Arguably, it was not just the most iconic visual of the campaign, but also one of the most iconic images in American history.  The picture of a bloodied but defiant American president reaching toward the heavens and expressing a sense of resolute calm in a moment of chaos will remain in many people’s minds for the rest of their lives.  President Trump’s bravery is seared in their memories.

In any other election cycle, the contest would have ended on July 13.  On a sunny day during a festive campaign rally, a shooter murdered a husband and father protecting his family, injured two other attendees critically, and nearly assassinated a former president.  Such outrageous political violence should have sufficiently shifted public sentiment toward Trump’s favor to make his victory a foregone conclusion.  (For what it’s worth, President Biden dropped out of the race eight days later.)  Fearing that possibility, the propaganda press immediately worked to erase the incident from the public’s thoughts.

After becoming one of the most famous photographs in the world, the image of President Trump’s raw courage disappeared from publications and websites.  Reporters barely talked about the murder of local Pennsylvanian Corey Comperatore or the serious injuries to other rallygoers.  Anonymous FBI sources initially downplayed the attempted assassination by speculating that Trump had not actually been shot but had instead been cut by flying pieces of broken glass.  Cable news pundits openly mocked the bandaging around Trump’s ear and acted as if being shot in the face is no big deal.  To this day, FBI investigators preposterously claim that they are unable to ascertain the shooter’s motive.

This is the unfortunate reality of America in 2024.  One of the most consequential public figures in the world comes within millimeters of being assassinated, and the great majority of corporate news sources invest all their resources in covering up the seriousness of the event.  Reality cannot be permitted to interfere with their preferred political narratives.

Imagine if President Biden, President Obama, or Vice President Harris had been the target of an identical assassination attempt.  The press would have been talking about the incident nonstop over the last four months.  Newspaper headlines and news show chyrons would have kept the word “assassination” in front of Americans’ eyes.  Reporters would have demanded daily press briefings from the Secret Service, DOJ, and FBI.  We would have been repeatedly reminded that “democracy” is “literally” under attack and that violent Republicans are a “threat” to the stability of the Republic.  July 13 would have been memorialized as another “date which will live in infamy” because Democrats and the propaganda press would have settled for nothing less.

On January 6, 2021, tens of thousands of unarmed Americans protested for free and fair elections outside the Capitol, and Democrats have made sure Americans never forget that date.  Corporate reporters have falsely called protesters “insurrectionists,” “terrorists,” and “violent extremists.”  Politicians have accused Trump’s voters of trying to somehow overthrow the federal government without firing a shot.

In contrast, an assassin kills one Trump-supporter, injures several others, and nearly takes President Trump’s life, and the propaganda press acts as if it never happened.  If that glaring inconsistency does not vividly demonstrate how fake the J6 “insurrection” narrative has been, nothing else can.  Unlike Kamala Harris, Donald Trump was nominated for president through a democratic process, and when democracy actually came under attack, the news media minimized it as a trifle.

The outcome of this election will have serious consequences for Americans.  We will find out whether we are a nation willing to protect its citizens or a bankrupt welfare state with wide-open borders.  We will learn whether runaway inflation and economic uncertainty have become our permanent way of life or whether money-printing and crony capitalism have finally come to an end.  We will discover whether the Bill of Rights and Constitution still mean something in the United States or whether concerned Americans will have to fight for their most basic freedoms once again.  The stakes could not be higher.

On top of all these life-and-death issues, one weighs most heavily: will the struggle for truth survive?  Will Americans beat back a Deep State committed to mass censorship?  Will Americans dig their heels into the ground and defend free speech?

What we have learned over the last four years while the Biden-Harris administration attacked dissenting opinion as impermissible “disinformation” is that the death of the First Amendment means the proliferation of everything that is fake.  When scientific debate is censored, we get fake pandemics and fake vaccines.  When allegations of election fraud are treated as crimes, we get fake votes.  When political speech is vilified and the right to assemble is ignored, we get fake insurrections.  When Democrat elites overrule primary voters, we get fake presidential nominees.  When ill-prepared vice presidents are incapable of answering simple questions, we get fake accents!

Because Democrats and their corporate news allies have declared war on free speech, all we get is fake news.  And in a world where fake news dominates the headlines, assassination attempts against President Trump are erased from history.

In the place of news that greatly matters, the propaganda press has filled the airwaves with demonstrable lies in the days leading up to the election.  Fake journalists lie about President Trump taking away birth control and forcing women to have babies against their will.  After covering up Joe Biden’s dementia for years, they now lie about Donald Trump showing fake signs of fatigue.  They parrot the FBI’s fake crime statistics and lie to Americans about the safety of their communities.  They parrot the CDC’s fake COVID statistics and lie to Americans about the success of lockdowns, mask mandates, and fake vaccines.  They parrot fake jobs reports and lie to Americans about economic growth.  Despite the fact that Kamala Harris has the lowest approval rating for any modern vice president, our fake journalists lie to Americans about her remarkable popular appeal.  And after mocking President Trump for being the victim of two separate assassination attempts, the propaganda press now pushes the lie that his words somehow threaten RINO Liz Cheney’s life.  The Deep State spews blatant lies, and the propaganda press treats those blatant lies as irrefutable truths.

