Policy are stupid or they want a constant stream of enemies we can fight to justify a bloated defense budget and the creation of all these agencies to protect us from the monsters they create; although I haven’t decided which is more accurate a statement.

I wonder, would Russia or China have been justified in lobbing a few missiles at Washington D.C. when they allowed the experimentation upon U.S. servicemen to determine the effects of radiation or chemical weapons? Would they have been justified in teaching our government a lesson in the consequences of human rights violations after Waco and Ruby Ridge?

Someone made similar comments on Facebook the other day and another person responded by saying that the attack upon Waco was justified because there were confirmed reports of rape by David Koresh upon the women in the Branch Davidian Compound. Oh, so we go in with an attack that kills all the women and children because David Koresh may or may not have been guilty of rape? Is that how the justice system works in America today?

And what about Ruby Ridge and the shooting of unarmed Vicki Weaver by FBI sniper Lon Horiouchi; does that not count as a human rights violation? Or is the taking of a woman’s life who is unarmed and holding an infant just the cost one must pay when they stand up against our government these days?
Listen, I’m all for our government using diplomacy, and even trade sanctions or embargos upon another country to prevent them from committing human rights violations like the ones Syria is accused of committing; but I have a healthy and active sense of skepticism when it comes to our government’s reasons for doing things like what Trump just did. I believe there is ALWAYS an ulterior motive for the things our government does in regards to its enforcing of its foreign policy upon other nations.

I mean, if the U.S. were so concerned with human rights violations why haven’t we launched a few cruise missiles into Darfur and Rwanda? In Darfur close to half a million people have been slaughtered in a calculated act of genocide by government sponsored rebels in the Western Sudan. Then in Rwanda the Hutu, armed mostly with machetes, began actively slaughtering the ethnic Tutsi’s. Estimates place the number of Tutsis killed at around 800,000. It was only when Tutsi’s from neighboring countries came to the defense of the Rwandan Tutsis that the genocide came to an end; but not one cruise missile was sent into Rwanda to halt these violations of human rights. But I guess being hacked to pieces by machete isn’t as horrific a death as being gassed; therefore it doesn’t justify our government getting involved. But then why did the U.S. get involved in the ethnic cleansing which occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

On top of all this, I reckon the constitutionality of a president ordering a military strike on another sovereign nation without a formal declaration of war by Congress shouldn’t bother people in the slightest. After all our military has been actively engaged in one conflict or another for the past 60 years–all without declarations of war by Congress–so what’s a few cruise missiles lobbed into Syria compared to putting boots on the ground in a full scale attack?

I suppose it shouldn’t also matter that when Barack Obama was president then civilian Donald Trump Tweeted, “The President must get Congressional approval before attacking Syria-big mistake if he does not!” (August 30, 2013, in regards to the Obama administration considering attacking Syria) After all, aren’t hypocrisy and double standards the great American pastimes these days?

Yet the Constitution does clearly state that it is the power of Congress to declare war, not the power of the President; and I’d say lobbing a few dozen cruise missiles into another country was a pretty hostile act and, should someone have done something similar to us, we would have considered it an act of war and retaliated accordingly. But that’s right, we can do things like that and get away with it because we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys who are committing human rights violations.

People seem to have forgotten that whatever power held by our government was given them by the people, and that the various branches cannot transfer any of their power to another branch without the Constitution first being amended to authorize such a transfer of power. I’ve mentioned this before, but it needs repeating since people don’t seem to understand this simple legal principle; there is a legal maxim which, translated from its Latin origin, states, “a delegated power cannot be further delegated.”

Therefore, if we the people delegated the power to declare war to Congress, (and I’d say the launching of a couple dozen missiles into another country constituted an act of war), then Congress cannot just up and allow the President to unilaterally order such a strike by the military without their approval.
Besides, our Founders believed that the best policy of the United States was to remain neutral in the intrigue and affairs of other nations; only acting militarily when the United States was attacked. They understood that in the world there would always be conflicts between nations, and the best policy of the United States was to avoid becoming entangled in these conflicts, if at all possible.

I know I have used this before, and I know it is rather long, but it bears repeating in light of current events. In an 1821 speech celebrating America’s independence from England the Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, gave a speech in which he said:

America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. . . . Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

But why should we let the words of a bunch of guys who have been dead for centuries bother us or guide us in what it means to be patriotic or in establishing our foreign policy? After all, they only fought for this country’s independence and then established a system of government designed to secure our rights; what the hell did they do that was so important that we should heed their words? After all, aren’t we smarter than they were?

Yeah, go ahead and keep believing that; see what happens…

A short time ago someone prefaced their comments on one of my articles with, “The problem with all you Republicans is…” and they then went on to provide a laundry lists of things they felt were the problem with those who aligned themselves with the Republican Party. The problem is, I’m not a Republican. This person, who shall remain nameless, is a self-admitted liberal, and it seems that anytime they encounter someone whose beliefs run counter to theirs they lump them all into a single category: Republicans.

Had this person’s brain been functioning at 100% they would have known that I don’t consider myself to be either Democrat or Republican. I suppose if you really want to slap a label on me, Libertarian is about as close as you’re going to get as far as labels go. Yet even Libertarianism suffers from the left/right division which plagues the two primary political parties in this country.

Libertarians place liberty as their guiding principle in all their political and social decisions; yet among Libertarians there are those who believe that capitalism and private ownership of property is actually detrimental to liberty. Therefore these left leaning Libertarians advocate for a system in which nobody owns anything; that everything is owned and managed by the collective; which is actually what pure communism is.

I have never been one who has fit in to any single category or group; I was a loner in school who never belonged to the jocks, the burnouts, or the nerds who spent their time buried in books in the library or in science labs. Maybe that is why it is easier for me to not need a group, a political party to tie my horse to. In any case, I think that when people join a group, or at least claim an affinity towards a certain group, they tend to lose a bit of their individuality; they start to take on a group mindset. What I mean by that is they let the group begin to dictate what they believe and what they don’t believe.

So, when someone claims an affiliation with either the Republican or Democratic Party, instead of examining facts based solely on their own merit they tend to echo, or mirror their particular party platforms; developing a herd mentality.

Did you know that today, April 13th is Thomas Jefferson’s birthday? In honor of Jefferson I would like to share a quote from him on this whole idea of belonging to groups or political parties. In an 1789 letter to Francis Hopkinson, Jefferson states, “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”

Those are pretty strong words; saying that if he could not go to Heaven without being part of a party he would not go at all. But there’s more to it than just that; he also makes reference to what I was just discussing; that when a person belongs to a group or party they begin to think in Groupthink; which causes them to lose their individuality. This Groupthink mentality places the collective belief above all else; including facts; making open and honest debate upon the issues next to impossible. You can’t break through the barrier of Groupthink when discussing the issues when they have forsaken reason and have allowed others to dictate what they themselves believe. That is why those belonging to groups, or parties, tend to hurl insults at each other, and call each other names; like how those on the right call those on the left Libtards and Snowflakes.

Now I’m not saying those on the left are guiltless; not with their crusade to remake and revise our nation’s history to fit their perverted agenda of turning America into a Socialist country; even though history has proven that every experiment in Socialism has failed. No, those on the left are as close minded and guilty of Groupthink as are those on the right.

What this means for liberty in America is that we have two political party entities which control the thinking of a very large segment of society; thereby allowing them, and not the Constitution and Bill of Rights, to dictate what powers our government should exercise and what goals it should pursue.

I used to have a friend who stopped speaking to me in 2008 after I began sending him my articles and material supporting Ron Paul for President. This friend was someone I’d spent many a night drinking beer and playing pool with in strip clubs across the Florida panhandle; yet he allowed his political party ideology to blind him to the fact that our government was overstepping its just authority and engaging in wars that were not justified. It came to a head when he was hired by the TSA, (Transportation Safety Administration) as an airport screener. When I began denouncing the Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and his employer, the TSA, he shut off all communication with me and I haven’t heard from him since.

Heck, I have had some pretty heated debates with my own brother about the same issues which has cost me friends. I find it funny how two people, growing up under the same roof, can have such wide differences of opinion on what our government should and shouldn’t be doing. If party ideology can cause riffs in family ties, and cause you to lose close friends, imagine what it can do when total strangers attempt to engage in any kind of serious debate upon the issues. It’s no wonder people in America can’t agree with each other on damned near anything.

I do not belong to any political party; having registered as an independent many years ago. Since then I have come to the belief that our system is so corrupt and broken that it is futile to hold out any hope that it can be repaired at the voting booth.

Therefore, for someone to call me a Republican is ludicrous; for I’m NOT a Republican. When people call me a Republican it only tells me that the things I’ve said and written haven’t registered with them; for if they had they would know that I’m anything but a Republican. Libertarian comes close, but with the divisions among those who call themselves Libertarians, even that does not come close to describing who and what I am.

I guess the word that best describes me is PATRIOT. I can almost hear the cries of outrage from people, “But I’m a patriot too.” Are you…really? You see, your definition of patriotism and mine are probably worlds apart. You might define patriotism as supporting your country, or your government; as paying your taxes faithfully and supporting the troops whenever they are sent to fight in America’s wars; and for obeying the law to the best of your ability.

But that’s not my definition of patriotism. My definition is one who cherishes the principles upon which this country was originally founded, and who will fight, to the death if required, to defend and sustain those principles. My definition of a patriot is one who cherishes liberty above all else; above comfort, above security, above wealth, and even above friends and family if needs be.

