Article by J.B. Shurk in The American Thinker
We Can Govern Ourselves
Tens of millions of us were brought up in America to view rightly Marxist-socialism as an evil ideology that must be destroyed. Part of our personal understanding of what it means to be American was forged in our understanding of what it means not to be American. In America, until recently, freedom of speech was guaranteed. In most other nations of the world, that was not true. In America, until recently, the freedom to practice one’s religious faith without government interference was guaranteed. In most other nations of the world, that freedom was not protected. In America, until recently, personal liberty was maximized to the greatest extent possible, and authorities were forbidden from infringing on that liberty by a Constitution specifically designed to minimize government power. In most other nations of the world, government power has always been maximized and individual power dismissed.
These are rock-solid principles that do not countenance expedient exceptions. They are not true one day, sort of true the next, and then discarded the day after that. The right to own firearms in order to preserve life and constrain the growth of tyrannical government does not disappear because Congress or the Supreme Court or the president wakes up one morning and decides that modern government is sufficient to protect the people from crime and capable of determining for itself what is and is not tyrannical. The right to engage freely with others and chart one’s own course through life without stifling interference from school boards, regulatory agencies, or tax authorities does not vanish because a new generation of petty totalitarians decide that they may control each American’s life from “womb to tomb.” The right to personal freedom lives regardless of whether government actors decide to stamp it out of existence. It exists in perpetuity beyond the artificial laws created by man. Dissolving it by government decree is as absurd as decreeing that henceforth there shall be no sun or stars. No matter how hard they endeavor, rule-makers cannot destroy what they did not create.
If a stranger came up to you and said, “Here, put this in your mouth,” would you just kindly oblige? If a used-car salesman approached you with a syringe and said, “Hold out your arm for me,” would you feel compelled to do so? Then why in the world should a rational human being in control of his own future be expected to do so for pharmaceutical reps whose job it is to sell drugs, government agents who have given those reps absolute legal immunity, and health bureaucrats who represent the interests of foreign powers? Why should any individual’s agency be sacrificed, so that the government’s agency alone prevails? Why should free people accept that they are not capable of thinking for themselves? We have long known that the political left promotes its hideous socialism by just adding the word “justice” to any issue. At a time when the FBI is intimidating parents for exercising their free speech at school board meetings, political prisoners protesting for fair elections have been abused by their government, and medical terrorists are threatening Americans to shoot up with an experimental serum or lose their jobs and livelihoods, we are in desperate need of good old-fashioned justice in its authentic form to return.
Just because sellouts in government, business, or the military decide to throw freedom aside to betray America’s founding ideals doesn’t mean principled Americans should suicidally follow those with no principle at all toward the cliff’s edge. Unlike the un-American Dr. Fauci, who actually believes that individual rights must be abandoned “for the greater good of society,” free Americans will never make excuses for replacing liberty with servitude. Unlike Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley, who proved how quickly he would fold in the face of peril and embrace Marxism for personal gain, red-blooded Americans will never stop treating authoritarianism as our enemy, even if the White House and Congress were to finally stand up and declare what we already suspect, that the U.S. government is up to its neck in the very evil we Americans were born to fight. No American should trade freedom for this modern fusion of communism and fascism just because too many men and women in positions of power allowed themselves to be corrupted and beaten by our sworn enemies. If fighting totalitarianism means one day fighting Washington, then so be it. Better to stand strong behind America’s founding truths that ushered in greater liberty and prosperity around the world, even if doing so puts our futures at risk, than to cower in darkness, left crippled by the chains of socialism’s eternal slavery to the State. Life without freedom is not life at all.
At its heart, the fight for freedom is the fight for common sense over constant lies. Almost everything advanced as “truth” today is built on falsehood. Man’s use of hydrocarbon energy is not leading us to extinction, as government-paid “experts” insist. The China Virus is not the death sentence we’ve been instructed to fear by politicians who wish to remake the world into something more easily controlled. Xenophobia and misogyny have never been so trifling in America, even though the nightly news and the FBI falsely insist otherwise. And, as the world now knows, the whole Russia collusion scam was an Obama-Clinton gambit all along. Because most politicians don’t honestly believe in God, they think man’s resounding belief in a higher power is proof that human beings are easily manipulated, and even worse, proof that humanity should be manipulated for their purposes. This is why they have no problem telling such blatant lies about our imminent extinction from global “warming” or COVID-1984 when it serves to redistribute power from those with too little to those with too much. Americans with common sense understand that government has abandoned truth entirely. And if you don’t yet realize you’re being flooded with falsehoods and conditioned to think of yourself as an inferior human being deserving of second-class rights, then those spreading these falsehoods and doing the conditioning thank you for your continued subservience. There are those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who refuse to see what’s before them. In its war on freedom, the government hopes we all remain in the latter prison.
There still exists in the world today a veritable “Axis of Evil.” It’s just that the axis has set up camp here at home. “Elites” with titles and prestigious government positions tell lies to other “elites” in news conglomerates who then retell those lies to global audiences either because they are too dumb to know better (useful idiots) or more than happy to become another member of the conspiracy committing fraud against the public. Either way, almost everything an “elite” says is false, while all the truths screamed out by common folk are trivialized as ignorant falsehoods. Politicians, the Department of Justice, and the Intelligence Community produce lies for a living; the media companies launder those lies and turn them into “truths” for mass dissemination; and the tech monopolies seek out and destroy anybody who objects. This is the crystalline prison that has descended all around us today, more seductive than Stalin’s Iron Curtain, and therefore more evil in its effect.
Nineteenth-century French composer Hector Berlioz once noted ironically, “Time is a great teacher that eventually kills all of its students.” There has never been a worse teacher in America than the American government is today, but it does seem committed to reaching the same result. Perhaps it is time that Americans realize we can choose to begin governing ourselves. We merely have to decide we’ve had enough.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/we_emcanem_govern_ourselves.html