There is good news.  After eight years of unremitting propaganda demonizing President Trump as the most dangerous threat to the United States, he has never been more popular.  Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and every other prominent Democrat in the country have called Trump a “fascist,” a “Nazi,” and “Hitler” reincarnated for years.  An MSNBC reporter recently asked a New York voter, “How does that message resonate with you?”  The voter paused, looked at the reporter, and replied, “It doesn’t.”  The reporter seemed surprised, but Americans see through their lies.

President Trump survived an assassin’s bullet for a reason.  This is the time to choose a side.  All we must do is vote!  May God guide and protect us.  And remember: “Fight!  Fight!  Fight!”

You can tell it was a smashing success because the propaganda press hasn’t stopped talking about it.  Any honest journalist would tell you that it was an electrifying political rally that united Americans of all backgrounds and from all walks of life.  Because today’s “reporters” do not tell the truth and instead push an ideological agenda at all times, they are following Hillary Clinton’s marching orders and smearing the MSG event as some kind of twenty-first century Nazi hatefest.

Their lies prove only how panicked they are at the sight of President Trump’s broad appeal.  Democrats talk endlessly about skin color and ethnicity and celebrate physical “diversity” as if it were a noble virtue.  They are obsessed with how a person looks to the exclusion of everything in a person’s mind and soul that makes each of us unique.  That said, Democrats could never have packed Madison Square Garden with such a diverse group of Americans united in common cause as Trump did — at least not without busing in paid actors to meet their rigid racial quotas.

When the Trump campaign made tickets available to the public, they were gone almost immediately.  Who grabbed them?  Oh, just about every kind of American you could imagine.  Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Catholics, Protestants, agnostics, and non-believers.  Black, white, brown, and every shade in between.  Blue-collar workers and billionaires, tradesmen and suits, young and old people alike.  Every kind of dirty job, white-collar profession, and socio-economic rung was well represented.  Lifelong Republicans, libertarians, independents, and former Democrats all sang patriotic tunes together.  Truly, President Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally demonstrated in striking fashion just how attractive his policies are to Americans of every demographic.

It was an astonishing scene, and if any campaign event were to demonstrate the magnitude of the political realignment (if not ideological revolution) that Donald Trump has unleashed in America, MSG’s joy-fest was it.  It should take its place in the history books as prima facie evidence that the “Great Awakening” is here.  The Democrats’ and corporate media’s outrageously malicious attempts to paint the political rally as “dark,” “threatening,” and even “fascist” should similarly be regarded as demonstrable proof of their moral turpitude, deceitfulness, and irrelevancy.

I don’t usually write about physical diversity.  Appearances, like book covers, tell us next to nothing about the stories inside.  I have been fortunate enough to interact with all kinds of human beings — good and bad — and get a decent sense of both the great things our species can accomplish and the horrifying deeds we are all too willing to commit.  We humans have no trouble uniting to save strangers in mortal danger, but we also have no trouble killing each other for our beliefs.  What a world it would be if we worked as hard to avoid murdering each other as we do to rescue a child trapped in a well.  Alas, that’s not who we are, and no race of people on the planet has a monopoly on either vice or virtue.

I suppose that’s why the Madison Square Garden rally stood out.  Because of their ideological compulsion to separate the electorate into distinct groups of “oppressors” and “victims,” Democrats of every generation demonize some group for special targeting.  A century ago, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson wanted to use the “science” of eugenics to eliminate black Americans.  Today, Democrat leaders speak of “white supremacy” as a disease that must be similarly eliminated.  Who knows which group of people displaying some combination of physical attributes the Democrat Party will choose to vilify next.

In contrast, President Trump’s MSG event showed just how much his message is directed not to any one class of people but rather to all people regardless of how they might look, speak, and act.  It doesn’t matter what color your skin is; anyone can be an ardent defender of free speech against government and corporate censorship.  It doesn’t matter how you pray (or even if you pray); anyone can be a resolute protector of religious freedom against government persecution.  It doesn’t matter whether your ancestors came over on the Mayflower, or whether your parents worked hard to gain their American citizenship; a promise to defend the U.S. Constitution from its enemies holds the same weight.  None of us was around when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and made clear to the whole world that the purpose of government is to safeguard every person’s God-given rights and liberties.  No matter how we look, how old we are, or what part of America we call home, all of us are capable of fighting for and preserving freedom.  Regardless of the stories we hold inside, we can choose to stand together and against government tyranny.