It is said that Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, once said, “In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.”

Yet America was built on the back of patriots; off their blood, sweat and tears. It was not the meek and timid who fought for America’s independence; it was the patriots who cherished liberty above life itself who risked their all for the cause they believed in. That right there is my definition of patriotism; and from what I have seen the patriots in this country are few and far between.

America was built upon the backs and labors of patriots, and it was the cause of liberty that drove them to risk their very lives. It was this cause which led Patrick Henry to say, “Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings-give us that precious jewel, and you can take everything else.”
Liberty, according to Jefferson, is defined as “… unobstructed action according to our will: but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.”

While some may agree with me up to this point, this is where the crowd thins out dramatically. I don’t believe patriotism entails obeying whatever laws our government passes simply because they say we must obey them. You see, Jefferson did not end his quote there, he also said, “I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” (Source: Letter to Isaac Tiffany, April 4, 1819)

It was patriotism which caused our Founders to support and defend the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence. It was patriotism which led those who opposed the proposed constitution to demand that a Bill of Rights be included to protect the liberty all governments should strive to secure for the governed. It was patriotism which caused a portion of the country to secede from the Union when they saw that its system of government had become as tyrannical and oppressive as the one their ancestors had fought a revolution to free themselves from.

So you see, I’m not a Republican, I’m a patriot; and I’m growing awful weary of your, (both left and right) attacks upon my liberty. There is a tool one can use to measure the extent to which a person understands, or at least values liberty. If their beliefs do not impose any restrictions upon the actions of others, or impose any burdens of taxation to fund the programs they support, then there is a good chance they value liberty as much as I do.

But, if you think that your will should dictate what others can and cannot do, say, write, or display; if you think that your will should be all that is required for our government to take from the bread of our earnings and distribute it to others in the form of social programs, subsidies, and benefits, then there is a good chance that liberty means nothing to you.

That litmus test crosses political party boundaries and covers both the Republicans and Democrats. That is why I stress that party over principle has taken over in American politics today; because party ideology has replaced a defense of the liberty our country was founded to secure for all.
Our Founders, were they alive today, would be shaking their heads in sadness over for what we allow our government to do to the liberty they fought so valiantly to secure. I’m certain they would be asking themselves why they bothered when the people of this country valued liberty so little that they would allow it to be taken from the people with nary a whimper of protest.

These true patriots from our history would be asking, “Where are the patriots today; those who are willing to stand up to this tyranny and restore the liberty we fought to secure for them?” Instead, all they would see are Republicans and Democrats arguing over how best to violate the Constitution and destroy the liberty America was built to secure for them.

George Washington was right, “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

I don’t need a political party to tell me what things our government can and cannot do, I have a brain of my own and am willing to devote the time and effort required to learn that on my own from the writings of those who actually participated in the Founding of this country. I don’t need a bunch of hacks and corrupt career politicians to tell me what to believe and what to support or oppose; I am a free man and will either live free or die trying to regain the freedom the rest of you sheep are allowing government to deprive you of.

NOTE: Written in honor of Thomas Jefferson, who was born on this day in 1743; Author of our Declaration of Independence, our nation’s 3rd President, and a man who understood and supported liberty probably more than those of his own time, and certainly more than the average American today.

I’m sorry Mr. Jefferson if we have disappointed you as a nation.

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive
will not long be safe companions to liberty.”
~James Madison~

“The Congress shall have the power to … raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years…”
~U.S. Constitution~
(Article 1, Section 8)

Unlike most Americans today, our Founding Fathers were well versed in all the forms that government may take, and the perils associated with each form. In framing our system of government they sought a balance between providing the government they were creating with the requisite power to perform the functions it was being established for, while at the same time seeking to preserve the rights of the States and the general public.

As students of both history and government they knew that certain things were fatal to the liberty of the people; things such as a powerful government accompanied by a perpetual standing army. Yet today, if one questions the need for a massive standing army, or the constant use of that army against enemies who have never directly attacked the United States, one’s patriotism comes into question and they can, and do, lose friends over it. This blind support for our military is both dangerous and foolish; for it is often the military which is the tool by which tyrants enforce their will upon a powerless society.

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part I support the troops and the fact that at any moment they could be called upon to lay down their lives in the defense of their country. After all, for over 13 years I served in the United States Air Force; so I know what it’s like to sign a blank check to Uncle Sam for up to and including your life in the defense of your country.

But you see, there is a fine line of distinction between the defense of America and the defense of business interests or the sustaining of an American Empire which spans the globe; and unfortunately our government has crossed that line and our troops are the pawns who pay the price for it. I can honestly say, without any reservations, knowing what I know now I would never enlist in the military… NEVER!!!

I know it may seem like I’m suddenly switching tracks; changing subjects, but bear with me, it will all make sense in a minute. Basic economics teaches that for a company to make a profit it must sell enough of the product it produces to offset the overhead costs associated with manufacturing that product. If it costs a company $5 in parts and $10 in labor to produce one widget, then they must sell that widget for $15 to break even, and $16 to make a profit; and that’s assuming that there are no costs associated with ad campaigns to spread the word about their widget. That’s basic economics and it applies to every company which produces a product; including the defense industry; or as Eisenhower called it, the Military Industrial Complex.

Most companies produce goods which are then purchased by the general public; clothing, food, automobiles, televisions, etc. etc. However, the military industrial complex sells a specific category of goods which, typically, is only purchased by those who engage in war; such as governments. Therefore, economics demands that for them to continue making a profit, and keeping their stockholders happy, there must be a constant need for the products they produce; in other words, a constant state of war. It is simple common sense that in times of peace there is less need for bombs, bullets, tanks and fighter planes than there is in times of war.

There is something else, our elected representatives aren’t the ones piloting those planes; they aren’t the ones driving the tanks; they aren’t the ones on the battlefield expending all that ammunition and ordinance–it is the men and women serving in our military. Therefore, along with a constant state of war, there needs to be a standing military force who will utilize the goods produced by the Military Industrial Complex.

While I’ll be the first to admit that warfare has changed from the times when you just put some fatigues on a soldier, gave him a rifle, and sent him off to the trenches to fight, and that the technologically advanced state of warfare demands that we have better trained people ready to defend our country, I do have a problem when our military is used for anything other than the defense of the United States from outside attack.

I have a serious problem with our service men and women being sent off to some shit hole of a country in support of some Resolution passed by the United Nations. Our military is not the enforcing arm for resolutions passed by countries, many of which despise the United States. The list of countries which our military members have been deployed in support of the United Nations is almost endless; Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Somalia, El Salvador, and it goes on and on and on.

Excuse the language, but fuck the United Nations. I didn’t vote for them, they don’t represent me, and they damned sure don’t have any authority to pass resolutions which affect me or deprive me of any of my unalienable rights. As far as I’m concerned, the UN can shut its doors, its ambassadors can pack their bags and return to their own country, and we can use the UN building to house the homeless.

Former Marine General Smedley Butler said this about war, “It is the only one [racket] in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” Who profits from war? Well first off there are the arms dealers who make the bullets, bombs, tanks, planes and even the uniforms our soldiers wear. Next in line of profiteers are the bankers who loan the huge sums of money it takes to conduct a war.

Are you aware that the Father of our Constitution, James Madison, once said, “Each generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expense of other generations.” Right now our national debt stands at $21.13 trillion and it adds about $1 million every 30 seconds. Much of that money being borrowed, or added to the debt, is going towards our current war on terror.

In all our past wars we could find a map or a globe and point to where our enemy was. Not this time. Can you find the country of terror on a map? This war on terror, declared by George W. Bush all those years back, is an open ended blank check to our government which gives them the ability to wage war against whomever, whenever, our government deems that there is a valid threat of global terrorism. We don’t have to be attacked, we only have to decide that some country poses us a threat and that is sufficient cause for the US to use military force to reduce or eliminate that threat.

I think most Americans live in this little cocoon which protects them from the real world. Some people I know have never left their home State, let alone travelled to another country. Yet these same people believe that our military is fighting the good fight to keep us safe back here in the US of A. Let me ask you something; are we at war with Germany? I thought a peace treaty was signed after the defeat of the Nazis. So why do we have almost 35,000 troops stationed in Germany?

What about Japan, we are at peace with them too; right? Well why are there almost 40,000 U.S. troops assigned to Japan? While technically the Korean Conflict never ended, it is only a cease fire, there are still 23,468 U.S. servicemen and women stationed in South Korea. There are 12,000 in Italy and almost 8,500 protecting our good friends by setting up shop in Great Britain.

According to the PEW Research Center, there are approximately 200,000 U.S. military personnel assigned outside the continental United States; and those numbers are at an all time low. Are we defending our country, our empire, or could it be that our military is being used to defend the interests of powerful special interests who have holdings in those countries?

In 1961 President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a speech in which he said, ” Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex.”

Now you tell me, do you think that those whose very survival as businessmen depends upon a constant need for the weapons they produce are going to lobby Congress to decrease the size of our military, or call for cutbacks on our involvement in foreign wars? That’s not to mention all the other companies that have holdings, or interest in the resources of another country, but face obstacles due to anti U.S. sentiments by their duly elected leaders. How much better for them if our military went in and toppled the existing government, or the CIA orchestrate a coup to pave the way for U.S. business interests to get a foot in the door.