Give me a country filled with people as physically diverse yet wholly unified in their loyalty to the Bill of Rights as those who showed up at President Trump’s MSG rally, and I’ll show you an America that will lead the world for centuries to come.  I’ll show you a country capable of building new and exciting things.  I’ll show you a country reenergized and focused and ready to defend its way of life.  I’ll show you a country whose demise is greatly exaggerated and whose greatness is just beginning.  I’ll show you a country that is “awakening” from an odd slumber and slowly but surely coming back to life.

That’s not supposed to happen.  Democrats were all suckled on some version of Marx’s historical materialism in which human society marches forward inexorably toward communism.  They call themselves, “progressives,” because they erroneously believe history proceeds in only one direction.  Those of us who resist their planned dystopia are “reactionaries,” “deniers,” “deplorables,” and “conservatives” stuck in the past and unable to bend.  That’s why Democrats are obsessed with berating us that we must join “the right side of history.”  So sure are they of the future that they arrogantly believe anyone who refuses to join their sad, hate-filled, envy-ridden descent into collectivist totalitarianism is destined to be either forgotten or reviled in the pages of history.

They are wrong.  Marxism is intellectual tripe.  Collectivism denies humans the opportunity to flourish as individuals.  Totalitarianism is as ugly today as it was last century.  And a growing movement of freedom-minded Americans is rising once again to preserve liberty in its hour of need.

It used to infuriate me that Republican backstabbers such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would disparage President Trump’s governing philosophy as appealing only to an insular, white, working-class fringe.  The man won far more votes than McCain or Romney, won over ten million additional votes in his 2020 campaign, won the highest percentage of minority votes of any Republican in over sixty years, and is expanding that historic support in his 2024 campaign today.  How could anybody credibly argue that Donald Trump has done anything but strengthen the Republican Party?

Then I finally realized that no matter how “conservative” RINOs claim to be, they have either consciously or unconsciously bought into the Democrats’ Marxist philosophy.  They have deluded themselves into believing that the world is destined to be dark, uninspiring, and unfree.  President Trump disagrees, and a hundred million Americans have joined him to fight for a future that cherishes human liberty.  That’s how we really make history.

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

America will one day have a female president.  She will be smart, articulate, prudent, and brave.  She will treat her campaign for office as a chance to prove to the American people that she has their best interest at heart.  She will be thoughtfully prepared to answer any and all questions.  Nobody will say it’s “her turn” or pretend she is more talented than she really is.  Nobody will hold her to a lower or higher standard because of her sex.  She will rise to the top because she earns it.  Americans will listen to her speeches, watch how she conducts her personal life, and conclude that she is the right leader for the time.  And when she is elected, no one will mumble, “She won only because she’s a woman.”  She will win on her own merits.

The Democrats have done women no favors by pushing the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.  Neither has the necessary disposition for holding the highest office in the land.  Both are rash and unwise.  They are selfish and unjust.  They are intemperate and vengeful.  They are self-conscious and uncertain.  They are unkind, impatient, and self-serving.  They exude no faith in God, inspire no hope in others, and display no courage.  They are weak in mind and soul and encourage such weakness in others.  They are unfit to lead.  They are not remarkable women.

That Democrat party elites have forced Hillary and Kamala on the American people shows how little they actually think of women.  Hillary is an inveterate liar and shameless shrew whose chief accomplishment in life has been to obtain enough dirt on Washington insiders to stay out of prison.  She won a seat in the U.S. Senate because New Yorkers pitied her when it became clear that her president husband is a lecherous creep incapable of moderating his own depravities.  Giving Hillary a prestigious government job after Bill’s Oval Office debauchery with an intern barely old enough to drink legally was a Hallmark card kind of way for the American people to say, “Sorry your husband humiliated you while you were first lady.”  Had voters known that Hillary was already scheming for the top job and only pretending to be wounded by Slick Willy’s philandering, they would have been much less likely to overlook her own personal qualities.  And they certainly were not hoping that Hillary’s presidential ambitions would one day return both immoral Clintons back to the White House!

Yet that’s what the elitist Democrat party gave the American people.  You get Hillary!  She will break the glass ceiling and become the most powerful person in the country!  She will do what no woman has ever done before!  Because…well, she put up with Bill’s womanizing…and because Barack gave her the State Department gig as a consolation prize even after she outed him for being born in a foreign nation…and because…well, because it’s her turn, dammit!

Democrats expected Americans to forget that Hillary has always been an unlikable person with a notorious reputation for venality and vindictiveness.  They expected Americans to forget the scandal-plagued years of the Clinton White House, during which stories of Hillary throwing pieces of fine china at Bill Clinton’s head and screaming obscenities at Secret Service agents regularly leaked.  They expected Americans to forget Hillary’s involvement in the cover-up of the 9/11 Benghazi attack that left four Americans dead and which Hillary falsely blamed on a random internet video in order to preserve Obama’s 2012 election viability.  Democrats told Americans to ignore a lifetime of evidence that Hillary Clinton is a vile person and vote for her anyway…because she’s a woman.