Think things like that never happen? You ought to do some research into the joint U.S./British organized coup which saw the democratically elected leader of Iran toppled so that the Western Friendly Shah of Iran could be installed in his place. It didn’t matter that the Shah brutalized his own people; as long as the profits kept rolling in to U.S. and British petroleum companies.

That wasn’t an isolated incident either; the U.S. has been meddling in the internal affairs of other nations for a very, VERY long time. Getting back to Smedley Butler, he said this about his time in the United States Marines, “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Are you aware that currently there are over one million people serving as active duty servicemen/women? While most of them are serving in the capacity of National Defense; whatever our government declares to be in the National Defense that is, a huge standing army like that could easily be used to enforce the will of our government should it go full blown tyrannical on us. You tell me, with a population who can’t be bothered to question whether or not their government is violating the Constitution, do you think the average soldier, sailor, marine, or airman is going to hesitate to fire upon U.S. citizens if given the order to do so by their Commander in Chief? Sure, there will be some who refuse to follow orders, but for the most part they will shoot first and question the legality of the order later. Think about that before you decide to slap on that ‘Support the troops’ bumper sticker.

There is another aspect of warfare that is closely tied to it which also is being used to deprive us of our rights. Every war depends upon intelligence gathering. Heck, Nathan Hale, who famously said, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country” was hung for spying on the British during the Revolution. Spies, scouts, and other means of gathering intelligence are crucial to effectively defeating your enemy. But the same means by which your enemies are spied upon can also be used to spy upon the people of a country to monitor against anti-government sentiment; even when that sentiment is wholly justified.

Thomas Jefferson rejected the idea that government should be allowed to punish those who spoke out against the actions of their government, and when President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts he secretly wrote the Kentucky Resolutions in opposition to these laws. But that never stopped government. During the Civil War members of the Lincoln administration monitored the Northern Press and shut down, or imprisoned editors who wrote anti war editorials.

For a very long time our government has had the ability to spy upon us without our ever knowing we are being spied upon. Way back when I was in high school Senator Frank Church made the following comments, “The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”

Of course we all know that Edward Snowden had to flee the country when he released Top Secret files which revealed the extent to which our government has been spying upon us; just a Senator Church feared would happen, and in clear violation of the 4th Amendment; and FISA warrants be damned!!! The shroud of secrecy that surrounds the issuing and executing of FISA warrants gives our government all the cover it needs to perform unconstitutional and unwarranted surveillance upon every man, woman and child in this country; without our knowledge or permission.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that our government built a special building, the size of numerous football fields, all specifically for the purpose of storing all the information they are gathering on every person they have spied upon; including you and I. Each of us has our own electronic file with all our communications stored away for easy access. The only difference between your folders and mine are that mine probably have a few more red flags in them and are a bit thicker due to the fact that I’m most likely on their radar as a potential threat to national security, or the public safety; or whatever other code phrase they have for standing up for the Constitution and Bill of Rights these days.

For crying out loud people, think about it; they already have, not only an army, but a fully militarized police force that has no qualms about enforcing unconstitutional laws upon the citizenry. They already spy on us to the extent that any kind of organized resistance to government would be no secret to them. Now, once again, they are coming after our guns.

When I was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida there was a low security prison on the base where the prisoners worked on base doing lawn maintenance and other chores as part of their time spent in prison. Hell, they even had their own softball team that played in the base league; and they were tough to beat. Yet with all that freedom they were still prisoners.

That’s the state I see Americans as living in today, low security prisoners where they have a few meaningless rights to do as they please, but those rights are conditional upon their obeying the important laws; like not questioning government and making sure you keep the life blood of tax dollars flowing into their coffers. As long as you do these things you are free to do as you please; or free range slavery as I like calling it. But try exercising any real freedom and they will come down on you like a ton of bricks; just ask the Branch Davidians if you don’t believe me.

Our Founders left us plenty of warning signs to look for and things we needed to do to ensure that we retained the liberty this system of government was designed to protect. We have ignored them all and now the only thing missing from our servitude is a ball and chain shackled to our ankles.
But that’s okay, Trump’s gonna fix everything, and if he doesn’t then the Democrats will when they get their guy in the Oval Office. The Two Party Paradigm keeps on turnin’ and the people are none the wiser.

Well, one of these days reality is gonna pop up in front of you like those old clowns in the wind up music boxes; and when it does don’t blame me, blame yourselves; you’re the ones who placed football, Facebook, Reality TV and even your children and grandchildren over the preservation of your freedom. Liberty comes with a cost, and for generations the average American has been delinquent in paying that cost. Now the time is almost here to pay the piper.

Pop goes the weasel…

How many of y’all have ever gone camping? Now when I say camping I’m not talking about loading up the RV and sleeping in the comfort of a fold out bed while you watch your satellite TV, nor am I talking about going to a State or National Park that has fixed campgrounds with ready to use barbecue pits; what I’m talking about is the real deal; where you hike into the backwoods with only what you can carry in a backpack and live off the land for a few days.

If you’ve ever done that, gone camping that is, you’ve gotten about as close to being totally free as you’re going to get in this country. When you go camping you’re pretty much free to do anything you want without interference from anyone else. You could walk around naked if you should choose to do so. At the same time you alone are responsible for the consequences of the choices you make. For instance, if you should choose to walk around naked, and brush up against some poison oak, there are no clinics or drug stores in the woods where you can pick up some Calamine Lotion to relieve the itching.

When you’re camping like that you alone are responsible for your very survival. If you choose to sit around all day just basking in the sun and enjoying the great outdoors, then when you go to bed hungry you have only yourself to blame; because instead of choosing to hunt or fish for your supper you chose to be lazy. If another camper stumbles into your camp and attempts to take what you have there is no 911 you can call and no police to arrive to prevent someone from stealing your belongings or doing harm to you; either you defend yourself and what is yours or you face the consequences.

That is true freedom; and nobody experiences that when they live amongst society with all its rules and regulations regarding what you can and cannot do. That is also what our Founders called a State of Nature; not because we are living in nature itself, but because those are Natural Rights that belong to mankind when they live in a state of nature; free from the rules imposed upon them by society. There is another word to describe this state of nature: Liberty.

It never crossed my mind until later in life, but after having experienced the freedom, and the responsibility that came with going camping I have often wondered what it must have been like for the Pilgrims who disembarked from the Mayflower to seek a new life in an untamed wilderness. Although they were technically British subjects there were no authorities present to enforce whatever laws their government might have passed governing their lives. They knew absolute and total freedom; including the harsh reality that if they had a bad crop they starved over the winter.

I’ve also wondered what it would have been like to have been a homesteader who moved westward into the untamed Great Plains area before civilization caught up with them. They too knew freedom in its fullest extent. It was their responsibility to provide for all their needs, from shelter, to food, to their own defense.

People today say they want freedom, but what they want is freedom from responsibility. Let’s take the freedom of speech as an example. People want to be free to say whatever they want, but then when someone with more facts than them contradict their position they tend to get angry or offended, and seek to have the opposing view silenced. You see, people want that freedom to say whatever they want, but they DON’T want the responsibility to be able to support whatever they say or believe with facts and evidence.

This unwillingness to provide facts to support a position is what led speech to be guided by whatever is considered to be politically correct; one group of people censoring the speech of others simply because the truth often hurts and proves that a person’s position is founded upon lies. People can’t handle that; so we get what Winston Churchill said, “Some people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that’s an outrage.”

This absolute freedom, or liberty if you choose, is one of the things our government was established to preserve. I can’t imagine our Founders fighting a war against the mightiest army in the world to secure their own liberty, only to turn around and create a system of government which was designed to restrict their liberty. It’s as the Loyalist Mather Byles said when he argued against the Colonies seeking independence from Great Britain, “Which is better – to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?” It is simply inconceivable to me that our Founders would risk so much to free themselves from tyranny only to establish a tyrannical government of their own.

One can’t spend any amount of time reading the thoughts and correspondence of our Founders without encountering the word liberty. Whether they truly sought to preserve it or only pay lip service to it, liberty permeates the documents from the period which say America become and independent nation with a government established to secure it.

I constantly hear people say that they know their rights, but do they actually know them and understand where they come from? In his book The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine states that our civil rights have as their origin our Natural Rights. Yet I rarely hear people talk about their Natural Rights; only their civil rights; the ones they feel that can be controlled and restricted by law if it serves the public good.

Our Natural Rights are governed not by men, but by the laws of nature itself. The first and foremost of these Natural Laws is the law regarding self defense. As Samuel Adams so adeptly stated, “Among the Natural Rights of the Colonists are these First. a Right to Life; Secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best manner they can–Those are evident Branches of, rather than deductions from the Duty of Self Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature.”

One might take that to mean that Life, Liberty and the possession of Property are our natural rights; but they ignore the other right that Adams mentions; the right to defend those other rights in the best manner we can. What was the American Revolution if it wasn’t the Colonists defending their rights against their own government?

Getting back to Paine for a moment, he also states, “Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured.”

Although while serving as a Supreme Court Justice, James Wilson may have proven himself to be a hypocrite, he did once say, “Government … should be formed to secure and enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government which has not this in view as its principal object is not a government of the legitimate kind.”

Using that as your guideline, would you say that our government today is legitimate, or has it become illegitimate and corrupt? The very nature of government implies the power of making laws. Therefore, if the purpose of government is to secure and enlarge the natural rights of its members, then all laws passed by government should serve that end for them to be legitimate and lawful.

Yet as Frederic Bastiat says in the opening of his book The Law, “The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose!” How can you support a government that passes law after law which restricts the rights government was established to secure and enlarge?

I want you to read something now from Bastiat’s book on the purpose of the law. I know it is rather lengthy, but try and glean some understanding from his words and learn what the law is and what purpose it should serve:

What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

Each of us has a natural right—from God—to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties?

If every person has the right to defend—even by force—his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right—its reason for existing, its lawfulness—is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force—for the same reason—cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

If it is our right to use force to defend our other rights, then why is it a crime to use force against someone who only seeks to steal something from me; against someone who is not actually threatening my life? In Chapter 3 of Locke’s Second Treatise we read, “And hence it is, that he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him; it being to be understood as a declaration of a design upon his life: for I have reason to conclude, that he who would get me into his power without my consent, would use me as he pleased when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it; for no body can desire to have me in his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the right of my freedom, i.e. make me a slave. To be free from such force is the only security of my preservation; and reason bids me look on him, as an enemy to my preservation, who would take away that freedom which is the fence to it; so that he who makes an attempt to enslave me, thereby puts himself into a state of war with me. He that, in the state of nature, would take away the freedom that belongs to any one in that state, must necessarily be supposed to have a design to take away every thing else, that freedom being the foundation of all the rest; as he that, in the state of society, would take away the freedom belonging to those of that society or commonwealth, must be supposed to design to take away from them every thing else, and so be looked on as in a state of war.

This makes it lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than, by the use of force, so to get him in his power, as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him; because using force, where he has no right, to get me into his power, let his pretence be what it will, I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else. And therefore it is lawful for me to treat him as one who has put himself into a state of war with me, i.e. kill him if I can; for to that hazard does he justly expose himself, whoever introduces a state of war, and is aggressor in it.”

If it is our natural right to use force to defend the liberty that government was instituted to protect, does it not make sense that this same force can be used against government itself when it perverts the law and seeks to deprive us of our Natural Rights? Patrick Henry gave us a stern warning about protecting our rights; by force if necessary, “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force: Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.” (Source: Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1788)

Whenever you give up that force you are inevitably ruined…hmmm, that sounds a lot like the right of the people to keep and bear arms to me. In that same speech Henry would later say, “The Honorable Gentleman who presides, told us, that to prevent abuses in our Government, we will assemble in Convention, recall our delegated powers, and punish our servants for abusing the trust reposed in them. Oh, Sir, we should have fine times indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people. Your arms wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical; no longer democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all?”

Not only is our government seeking to deprive us of the ability to resist its encroachments upon our liberty, the people themselves are calling for such measures in the name of the public safety, or for the welfare of our children. Just look at all the recent marches protesting for tougher gun laws; as if criminals had any inclination to obey the law in the first place. These people are so ignorant regarding why we have a 2nd Amendment that they would see the people of this country totally disarmed against those who would tyrannize us; all in the name of the public good.

A perfect example of this widespread ignorance is the individual in the photo below. I do not know his name I only saw his image in one of the many articles about the protests arguing for tougher gun laws:

This young man is a perfect example of what happens when our educational system is taken over by government and the principles this country was founded upon are not taught to our youth. This kid actually believes that government has the power and authority to grant itself powers while at the same time limiting the rights of the very people who created government in the first place. The sad thing is, he is not alone in those beliefs; this country is full of people who are equally as ignorant. They have been so effectively indoctrinated that it is beyond their ability to think critically and examine the facts on their own merit without allowing their emotions to get in the way. They are no better than a herd of sheep who are being led around by their noses by those seeking to deprive them of the freedoms their government was instituted to secure and protect.

As much as I despise Joseph Story for his rulings while serving as a Supreme Court Justice, he did get this right about the right of the people to keep and bear arms, “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”

You may be willing to submit to tyranny, to sacrifice your only means of defending your liberty, but not me; I will never submit. Your government spies upon you on a day to day basis and you don’t care. Your government may be elected by you, but it represents powerful special interests and both its foreign and domestic policies are dictated by the Deep State; and again you don’t care. Your right to defend your rights, your life and your property are under constant attack, and you don’t care.

Well maybe you’ll care if you consider what John Adams once said in a letter to his wife Abigail, “Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.”

Our country was founded by men who would not submit to tyranny and it will only be saved by people of the same mettle and character; it will NOT be saved at the voting booth or by those who meekly submit while their rights are slowly being taken from them.

During the American Revolution George Washington delivered a speech to his men in which he said, “The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.” Those same words apply equally to Americans today; the only question is; what choice will the people of this country make?

There’s somethin’ wrong with the world today
I don’t know what it is
Something’s wrong with our eyes
We’re seein’ things in a different way
And God knows it ain’t his
~Steven Tyler~
(Livin’ On The Edge)

Have you ever been in a room filled with people, yet felt completely out of place, as if you didn’t belong there? If you have, then you’ll at least have somewhat of an understanding how I feel whenever I leave my home and have to interact with the people of modern day America. It’s bad enough dealing with people from my own generation who have allowed emotions and political party allegiance to overrule their ability to think critically and analyze facts; but the youth of this country are something else altogether, and make me fear for the future of this once great country.

When I look around me and see the younger generation that is growing up to assume its place in the world I can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of doom and despair. However, that sense of doom is also accompanied by the comforting assurance that I’ll probably be dead within a decade and won’t have to witness what happens to this country when they finally take over. I have to wonder though, from whatever eternal resting place my soul goes to will I suffer as I watch the country I love go down the toilet? If that truly is the case, I can only imagine the anguish the souls of our Founding Fathers must be suffering as they watch all their hard work and sacrifices being taken for naught, and the freedoms they fought to secure for us being thrown aside as if they were garbage.

I remember, as if it were just yesterday, my senior year in high school when someone got the idea to put a rock into a box and sell it to consumers as a PET. At $4 each, the person who marketed these Pet Rocks sold over 1.5 million of them; making himself a millionaire almost overnight. I think it was at that moment in time that I began to get an inkling of how stupid people actually can be. I remember thinking to myself: “Who in the hell is going to pay $4 for a rock when there is a whole lot full of them across the street from my house?” When the Pet Rock phenomenon took off, I came to the realization that people are stupid and that they’ll fall for almost anything if it is packaged and marketed properly.

Yet I still can’t help but being shocked every time I hear of one of these new trends that young people are following; such as eating Tide Pods or snorting condoms up their noses only to pull them out through their mouths. I’m not saying I didn’t do stupid and risky things as a youth, I did. But never, and I mean NEVER did I do something stupid just for stupidity’s sake; which leaves me to wonder what the future holds for this country when these young people finally take over.

I was born into this world at the latter end of the period known as the Baby Boomer generation; names so due to the massive increase in births after World War II veterans returned home and began producing children of their own. It was my generation which gave America the hippy counter culture movement which saw a departure from traditional American values and led to what we are witnessing in America today.

What’s wrong with America today is not due to the fact that our government has been run too long by Republicans or Democrats, it is a systematic and multi pronged attack upon all the values that made this country such a wonderful place to live.

People think that just because the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed that Communism is dead. Well, it’s not; it’s alive and thriving right here in America; having been repackaged and sold to the American people under the guise of Progressivism. Progressivism is being taught in our schools, it is being broadcast on the shows and films we watch and it is being touted as normal and acceptable behavior by a complicit news media. Our American values are under constant attack from all sides, and if we don’t have an anchor, some sort of belief system to hold on to, America will fall from within; just as Stalin said it would.

If you wanted to undermine, or subvert a nation, how would you go about doing it? Would you incite an armed revolution against established authority, or would you resort to other, more subtle means? I think if one cared about preserving lives and preventing as much damage to the infrastructure of a country they would choose a less violent method; but how to accomplish such a subversion without an armed rebellion?

It’s pretty simple actually; you start with the youth of a country by slowly, but surely, eroding the principles held by previous generations. If you can slowly erode a country’s patriotism, its spirituality, it’s love of liberty, then you can begin to shift the attitude of an entire nation until eventually you have brought them into your line of thinking without ever firing a shot.

When I was growing up the hippy movement was in full swing; protesting against the war in Vietnam and preaching their communal philosophy. Yet does not commune and communism bear a striking resemblance? The elder people, of whom my parents belonged, did not realize the danger of the concepts and philosophies being espoused by these hippies; otherwise they would have resorted to other measures than simply calling them misguided youth.

Many of the leaders of this so-called hippy movement had close ties to the Communist Party and used the hippy movement as a means to forward their goal of institution Socialism, the precursor to Communism, in America. It was so effective that one of their own was elected President; Barack Obama, and no one batted an eye in regards to his close ties to known Communist sympathizers like Bill Ayers.

Some of the means by which Socialism is forced upon a people is by destroying their faith; destroying their understanding of patriotism, and by destroying traditional values and morality. All those values are what guided our Founders when they sought to create our American Republic, and those who sought to destroy us from within knew that if they were to succeed they would have to change how we perceived these things.

So they infiltrated the media so that they could slowly shift the attitudes of this country away from traditional values to those which included acceptance of homosexuality and the breakdown of the traditional, or nuclear family unit: father, mother and children.

They also infiltrated the news so that they could provide biased reporting on the issues to manipulate the mindset of the millions of people who trust them to report the facts.