Americans would have been better off if Bill and Hillary Clinton had been forced to serve time for selling state secrets to communist China.  Had they ever paid for their various crimes over the years, the Clintons’ hold over official Washington would have disappeared.  Hillary would never have been in a position to seek the presidency.  She and her accomplices would not have been able to commit fraud against the American people with the Russia collusion hoax.  The Democrats would not have spent the last twenty-five years pretending Hillary Clinton should be trusted with the reins of power.  Hillary would be in prison today instead of on television encouraging further acts of violence against President Trump.

Americans would also not be facing the peril of a Kamala Harris presidency.  The reason is simple: by excusing Hillary’s immoral and unethical character, Democrats convinced themselves that her failed presidential campaigns could be attributed to her immense political baggage.  Because she has been a divisive national figure since the ’90s, her supporters blamed “deplorables” for not giving poor, sweet Hillary a chance.  Stuck in that misguided mindset, political operatives came up with an even more misguided solution: to put a woman in the White House, they needed a blank-slate candidate whose public utterances are inscrutable and whose political convictions are always shifting.  Voilà — the vaunted rise of Kamala Harris!

Kamala is that rare breed of public speaker who says less and less the longer she talks.  Once a listener perceives a cogent thought forming from the stream of words exiting her mouth, she takes a linguistic hard left and drives straight over a cliff of utter nonsense.  Trying to make sense of her gibberish is like following Alice down a rabbit hole while tripping on psychedelics and translating Arabic manuscripts into ancient Greek.

Joe Biden’s cognitive decline causes him to ramble incoherently before shouting meaningless words with great enthusiasm.  The Pravda press’s inability to continue hiding his debilitating condition is why the Democrat party chucked him from the top of the ticket without even consulting primary voters.  Kamala Harris speaks just as incoherently as Dementia Joe, and the same state media are doing everything they can to hand her the presidency.  Perhaps if Joe had swapped his tie for a string of pearls and transitioned to “Joan” Biden this last year, the Deep State would have allowed him to finish his run for re-election.

Democrats seem to believe that a woman can ascend to the presidency only if she is as conniving and ruthless as Hillary Clinton or as fatuous and ditzy as Kamala Harris.  They see no value in supporting women with proven intelligence, virtue, courage, and authenticity.  Those attributes are apparently attractive only in male politicians.  Talk about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

What else would one expect, though, from a political party that holds women in such low regard?  Democrats encourage men to dominate women’s sports.  They push men into women’s locker rooms, domestic violence shelters, and prison cells.  They promote men who dress up as women in the workplace and let men take credit for “female first” accomplishments.  They tell real women that the best thing they can do for the planet is avoid having babies.  For a party that talks feverishly about destroying the “patriarchy,” Democrats sure do seem committed to making sure that a man in high heels shatters the “glass ceiling.”

What the Democrat party peddles as “female empowerment” should offend all women of integrity.  Women deserved much better than Hillary.  They should expect much more than what Kamala has to offer, too.

If the answer is, “No,” why not?  Don’t human traffickers and international drug cartels depend upon a supply of paper currency that they can move back and forth across borders and launder through unrelated businesses for future use?  If there were no money except for the digital ones and zeroes created and monitored by national governments, surely major criminal organizations would have no way to operate and nowhere to hide.

How could prostitution and corner drug sales survive within a system that traces all digital transactions in real time?  How could black market trades in illicit commerce or between sanctioned nations continue if Western central banks actively surveil each digital dollar that changes hands?  Surely the imposition of government-mandated digital currencies would usher in a more peaceful planet that is relatively free of crime…right?

If you’re still not convinced, let me suggest what might be tripping you up: your instincts tell you that criminals will find a way to skirt any future digital surveillance.  Somehow, human ingenuity will succeed in creating effective workarounds to government-imposed central bank digital currencies.  The sale of illegal narcotics, weapons, and other banned materials will continue around the world because, at the end of the day, humans adapt and overcome whatever obstacles stand in their way.  Crime will continue to exist because criminals will continue to exist, and criminals will continue to exist because in every generation some faction of the human race behaves immorally, disregards social mores, or flat out refuses to obey.

If this is your conclusion — and I think it is the correct one — then don’t ordinary, non-criminal citizens also have a choice about what the future holds?  If you believe that criminals are wily enough to fashion workarounds to totalitarian government, then shouldn’t you expect defenders of liberty to be similarly inventive?  If so, then perhaps our worries about the future do not revolve around the idea that ordinary citizens will have no way to evade and overcome government tyranny but rather that the path to doing so might make many of us “criminals,” too.

An immoral law is no law at all — which is to say, whenever governments use the force of law to coerce citizens to do immoral things, moral citizens will choose to become “criminals.”  This is more difficult than it sounds.