They have also infiltrated our clergy to the extent that Bible based religion is rarely what one finds when one attends church. Just witness the explosive growth of these mega churches where people come to feel good about themselves; without any reference being made to sin and the punishment for it.

Finally, and probably most importantly, they infiltrated our educational system so that they could teach their social justice visions of a global society which goes against all that our Founders felt our system of government should be.

This process probably began before I was even born, but I only caught the early stages of it and the changes that this country was undergoing were still in their infancy. But since I was born 6 generations of Americans have grown up having this twisted and perverted vision of what it means to be an American force fed to them; and for the most part the people of this country have swallowed the lies hook, line and sinker.

That is why so many people are steadfast in their belief that America is a democracy, not a Republic. That is why so many people are willing to surrender their rights for the public safety; because they have not been taught the nature of their rights; that they cannot be surrendered unless the people submit to servitude and bondage to their government.

When someone picks up a gun and shoots up a public place, killing dozens, do you think the gun is going to go the hell and face eternity for what it did, or is it the person who will face eternal damnation for their sin? If you took away every gun on the planet, the evil in people’s hearts would still exist. You cannot legislate evil out of existence…you simply can’t do it.

Good and evil are choices we as people make; either we choose to serve God or we choose to serve Satan; and the choices we make in our own lives are reflected in our country and our government. Isn’t that why Madison said, “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” If our government is corrupt, if there is this so-called Deep State, then could it not possibly be due to the fact that we as a people are corrupt and allow our government to abuse its power and allow outside influences to enter in and control its decision making process?

God gave us free will, He gave us our rights and our liberty. Do you honestly think He will bestow His blessings upon this country when we allow His gifts to be taken from us without a fight? What’s the old saying, “God helps them who help themselves”? Do you think you can just sit there on your couches and do nothing while your rights are being taken from you, then get on your knees at night and pray that God comes to our country’s aid?

If we want God’s help we are going to have to earn it by turning from our wicked ways and start giving our allegiance to Him and His laws, not men and the laws passed by men. I have heard many arguments saying that our country was not founded upon the Christian religion. Maybe, maybe not; but one thing is certain, our Founders believed in a God, or a Supreme Creator, and they believed that it was through His divine providence that they would either succeed or fail in their endeavors.

It is said that Thomas Jefferson was a Deist; one who believed in the existence of an indifferent Creator who did not interfere in the affairs of man. If that is the case, why would he write the following quotes:

“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” (Source: Declaration of Independence)

“God who gave us life gave us liberty.” (Source: A Summary View of the Rights of British America)

“…can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever . . . .” (Source: Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII)

“Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.” (Source: Personal motto and found above the entrance on the gates to Monticello)

Our country may not have been founded upon any single denomination of the Christian faith, but it was most certainly founded by Christians. They felt that divine providence, or the hand of God, helped them secure their liberty from Great Britain, and that our country could not, and would not survive if we did not remain a virtuous and moral people.

It is said that the great firebrand orator Patrick Henry once said, “It is when people forget God that tyrants forge their chains.” Now he may or may not have said that, but he did say, “For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.” (Source: Speech given at St John’s Church, March 23, 1775)

Our Founders felt that our liberty was a gift to us from God, and it was our duty as Christians to defend that liberty against all attacks, doesn’t it then seem logical that if we fail to uphold our duty then God would withdraw His support for our nation and allow us to crumble from within?

How many instances in the Bible are there when God allowed His people to suffer because they had sinned? He even killed off all mankind except for Noah and his family for the wickedness of man. He destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and He allowed His people to wander in the wilderness for 40 years because they were not yet righteous enough to enter the Promised Land. Those are just some of the instances where God has punished man because they forsook Him and His Laws. What makes people think He wouldn’t punish us today if we forsook Him?

Our Founders did not meekly sit back and cry in their beers about the laws being passed by their government; they resisted them by protests and acts of civil disobedience until they felt that their only recourse was to take up arms against their government and sever the ties which bound them to it. That is the nature and character of true patriots, not those who think they can change America for the better at the voting booth, or by marching in the streets carrying placards and chanting slogans.

Thomas Paine wrote about the summer soldier and sunshine patriot when he said that they will shrink from the service of their country, i.e. defending the liberty that was their gift from God. Yet he also said, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

Didn’t Christ tell His disciples something similar, “And ye shall be hated by all men for My name’s sake, but he that endureth to the end shall be saved.” How many of them met a brutal death? It is said that Peter was crucified upside down because he felt he was not worthy to be crucified in the same position as his Lord. Andrew was tied to a cross; a more slow and painful death; the whole time preaching the Gospel of Christ to those who passed by. James, the son of Zebedee, was beheaded for his faith. Philip was scourged and crucified. Thomas and Matthew were speared or stabbed with swords. Of all the apostles, only John lived to an old age; banished to the Isle of Patmos.

All of these men suffered, just as Jesus had said they would, and all persevered to the end; maintaining their faith. How many of us today actually have that kind of courage; to stand up in opposition to our friends, our family, and our government itself, when we see our most sacred rights and liberty being taken from us? Yet we, who have both little faith and little courage, expect God to bless America? REALLY???

Noah Webster, the great American Lexicographer who gave us Webster’s Dictionary, was also a devout man. Webster is quoted as saying, “All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”

Can you not see the correlation between what Webster said and the rampant evil that permeates throughout America today? Can you not see, after all that I have said, that hoping for a change for the better at the voting booth is an exercise in futility and doomed to fail?

It is my honest belief that God has withdrawn His support for this country because we have forsaken Him. Sure, many of us profess to be Christians, but then we sit back in silence while a very vocal minority take Him out of our schools and public places. If we want to make America great again we have to prove to God that we are worthy of His divine protection; and so far I haven’t seen much evidence of that happening.

When people look at the rampant stupidity and crime that permeates America today they often ask, “What the hell is wrong with people?” It’s funny how close to the truth they are when they say that; as hell is what’s wrong with America, or at least the influence of the ruler of Hell upon the people of this country.

Two hundred years before I made my appearance on Planet Earth another man was born in the United States who his parents named Noah; after the Biblical character who built the ark. Noah grew up to become a writer of textbooks and American lexicography; or one who writes dictionaries. Go to any bookstore and you will find the modern edition of a book he first published in 1828; Webster’s Dictionary.

We as parents and as a people have failed in that we have not raised our children in the principles of virtue and morality; that there are laws higher than those passed by man, and that there are consequences when we disregard those laws. We as a people have forsaken, not only God’s Laws, but the very principles which our Founders built the American Republic upon. Yet we sit around scratching our heads, wondering why things are so screwed up in this country.

In the Book of Jeremiah it states, “At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. ” Source: Jeremiah 18:7-8)

I am not the most righteous and virtuous man, and I’m certainly not a saint; not by any measure. But I am open minded enough to realize that our problems are caused by our reliance on us, as humans, to fix all that is wrong in this country without any divine help from a benevolent Creator who will come to our aid if only we open our hearts to Him and obey His laws.

Even a fool like me can see that; why can’t you?

Historians and statisticians place the population of the original 13 Colonies in 1776 at around 2.5 million people. To give you an idea of how few in number they were, the current population of New York City is estimated to be around 8.5 million.

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but when you get a group of people together, especially when they come from different backgrounds, it is next to impossible to get them to come to any kind of agreement on something. So it is nothing short of miraculous that on July 2, 1776 fifty-six men, all from different backgrounds, all agreed that they would no longer submit to the tyranny of their government; that they would risk all that they owned and all that they were for one simple goal: LIBERTY.

It boggles my mind that people would think that our Founders would risk all that they had; that they would suffer the horrors of war to obtain liberty, only to turn around and create a system of government whose purpose was to destroy the liberty they had just won for themselves. Our history books, although even those are being revised and altered, teach us that our Founding Fathers were patriots.

But what is patriotism? Is it someone who obeys the law, pays their taxes on time, supports their government, (right or wrong), and respects the flag? Or is it something deeper; a firm attachment to the belief that all men are created equal, with that equality not being in status in life or wealth, but in their possession of certain unalienable rights? I may be alone in my beliefs, but I believe a person’s patriotism is not defined by how they support their government, or their country for that matter; but by the extent to which they defend the liberty which our Founders fought so hard to secure for them.

Using my definition, how patriotic are you; how ready and willing are you to stand up for your rights; even if it means losing all your friends and alienating yourself from your own family? I don’t want to make this a religious sermon, but when Christ began His ministry those who followed Him gave up everything to be near His side and hear His teachings. There was something so compelling about the message Christ was teaching that it caused His disciples to forsake everything just so that they could hear it.

In the end, the followers of Jesus all faced persecution, and even death, for their beliefs. Yet they did not back down from their testimony or their ministry just because it was unpopular; they knew the truth of the things they were speaking; and the fear of death was of less concern to them than the fear of eternal damnation for forsaking their Lord when faced with persecution or the threat of death.

Such is the nature of one who truly believes in a cause. Some might call them zealots, but didn’t our Founders risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor for the message that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, and that the purpose of government should be to preserve those rights? Could it not be said that, they too, were zealots for the cause of liberty?

Did not Patrick Henry proclaim to the world, “Give me liberty or give me death”? Did not Nathan Hale tell his captors, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country”? Such was the nature, and the character, of those who fought for the cause of liberty back in 1776. These men were willing to die just to ensure that their posterity would enjoy the blessing of liberty. Forget risking their lives in the defense of that liberty; I can’t get people to even spend an hour or so of their time every day trying to learn what liberty actually is, or how our system of government is slowly and methodically depriving them of it.

The Bill of Rights does not grant us a single right; it only protects rights which we already had against incursions upon them by the federal government. Yet the average person today barely bats an eye when their government enacts laws which violate their rights; in fact, the people themselves are often the ones who call for measures which restrict their liberty–all in the name of things like public safety or national security.

In 1788 Patrick Henry would declare, “You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your Government.”

In 1791 James Wilson would write, “Government … should be formed to secure and enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government which has not this in view as its principal object is not a government of the legitimate kind.”

Yet people today support their government, nay, they define their patriotism by the extent to which they support that government; even when the things it does run contrary to the purposes for which it was instituted. Then, when anyone has the audacity to call them on it they become angered and question the patriotism of those who attempt to expose the hypocrisy of their position.

Our Founders believed that their liberty was a gift to them from their Creator, and that it was their duty as patriots to defend it against all those who would threaten it. That is one reason they feared and despised democracies; because the will of a majority was all that was required to deprive the minority of their rights; and what is the smallest minority in the world if it is not the individual?

Not only did our Founders believe it was their right to defend their liberty, they believed it was their duty as well. In 1771 Samuel Adams wrote, “The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.”

Just one year later Adams would write, “Among the Natural Rights of the Colonists are these First. a Right to Life; Secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best manner they can–Those are evident Branches of, rather than deductions from the Duty of Self Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature…” (My emphasis)

Today, when one speaks out openly and loudly about the many violations of our rights which our government is guilty of, they are laughed at and scorned. Furthermore, when one attempts to resist the laws passed by our government which restrict their rights they are persecuted by the people, vilified by the media, and prosecuted by those who are actually the ones deserving of prosecution for violating our rights. What routinely happens today is the same question Thomas Jefferson posed to William Small back in 1775, “Can it be believed that a grateful people will suffer [individuals] to be consigned to execution, whose sole crime has been the developing and asserting their rights?”

Today our government passes laws, often at the behest of the people themselves, which destroy the liberty our system of government was instituted to protect. In 1850 a Frenchman named Frederic Bastiat wrote about exactly that scenario when he said, “The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!”

Yet people today define their patriotism by the extent to which they obey the law? Thomas Jefferson once explained, “… law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” (Source: Letter to Francis Gilmer, 1816)

Continuing with what Bastiat said in his book The Law, we read, “Each of us has a natural right—from God—to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two.”

That is the principle upon which our Founders rested their argument that they had the right to sever the ties which bound them to a system of government which sought to, “…reduce them under absolute Despotism…”

Patriotism is not submission to a government of almost unlimited power and authority. It is not submitting to laws which violate your God-given rights. Patriotism is the willingness to stand up and defend the rights your government was instituted to protect; nothing more and nothing less.

Unfortunately, for the most part, patriotism is a thing of the past; something few really understand, and fewer still are willing to exhibit as a personal character trait; in short, patriotism in not politically correct in modern day America. Although I don’t think they would have been so crude, I think were our Founders alive today they would tell the people of America to stick their political correctness where the sun don’t shine; (If you get my drift).

Our Founders were patriots. Those who resisted the tyranny of their government in 1861 when they declared their independence from the Union were patriots. It follows then that if those who resist tyranny are patriots, then those who seek to impose tyranny upon the people are the enemies of liberty; and it doesn’t matter if they are Republican or Democrat, or if they are elected representatives of the people or the general citizenry themselves; they are all to be resisted if you wish to consider yourself a true patriot.

Thomas Jefferson famously said that “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” I wonder them, if resistance to tyranny is obedience to God, is submitting to tyranny obedience to Satan?

Ponder that thought over your weekend…

On February 8, 1788 the Fifty-first of 85 essays written by Publius was published in newspapers across the State of New York in an effort to convince people that the proposed Constitution posed no dangers to their rights and the sovereignty of the States. Written by James Madison, Federalist 51 has one point I would like to take a moment to address. In his essay Madison states that, “If men were angels no government would be necessary.” What do you think Madison meant by that?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think he meant that men often show a lack of concern for the rights and property of others, and that some form of government is needed to ensure that both the rights and the property of the people be protected. Speaking before the Virginia Convention some 4 decades later, Madison affirms my stance that governments should be instituted to protect the rights of both property and the people, “It is sufficiently obvious, that persons and property are the two great subjects on which Governments are to act; and that the rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted. These rights cannot well be separated.”

Rights, liberty, freedom; these were all things of great concern to those who lived back in the period when our country was seeking its independence from Great Britain, and when attempting to frame a system of government for itself. Many of those who opposed the proposed system of government outlined in the constitution did so because it did not contain a Bill of Rights which would place absolute restrictions upon the authority of the federal government to violate certain rights.

Patrick Henry, a staunch opponent to the proposed Constitution, went so far as to say, “You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your Government.”

Although his actions as a Supreme Court Justice would show that he, as do most politicians, spoke out of both sides of his mouth, (i.e. he lied), James Wilson once said, “Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.” (Source: Of the Natural Rights of Individuals)

I could easily fill three or four pages with nothing but quotes proving that our Founders believed that one of the most vital functions of government was the preservation of the liberty of those governed; but I hope that the few I have provided are sufficient to convince you of this fact.

Therefore it stands to reason that if government is instituted to preserve our rights, our liberty, then these things existed prior to the existence of government; does it not? All our Founders, even those who considered themselves Deists, felt that our rights were gifts from our Creator, or God. You don’t have to believe in God yourself, but you must accept that most of them did, and they felt that it was He who bestowed these gifts upon us.

Does it not then make sense that if government seeks to deprive the people of their rights that it, not only commits a crime against the people, but it is an offense to God Himself? Is it not also reasonable to conclude that one should fear the consequences of having to explain to God Almighty why you let His gift of liberty be stripped away from you without a fight over whatever temporal punishments might be inflicted upon you for standing up for your rights?

In 1804 one of the lesser known Founding Fathers, John Dickinson, said the following, “KINGS or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness …. We claim them from a higher source—from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives. In short, they are founded on the immutable maxims of reason and justice. It would be an insult on the divine Majesty to say, that he has given or allowed any man or body of men a right to make me miserable. If no man or body of men has such a right, I have a right to be happy. If there can be no happiness without freedom, I have a right to be free.”

Even Alexander Hamilton, the bastard child of a Scotsman living in British West Indies, said the following, “The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty, is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society.” (Source: The Farmer Refuted)

Not only is our liberty a gift from our Creator, it is our duty and responsibility to defend it from all those who would seek to deprive us of it; including our government. Samuel Adams, that firebrand who was a driving force behind the Son’s of Liberty, said the following, “The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.”

Thomas Jefferson, in the document which gave birth to these independent States united, stated the following, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

I think I have made 3 things pretty clear by now. First I have proven that government is instituted to preserve and protect the rights and liberty of those it governs. Secondly, I have shown how government does not grant us these things; they are gifts from our Creator. Finally, I have shown how it is our DUTY to resist any attempts to deprive us of these rights.

All that is left to discuss is the means by which we the people can resist the violations of our rights or the restrictions upon our liberty by our government. If you were to do any research into the period leading up to the actual War for Independence you would see that it was anything but peaceful; especially in the area surrounding the city of Boston. The patriots who lived in that era did not sit behind their keyboards and write blog posts or letters to their elected officials begging them to restore their liberty; although delegates to the Continental Congress did send numerous petitions to the King doing just that.

However, the people often took matters into their own hands and perpetrated numerous acts of civil disobedience. Right off the top of my head the Boston Tea Party comes to mind. In his personal diary John Adams would write this of the destruction of the tea by the Son’s of Liberty, “This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire. The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered — something notable And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I can’t but consider it as an Epocha in History.”

Yet the dumping of the tea into Boston Harbor was not the only thing those angry at the actions of their government did. Tax collectors were tarred and feathered and their offices vandalized. The mansion of Andrew Oliver, the person chosen to collect the taxes imposed by the Stamp Act, was ransacked. The following night the Son’s of Liberty marched upon the house of the Lieutenant Governor, Thomas Hutchinson, whereupon they ransacked and vandalized it as well.

After the angry mob had dispersed, Hutchinson would write, “Not contented with tearing off all the wainscot and hangings and splitting the doors to pieces they beat down the Partition walls and although that alone cost them near two hours they cut down the cupola or lantern and they began to take the slate and boards from the roof and were prevented only by the approaching daylight from a total demolition of the building. The garden fence was laid flat and all my trees &c broke down to the ground. Such ruins were never seen in America.”

These events may sound harsh enough, but the spark that ignited the armed conflict between the patriots and the agents of the King came when General Thomas Gage sent his men to confiscate the weapons held by the Bostonians at the armory at Lexington and Concord. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back; to use a modern colloquialism. Those faced with the possible deprivation of their basic right to self defense did the only thing that a true patriot would do; they took up their arms and defended that right with physical violence against those who sought to deprive them of that right.