It is natural for people to overestimate their willingness to stand up to the State in matters of conscience.  From the comfort of our armchairs, we often judge too harshly those who yielded to tyrants in the past because we cannot step faithfully into our ancestors’ shoes.  We cannot accurately feel what they experienced as the coercive machinery of the State operated in their day.  Would we have hidden Jews in our cellars while the Nazis were rounding them up to be murdered in camps?  Would we have taken a strong stance against Japanese internment during WWII?  Would we have opposed racial segregation laws in Brazil and the United States, caste oppression in India, or ethnic cleansing in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East?  Many people would proudly say, “Yes.”  Most would be sorely mistaken.  Standing up to evil when it is backed by the authority of government offices and enforced by real human beings with guns and badges is no easy thing.  Moral people too often balance an abundance of conviction with a scarcity of courage.

The question of moral courage becomes even more difficult when we ask ourselves what we would do in situations that don’t rise to the level of evil we associate with persecution and genocide.  In 1933 President Roosevelt ordered Americans to hand over their gold savings.  Although justified as a policy for fighting the worsening depression, critics warned that the action was nothing short of government-sanctioned robbery and would only increase inflation and exacerbate economic suffering.  The critics were right, and a substantial number of Americans denounced the president’s order as entirely immoral.  Still, most complied.

What would we do if the government came for our greenbacks, gold, silver, or bitcoin today?  If the Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury joined other Western central banks in making all digital currencies illegal except their own, would you comply?  What if the FBI claimed that uncontrolled, decentralized currencies are used only by criminals who are most likely narco-terrorists and child sex-slavers?  Would federal officials’ concerted efforts to use your morality and sense of shame as psychological weapons ultimately succeed?  If the U.S. government used those same moral arguments to trash the Second Amendment and confiscate Americans’ firearms, would you hand over your weapons?  What if all your favorite athletes, movie stars, and musicians told you 24/7 that we must disarm ourselves in order to “save the children”?  Would you allow others to shame you into compliance?

Many Americans might do their best Charlton Heston impression here and declare, “From my cold, dead hands.”  But how many of those same Americans quickly submitted to the government because of a virus not too dissimilar from the common cold?  How many wore masks in Walmart in order to avoid accusatory stares from strangers?  How many sat in cordoned-off stadium seats at empty ballparks or paid full tuition for college classes taught entirely online?  How many did what they were told when faceless bureaucrats demanded that they stand six feet apart or isolate inside their homes?  How many ultimately took at least one injection of an experimental “vaccine” because employers threatened their jobs, hospitals threatened not to treat their unrelated health conditions, or police officers threatened them with arrests and fines?  As Hannah Arendt so insightfully observed, crimes against humanity usually come not from the hands of monsters but from those of ordinary people.  Because they are ordinary, we too often disregard our worries, avoid conflict, and comply.

Every act of compliance comes with two costs: we lose whatever liberty we freely hand over, and we invite further encroachment upon our liberty in the future.  Loss of personal freedom is like a loose thread that gets only longer with time.  Before you can repair the damage, you must make sure that your rights and liberties stop unraveling.  There has to be a moment when people say, “Enough.”

In other words, there has to be a moment when citizens accept that the State sees them as common criminals.  The price for speaking our minds will not stop with censorship.  It will not stop with de-banking.  It will not stop with professional blacklisting.  It will not stop with the J6 political prisoners.  It will not stop with all the Republican attorneys who have been disbarred and prosecuted for fighting election fraud.  It will not stop with the DOJ’s efforts to imprison President Trump.  It will not stop with all the servicemembers whose military careers came to an end because they refused to submit to the government’s experimental “vaccines.”  Like a loose thread coming undone, the State will continue to yank at our freedoms until we are left naked.  Only we can decide whether to remain so.

Because we have a choice, we don’t really fear that there is nothing that can be done about growing totalitarianism in the West.  We are apprehensive about what will be required to thwart it.  That’s a fine and prudent feeling to have, but it’s altogether different from the miserable dread of acquiescence.  Knowing that a fight is coming and worrying about its costs do not reflect weakness.  Nor does it matter whether an immoral government calls moral people, “criminals.”  We’ll have to get over that.

Who says?  Some very important people who belong to august bodies such as the European Commission, the United Nations, the Bank for International Settlements, the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization.  International groups with lofty reputations have no time to trifle with the beliefs and needs of discrete peoples.  The globalists are here to save democracy by ridiculing and rejecting whatever the people might want!

Sounds a little bit like an absolute monarchy, does it not?  The public is not in the mood for another round of COVID lockdowns.  Who cares? — it’s what the WHO director commands!  Citizens are extremely unhappy with the attendant crime, cultural conflict, and expanded welfare obligations that come with rampant illegal immigration.  So what? — the unelected bureaucrats at the E.C. and the U.N. are committed to destroying national identities!  Westerners demand an end to money-printing and runaway inflation.  Who asked them? — we do what the multinational investment firms say!

What we have today are kings and queens who sit on distant thrones and bark orders at the common people living under their rule.  Those who object to being ruled are condemned as “extremists,” vulgar “populists,” and bigoted “nationalists.”  From the royalty’s point of view, anyone who represents the people is a threat to the globalist monarchy’s continuing reign.  Populists and nationalists, you say?  Egad, off with their heads!

Why can’t the French, Dutch, British, German, Polish, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Australian, Canadian, and American governments represent their own peoples?  Because those territories are too small for their designs.  Today’s “elites” have global domination on their minds.  The concerns of individual nation-states are too petty for those who covet the whole planet.

We used to have a pretty good word to describe an arrangement in which many separate countries are forced to bend the knee and pay tribute to a superior power: empire.

Every empire’s defenders describe its institutions as absolutely necessary for promoting social cohesion, economic growth, and political stability.  Respect for authority and the hierarchical order is touted as essential for civilization.  But we are not living in the age of Caesar Augustus, Charlemagne, or Kublai Khan.  Must a small collection of global “elites” really keep distinct nations under their thumbs in order to keep the peace?  Not if immediate history is any guide.  Peace isn’t what empires do!  They command…until they are opposed by those who refuse to be conquered or until they are resisted from within by those no longer willing to obey.

During the twentieth century alone, many great empires clashed and died.  The First World War brought an end to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire.  The Second World War brought an end to the Japanese Empire, the German Reich, and the Kingdom of Italy.  In the aftermath of those global conflagrations, independence movements emerged in overseas territories once administered by the United Kingdom and France and set in motion decades of decolonization across Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Asia.  The combined results produced dozens of new nation-states around the globe.

Some had existed as kingdoms, tribes, or proto-nations earlier in their respective histories, whereas others materialized as products of diplomatic wrangling among peace negotiators partitioning military maps.  The trend, however, was clear: cultural and ethnic groups all over the planet sought independence from the much larger empires that had once swallowed them whole.  Following two horrific wars that had claimed hundreds of millions of lives to bloodshed, disease, genocide, and famine, the mid-twentieth century witnessed renewed calls for national self-determination, political statehood, and local decision-making.

Those calls were often ignored.  For millions of Eastern Europeans trapped behind the Iron Curtain, WWII did not really come to an end until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union nearly fifty years later.  The rise of communism in Asia divided China, Korea, and Vietnam and left most of the continent in various stages of civil war to the present day.  For those unlucky enough to have lived through the ethnic slaughter of the Yugoslav Wars in the ’90s, the Great War that began in 1914 lingered for most of the twentieth century.

In contrast to the proliferation of nation-states, the last century also produced a new kind of empire: the global superpower.  The United States and the Soviet Union faced off in a simmering Cold War that could have easily exploded into a third world war at any time, and their respective military alliances — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact — stretched their tentacles across continents and oceans.  While the U.S. and the USSR treated the world as a chessboard and nation-states as game pieces belonging to one side or the other, national independence movements often became little more than smokescreens for proxy wars between the world’s two dominant empires.  Under the shadows of the global superpowers, many fledgling nations were relegated to the status of client states — vassals doing their hegemons’ bidding.

The twentieth century’s clash of empires gave the world carnage and chaos that surpassed that of any other century and left humanity on the knife-edge of total destruction during a Cold War that carried the prospect of nuclear Armageddon.  From such savagery and perpetual angst, several obvious lessons could be gleaned: empire-building leads indubitably to empire collapse.  Likewise, when empires fall, people all over the planet suffer.  Finally, anything in this world that is “too big to fail” represents a threat to everyone.  Those lessons apply equally to financial as well as political Leviathans.

A rational person might well conclude that concentrated power and centralized government are the essential ingredients for future public resentment, social instability, and revolution.  An impartial observer might similarly conclude that unrepresentative government leads to the abandonment of protections for individual human rights and the concomitant growth of brute totalitarianism.  Finally, an honest messenger might warn that authoritarianism inescapably delivers violent repression; dogmatic speech controls; and, ultimately, genocide.  The twentieth century’s butcher’s bill might even suggest that local decision-making, community empowerment, and stalwart respect for personal freedoms remain the crucial bulwarks against the real scourge of humanity: tyranny.

How strange it is, then, that twenty-first-century global powers demonize nation-states as antiquated political entities detrimental to world peace and their defenders as xenophobes not worthy of recognition?

Most of Western Europe cheered the fall of the Third Reich because a continent of distinct nations with unique cultures and cherished histories did not want to become conquered vassals of the Nazi regime.  Eighty years later, those same European nations have become part of a continental union that promotes endless immigration from competing civilizations and recognizes Germany as its unofficial head.  Similarly, eight years after the British people voted for national sovereignty over European Union membership, several iterations of U.K. governments have watered down the intended effects of a real Brexit.  And the United States has spent the post-war period building a NATO military alliance, international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, and a labyrinthine system of “free trade” agreements — all meant to buttress what the U.S. government and its allies affectionately call the “rules-based international order.”