Many a leading Founder felt that the use or arms, or physical violence, was justified when the people were confronted by those who seek to deprive them of their fundamental rights. In a letter to George Mason, George Washington would write, “That no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment to use a—ms in defence of so valuable a blessing, on which all the good and evil of life depends; is clearly my opinion; Yet Arms I would beg leave to add, should be the last resource…” (April 5, 1769)

In 1774, future father of the constitution James Madison would declare, “We take this occasion also to give it as our opinion, that the blow struck in the Massachusetts government is a hostile attack on this and every other colony, and a sufficient warrant to use violence and reprisal, in all cases where it may be expedient for our security and welfare.” (Source: Speech given in response to Boston’s actions in response to the Coercive Acts)

Our Founders believed that diplomacy should always be tried before resorting to violence; but they also realized that there comes a time when diplomacy has either failed, or is not called for, and that force should be used against the forceful deprivation of certain fundamental rights; such as the right to keep and bear arms.

These men we read about in history books knew that if they sat back and let their government pass laws which violated their rights it would set a precedent for future violations of other rights; therefore they resisted each and every attempt to violate their rights as British citizens. This is what Madison would write about years later in his Memorial and Remonstrance, “Because it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entagled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it.”

Unfortunately, people have forgotten that; they have grown soft and complacent; willing to accept numerous violations of their rights without a peep in response. Worse, they scorn and deride those who have the courage to stand up and decry these violations of their rights. One look at how a person views the actions of Edward Snowden ought to be sufficient to prove this. If you think Snowden is a criminal who ought to be prosecuted, then you obviously have no concern for the fact that you have absolutely no privacy; that your government is spying upon you almost 24/7. If, on the other hand, you view Snowden as a true patriot who only attempted to shine a light upon the crimes being committed by your government, then there is a glimmer of hope for you.

People do not realize it, but history is repeating itself right before their very eyes. Their government, (and I say their because I no longer claim allegiance to it, or support for it), has a long history of abuses against our rights which prove a clear and deliberate attempt to reduce them under absolute Despotism; and Donald Trump is no better than the rest of them in that regard.

Due to the pathetic state of our educational system; which is best described as public indoctrination centers, the people of this country do not understand their rights, the true purpose for which their government was established, and that it is their duty to defend their rights from invasion by any and all who would threaten them; including their government.

I don’t know if you know the name Yuri Bezemov, but he was a Soviet defector who came to the United States around 1987. Well Bezemov tried to warn the people of this country about the subversion of the underlying principles America was founded upon in the effort to transform America from a country which enjoyed a maximum amount of liberty to a country that was almost Communist in nature.

In one of his speeches Bezemov stated, “According to my opinion, and the opinions of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages. The first stage being “demoralization”. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of [their] enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least 3 generation of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism; American patriotism.”

It’s just as Lenin supposedly said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” The gradual erosion of our rights is directly attributed to the fact that people have not been taught what their rights are; therefore they show no concern when those rights are sliced away at by their government.

But there are those of us, who for one reason or another, the brainwashing and propaganda has not taken hold, and we know what our rights are, and are becoming mightily upset that our rights are slowly being taken away from us.

Our freedom of speech and expression has all but been done away with due to political correctness; our freedom to worship our God as we see fit has been limited to safe spaces where we won’t offend others; the barrier protecting our right to privacy has been torn down under the guise of fighting a foreign enemy, and most importantly, our right to keep and bear arms is under constant attack. Tell me that doesn’t sound like a long train of abuses, I dare you!

If you truly loved your country; if you truly loved your liberty, you would take for your motto the words of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

And if you want my honest opinion, our government has not deserved our support for over 100 years. If more people were as angry at their government I was, maybe then it would once again fear us and stop violating our rights. But as long as the majority continue to support it by participating in the fraud of electing people to fill the seats of power within it, it can continue forward in its march towards tyranny, until it backs the true patriots into a corner where their only recourse is the same the Founders faced when the Kings men tried to take THEIR guns; and believe me, you don’t want that to happen if you can possibly avoid it.

I have no way of knowing for certain, but I’d imagine that there are quite a few parents out there who read these little, (okay, not always so little), rants of mine. If that is the case, then I’m certain the following sounds familiar, “How many times do I have to tell you ___________before you stop doing that?” Although I am nobody’s father but to my own son, you can imagine my frustration when the information I attempt to share in these rants go in one ear and out the other of those who need the knowledge I am trying to impart the most.

Understanding how our system of government was supposed to work and what our rights are and how they were to be protected by government is not rocket science; any 5th Grade student could learn these principles if they were taught in our public schools. So why is it that otherwise intelligent people cannot grasp them; this is the question that has been plaguing me and often keeps me awake at night?

Is it because if people chose to accept the things I write about it would mean they would have to actually change their entire belief system regarding our system of government; and that is simply too much effort to ask of people? Is it because believing that our system is corrupt beyond repair; that there is no hope of fixing it at the ballot box is to deprive people of the belief that their votes matter? Or could it be that they have had their eyes blinded to the truth because they have rejected the Laws and the teachings found in the Bible; that God has slammed their minds shut to the truth?

Listen, I don’t want to come across as all holier than thou, but there has to be some explanation why otherwise intelligent people cannot accept facts and evidence when it is laid out in a relatively easy to understand format.

I am not the best writer in the world, but having been writing for almost 2 decades now I have made improvements in my prose and my grammar. And I certainly am not the most upright and devout of Christians either. Yet throughout the Bible God has chosen people to send His message to the world who felt that they were unworthy; the story of Moses comes to mind. Did not Moses believe that he was not the best choice to deliver God’s message to Pharoah? Was not Moses, although he accomplished the task assigned to him by God, forbidden from entering the Promised Land? Yet God still chose Moses; even with all his flaws and foibles. I’m not saying this is what has happened, but maybe God has chosen me to deliver this message to you.

Our system of government, as originally designed, is relatively easy to understand. There was to be a Congress which consisted of two houses; one to represent the States in their sovereign and independent capacity, and another to represent the people in their sovereign and independent capacity. This Congress was to have certain specifically enumerated powers upon which it could legislate upon, and anything they did which went beyond those powers was deemed usurpation and could simply be ignored by the States.

There was to be an Executive, or President, who was to be the spokesperson of these States united when engaged in discussions with other foreign leaders; he/she was to be Commander in Chief of the military when it was called into the service of its country, and he was to faithfully ensure that all laws under the Constitution were upheld. He was not to be an elected monarch whose will and power were above Congress; otherwise why would the power to impeach a President be given to Congress?

Finally, there was to be a Supreme Court, or a Judiciary, whose job was to apply the law in cases where they held jurisdiction. They were not to interpret the law, or find hidden, or implied powers within the Constitution which granted, both them and the government overall, a wide range of powers not specifically enumerated in Article 1, Section 8.

The powers of the federal government were to primarily be exercised in regards to war and the regulation of commerce and the keeping of the peace between the States, The powers given the federal government were not to be exercised primarily on behalf of the people who occupied those States; that authority was retained by the States themselves.

This is something I have proven time and time again with the following quote found in Federalist 45 and written by James Madison, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”

I have also attempted to prove that one of the primary functions of our government was not to coddle and provide for all the needs of the people from birth to the grave, but to secure the liberty that was a gift to man from Almighty God. I believe Thomas Jefferson said exactly that; numerous times.
In Jefferson’s book, Notes on the State of Virginia, he states, “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”

Jefferson also stated something very similar 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…” (emphasis added)

If you truly believe in God, does it not seem like you are tempting fate and asking for eternal damnation to reject God’s gift of liberty to you; only to choose the creature comforts and servitude to a government consisting of corrupt men and women with no fear of God in them?

Again quoting Jefferson, “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God…” Therefore, it stands to reason that if you have rejected God’s gift of liberty, and the defense thereof, then you must have fallen under the influence of Satan and have become blind to the light of the truth. I don’t know why that truth is so apparent to me; when I am not the best of Christians; but it is painfully clear to me and it cause me great anguish and frustration that I cannot get you to see it as clearly as I do.

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Black Robed Regiment but they played a crucial part in our country seeking its independence from Great Britain. The Black Robed Regiment were clergymen, or pastors if you will, who thundered forth their sermons from the pulpit on topics such as the rights bestowed upon man by God and how Great Britain was seeking to undermine those rights. They did as must to stir the hearts and minds of the patriots of 76 towards independence as did Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense.

How many pastors or religious leaders in today’s society do you know who thunder forth from their pulpits that the tyranny of our government today MUST BE RESISTED? I know of only one, and he ran for President in 2008; and got just over 199 thousand votes. All the others I have heard, especially the candy coated Christians, such as Joel Osteen, are of the feel good, no punishment for sin brand of Christians that teach those who follow them that God has a plan for them, and that there is no effort required on their part to obtain salvation. The sad thing is, people are fundamentally lazy, and they flock to these charlatans by the thousands; if not millions.

If liberty truly is the gift of God to us, and if government was instituted to secure and protect that liberty, then why is it that the people, and those who tend to their spiritual needs as pastors and priests, not speak out frequently and loudly against the dangers of an all powerful government which seeks to deprive people of their God-given rights?

James Madison once said that “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.” Yet people today shun knowledge as if it were the Bubonic Plague; especially when accepting that knowledge would require that they exert any effort in the defense of the liberty that our government was established to protect. Dear me, I must have confused the average American with a true patriot; my mistake.