It would seem that two world wars and a debilitating Cold War did nothing to dissuade global “elites” from building a new empire on the ashes of the old.  It will surely suffer a similar fate.

The fact that Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, are using the imprimatur of the criminal justice system as a smokescreen to railroad and possibly imprison the leader of the opposition party is bad enough.  By treating President Trump’s speech as the “proximate cause” of other alleged crimes (consisting mostly of questionable trespass violations reimagined and inflated into felonies) committed by strangers, the Biden-Garland-Smith Triumvirate of Tyranny has turned every American’s opinion into a potential criminal act.

Should this bother all those rabid leftists who desperately want to see President Trump behind bars?  I would say so.  President Trump has now survived two assassination attempts, and although the FBI has done its best to muddy the waters concerning the motivations of the first gunman (trying to kill the Republican nominee for president seems like a pretty good clue, does it not?), the social media history of the second gunman (as well as the Biden-Harris bumper sticker on his truck) clearly exposes him as a Ukraine War–obsessed, anti-MAGA, Kamala Harris–supporting zealot who believes that President Trump is a civilizational threat.

Where would he get that crazy idea?  Oh, I don’t know — maybe from the constant stream of contributors on networks such as MSNBC who call Trump a “dictator,” another “Hitler,” and a “Nazi.”  Maybe the would-be assassin took Democrat politicians seriously whenever they showed up on news shows these last eight years to claim with utmost sincerity that Trump is a “threat to democracy.”

Maybe the man who turned an AK-47 on the president read one of the numerous opinion columns featured in the nation’s factually shoddy but stubbornly prominent publications, all universally libeling President Trump as a “rapist,” a “white supremacist,” a “fascist,” and a “dangerous” leader of the “far right.”  Should fake journalists who regularly claim that America will “literally end” if Trump returns to the White House be surprised when someone stumbles upon their neurotic rantings and subsequently attempts to “save” the country from the specter of their shared delusions?

Have we not also reached our “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” political moment?  If President Trump must spend millions of dollars defending himself against mercenary prosecutors intent on locking him up for the remainder of his life because of the “dangerous” words that come out of his mouth, then surely those people who use their speech to beg for someone — anyone — to rid the country of the once and future president should be held similarly liable.  How many times can a Democrat politician or credentialed propagandist falsely compare Donald Trump to mass murderers and dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini before those inflammatory slanders rise to the same level of “proximate cause” that prompted the Department of (in)Justice to put Trump in its crosshairs over January 6?

Jack Smith is prosecuting President Trump for somehow threatening the peaceful transfer of power from a legitimately elected president to an illegitimately installed stooge.  Even though Trump correctly believed (and still does believe) that the 2020 election was rigged in Biden’s favor (mail-in ballots stuffed into unsecured drop boxes in the dead of night, the use of Zuckerbucks to increase ballot collection in Democrat neighborhoods, and the Intelligence Community’s efforts to defraud the American people with regard to Hunter Biden’s “laptop from Hell” all amply support this conclusion), he left office as legally required on January 20.

Trump never called for violence against Joe Biden or the U.S. government.  He never urged Americans to revolt against their country.  Even on January 6 — the half-day of protest that leftist pundits and politicians say was worse than 9/11 and the Civil War combined — President Trump calmly urged his supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”  In other words, he defended his First Amendment right to speak his mind and the First Amendment right of all Americans to speak theirs — but he never, ever called for violence against his political enemies.

For the crime of speaking truthfully about the tremendous deficiencies and suspicious vote-counting activities surrounding the 2020 election, Jack Smith and the rest of the Triumvirate of Tyranny have thrown President Trump in the dock to defend his life.  And as atrocious as the Triumvirate’s political persecution of an American president has been, it pales in comparison to the way it has harassed, hunted, imprisoned, and even tortured thousands of ordinary Americans for showing up at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to protest for free and fair elections.

The vast majority of Americans who arrived in D.C. on that fateful day committed no crimes.  Most had no criminal records.  They included an inordinate number of veterans, law enforcement officers, grandparents, and retirees.  In D.C. courtrooms, however, prosecutors and partisan judges have described them as “terrorists,” “seditionists,” “insurrectionists,” and “domestic enemies.”

How did they earn such ignoble monikers?  They are accused of spreading the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump.  It does not seem to matter to any of these courts that roughly 60% of the American people also believe that cheating likely affected that election.  For expressing an opinion unpopular in D.C., J6 political prisoners have been held in solitary confinement and forced to review “re-education materials” regarding Trump’s “lies,” “crimes,” and “attacks on democracy.”  These are actual lesson plans for conservative political prisoners in the United States.