Did not Patrick Henry cherish liberty over all else so much that he proclaimed, “Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings-give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else…” I have often wondered what Patrick Henry would say to America today in a time when Facebook and Football are far more important than knowing what your rights are, and defending them against the intrusions of government, or the politically correct masses?
If knowledge truly is the key to preserving our rights, then does it not make sense that the obtainment of knowledge should be our first and foremost priority? Yet history records numerous times when the people have fallen into iniquity and seen their freedoms stolen from them by evil and designing men. Philosophers, such as Plato, warned that “The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

Our Founders warned of the dangers of allowing unprincipled men to hold high office, ” When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers, ‘just men who will rule in the fear of God.’ The preservation of [our] government depends on the faithful discharge of this Duty; if the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded. If [our] government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the Divine Commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the Laws.”

Finally, the Bible itself warns of what will happen when people choose ignorance over knowledge, “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge…” (Hosea 4:6)

Liberty cannot be preserved when the people remain ignorant as to what it is and allow those who govern over them to overstep their just authority and pass laws which restrict it. Liberty is not a gift from your government that they can revoke when it suits the public welfare; it is a gift from God that cannot be revoked except by the Almighty Himself.

Yet how we place our faith and trust in men, who are just as flawed as we are, to preserver that liberty for us. How we seek just the right candidate to answer all our prayers and make America great again without looking inwards and asking what we, ourselves, can do to make America great again.

In 1944 Judge Billings Learned Hand gave a speech in which he said, “I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

I may be alone in seeing it this way, but I associate how well one defends their liberty with how much they love God. After all, if liberty is the gift of God to all men, then shouldn’t the preservation of that gift be in proportion to how much they love God? Asking someone you elect to restore something they had no right to take from you in the first place shows how ignorant people are when it comes to both the nature and origin of their liberty.

I cannot drive 5 miles without seeing one or two of those bumper stickers that say God Bless America. Why should He when we have rejected Him; kicked Him out of our schools and our hearts?

If you want America to become great again, there is only one way that can happen; it will happen only when we open our hearts to God and let Him back into our lives and seek His help in making this country a land which is based upon the principle of individual liberty for all.

As the Bible says, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

Anything else is an exercise in futility and doomed to fail. As long as we have rested the preservation of our liberty on the hope that elected officials will be good men and not violate it. As Patrick Henry said, “Shew me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty? I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.”

No, if we want our liberty back we are going to have to open our hearts and minds to God and ask for His divine assistance, just as our Founders did in 1776 when they chose to take up arms against those who would deprive them of their liberty and demand that they submit to tyranny; anything less and we are destined for failure.

“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them.”
~George Washington~
Address to Continental Army Prior to Battle of Long Island
(August 22, 1776)

When my wife gave birth to our son she made up two sets of flash cards; one with numbers and one with the alphabet on them. When my son was old enough to sit up straight on his own she began teaching him his ABC’s and how to count to 10. By the time my son was 3 he was reading Dr. Seuss books on his own, and by the time he entered Kindergarten could already count to 1 million. By the time he was in 8th grade he was solving algebra equations in his head.

I am not saying this to brag about my son–although there may be a bit of fatherly pride involved–but the reason I say this is because all education is a step by step process. You don’t learn how to run first, you learn how to crawl, then to stand, then to walk, and finally to run. It’s the same with education; you first must learn to add and subtract before you can learn to multiply and divide; you must learn to multiply and divide before you begin to learn fractions; you must learn fractions before you can learn algebra; so on and so forth.

But what if everything you had learned on a particular subject up until this very moment was a lie; would you still consider yourself to be educated on that subject? What if what you had learned wasn’t exactly a lie, but vital information had been withheld from you; painting the subject matter with a certain, specific bias?

Today, when people go to vote, they are making decisions based upon their understanding of how our system of government is supposed to function. Unfortunately, the education they have received is, at best, only partially accurate. For instance, if you were to ask most people in this country what kind of government we have they would most likely respond by saying we have a democracy; which simply is not the case.

Our Founding Fathers, almost to a one, despised and feared democracies. James Madison, the so-called Father of our Constitution, once said, “Democracy is the most vile form of government. … democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as the have been violent in their deaths.”

That doesn’t sound like a gleaming endorsement of democracy to me. So why are we taught that America is a democracy? Why is it that our news media and those we elect keep referring to our democracy? In short, why is this and so many other lies being touted as the truth; and more importantly, why do people refuse to accept the truth when it contradicts the lie they have believed for most of their lives?

I went through the same public fool system, or indoctrination center if you prefer, as did so many others; graduating from high school in the year of our nation’s bicentennial, 1976. I was taught the same lies as everyone else. So why is it that I’m able to accept the truth while others aren’t? Why is it that I have such a driving desire to learn as much as I can while others choose to remain in an abject state of ignorance?

Could it possibly be that somehow I am a distant relation to one of our Founding Fathers; that within my veins flows the blood of an ancestor to a true blue American patriot; maybe someone who suffered the hardships of the winter at Valley Forge, or possibly was in attendance when our Declaration of Independence was signed? I certainly don’t know much about my own genealogy, so it might be possible. All I do know is that while others prefer TV, video games, getting drunk, or whatever else it is that occupies their spare time, I prefer to study the history and the founding of my country.

Yet people say I’m smart. I’m not smart, I’m driven; I’m obsessive; and above all else, I am willing to accept whatever truths the facts lead me to. Does this mean I am better than anyone else? Absolutely not; only that my priorities are different than theirs and that I become a tad bit more upset than do most when I see our government overstep it’s just authority and strip away the liberty it was established to protect.

One of the biggest problems today is that so little regard is given to one simple word: LIBERTY. People wouldn’t know real liberty if it came in a gift wrapped box to their front doors; and they wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had it. You see, liberty is like a coin. On the one side you have the freedom to live your live as you see fit without restriction or coercion by others. But on the other side comes the responsibility to accept the consequences of every choice you make, and to not seek to shoulder anyone else with the burden of those consequences.

If you want to get a glimpse at how a person views liberty, ask them what they would do if someone broke into their homes. If they say they would dial 911 and wait for the police to arrive, they don’t care that much about liberty. If, on the other hand, they tell you that they would grab a gun and shoot the son of a bitch, then they are among those who have a certain degree of understanding what liberty is.

You see, liberty is not only the right to do as you please in life, as long as it does not violate the equal rights of others; liberty is also the right to DEFEND WHAT IS YOURS without fear of being punished for it. The less you enjoy these two fundamental rights, the less liberty you have.

Our Founders understood this, and they were ready and willing to give up their lives to obtain it. Those who took up arms in 1861 to prevent an invading army from the North from depriving them of it understood it as well. While there aren’t as many today as there were in times past, there are still those who understand one simple principle; Liberty is a gift from God and that any man, or any group of men who try to deprive us of it are tyrants and we have the right to defend our liberty by any and all means.

Samuel Adams understood this, stating, “The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.” (Source: The Liberty Letters)

Adams also said, “Among the Natural Rights of the Colonists are these First. a Right to Life; Secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best manner they can–Those are evident Branches of, rather than deductions from the Duty of Self Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature.” (Source: The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772)

When Patrick Henry argued against ratifying the constitution being considered for adoption he stated, “You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your Government.” Was Henry a visionary who saw things that others couldn’t? Or, was he simply a man who cherished his liberty over life itself and who saw the dangers to liberty this proposed system of government posed?

Government, either by its own volition or by will of the majority, may deprive the people of their liberty, but liberty itself never dies. If I were to steal every penny you owned, would that money vanish, or simply be stolen from you? It’s the same with liberty, and as with money, the only way to preserve it is, often, with downright force. As Henry also said, “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”

Our government was established to preserve our liberty, not serve the interests of bankers and corporations; yet that is exactly who it serves today; and it matters not which party is in control of both Congress and the Oval Office. Yet when one speaks of openly resisting the laws passed by government, or goodness me, even an armed revolt against government, people look at them as if they had lost their minds.

Yet isn’t that EXACTLY what took place in 1776? Did not our Founders tell their government that they would no longer submit to its tyranny, that they had decided they could govern themselves without him? Did not they take up their own personal arms and stand up against the armed law enforcement that the King had sent to use force against them if they disobeyed his laws?

That is what it means to be a patriot, and that is why we have the 2nd Amendment. Our Founders understood how power, if lodged in the hands of weak and corrupt men, could once again lead to the subversion of the liberty that governments were instituted to protect; and they left it within the peoples reach to defend that liberty…by force if necessary; just as Patrick Henry said would be required.

During the American Revolution Thomas Paine would write a series of letters now called The American Crisis. In his first such letter Paine states, “THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

My definition of a patriot may be somewhat different from yours. Yours may mean one who supports our government; right or wrong; supports the troops, pays their taxes on time, and who votes during every election. Mine is simply, one who understands what liberty is and defends it against any who would threaten it; nothing more and nothing less.

Using your definition there are a great many patriots in this country. Using my definition, the number diminishes drastically; but it was people who felt the same as we do who won America’s independence from a tyrant, and it will be people like us who once again, if it is humanly possible, make America great again.

Liberty is the ability to do as one pleases without others without coercion or restriction as long as you do not violate the rights of others. It does not require a permit, a fee, or permission from government for you to enjoy it.

If you are unwilling to pay the price for preserving your liberty, you have no right to complain when you lose it.

“…I am fearful I have lived long enough to become an fellow: Perhaps an invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man, may, in these refined, enlightened days, be deemed old fashioned: If so, I am contented to be so: I say, the time has been when every pore of my heart beat for American liberty, and which, I believe, had a counterpart in the breast of every true American…”
~Patrick Henry~
(June 5, 1788)