If telling a “Big Lie” means that a person’s speech merits criminal punishment, though, surely Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deserve similar treatment.  Biden has repeatedly claimed that Trump-supporters murdered police officers on January 6.  That is a complete lie.  The only people to die that day were J6 protesters, including a female Air Force veteran shot in cold blood and another female beaten to death.  Crimes of murder and excessive force may very well have taken place on January 6, but Trump voters did not commit them.  That truth, however, is inconvenient for Biden, fellow Democrats, and their faithful media propagandists, who all desperately cling to the “Big Lie” that Trump engineered a “violent insurrection.”

Biden has also clung to the “Big Lie” that President Trump called neo-Nazis at a Charlottesville political rally “very fine people.”  Trump did no such thing.  He was discussing the issue of whether statues and monuments commemorating Confederate soldiers should be removed simply because they offend modern sensibilities.  In a moment when he sought to build unity among all Americans, he expressed his belief that there are good people on both sides of that contentious debate.  Trump warned, however, that once we start tearing down historic statues, the impulse to destroy our past will never end.  Eventually, he predicted, statues dedicated to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and other remarkable Americans would be targeted, too.  He was right.  Those who wish to transform America by first rewriting America’s history have spent the last four years toppling priceless monuments built by some of America’s finest artists.  But that truth does not permit Joe Biden to falsely portray President Trump as a “racist.”

Where have we heard the Charlottesville and J6 lies recently?  Kamala Harris repeated both during the presidential debate.  Surely, if President Trump is responsible for “inciting” a fake “insurrection,” Biden and Harris are responsible for inciting two very real assassination attempts.

If you don’t know Ned, he’s the founder of American Majority and Voter Gravity, grassroots organizations that specialize in fighting the culture war at the local level and electing America First conservatives.  On cable news channels and in his writing, he’s an eloquent defender of the Constitution, limited government, and the American Republic as the Founding Fathers intended.  I highly recommend that you read American Leviathan and share it with friends — especially friends who struggle to see clearly the stakes of the ideological war now raging.

How did we get to this point in time, when American leaders broadly repudiate the principles behind the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and an unaccountable, unconstitutional bureaucracy rules over the American people?  How is it that both major political parties routinely ignore the will of voters and seem beholden to the administrative state?

Why do prominent politicians — from Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney to Kamala Harris and Barack Obama — express an almost religious devotion to expansive government when our country was founded upon an inherent distrust of government power and a commitment to see such power forever chained?  Why have the most prestigious news organs rejected free speech, embraced censorship, and become little more than propagandistic parrots for the State?  It’s a long story, but it’s a story that must be understood in order for the American people to see with clear eyes what they’re actually fighting.

In American Leviathan, Ryun succeeds by making what is complicated quite comprehensible.  He takes a century and a half of mostly forgotten history and political debate and boils down all the sordidness into a digestible, if unpleasant, meal.  He traces the origin of the administrative state to a group of American intellectuals who were fascinated with Hegel’s philosophical defense of authoritarianism and the absolute power of the Prussian king.  He pinpoints the rise of the Uniparty in the overlapping policy preferences of leading Republicans, Democrats, and socialists at the beginning of the twentieth century.

He recounts how progressive Republicans, such as Robert La Follette and Teddy Roosevelt, advocated for radical expansion of government and rejection of long-respected constitutional constraints that mirrored many of the wishes of progressive Democrats, such as Woodrow Wilson and The New Republic founder Herbert Croly.  Together, these various thought leaders (at times hostile to one another as they advanced similar goals) initiated what Ryun calls a “Progressive Statist movement” demanding a fundamental transformation of the American system of government and the elevation of the State at the expense of Americans’ individual liberties.

Ryun defines the administrative state, the national security state, and the Deep State as distinct entities reflecting varying degrees of power, privilege, secretiveness, and incompetence, but he recognizes all of these unelected factions as parts of the same beast: the Leviathan.  With that appellation, he refers to the political treatise Leviathan, from seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose inclination toward a strong, centralized government emerged during the chaos of the English Civil Wars.  In the Old Testament, Leviathan is a sea serpent and demon associated with the sin of envy.

The monster eats the souls of those who are damned because they remain too attached to the material world to reach God’s realm and receive His grace.  Although the biblical Leviathan epitomizes chaos, Hobbes used the idea of a terrifying creature composed of myriad souls as a metaphor for an all-powerful State constantly shaping citizens and feeding from their individual energies.  The frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan shows a monarch clutching the symbols of earthly power in one hand and spiritual power in the other.

The monarch’s body is formed from hundreds of faceless individuals who, through their actions to support the king, embody the State.  At the top of the illustration is a Latin quote describing Leviathan from the Book of Job: “There is no power on earth to be compared to him.”  It is in this sense that Ryun describes the American Leviathan.

Although Hobbes saw the Leviathan as a necessary force for taming violent chaos, Ryun recognizes it for what it actually is: an uncontrollable, ever-growing, and ravenous beast that devours any prospect for representative democracy or individual liberty.  Interestingly, just as Hobbes saw the Leviathan State as the union of the secular and spiritual worlds, Ryun sees the American Leviathan as a usurper claiming dominion over both worlds, too.  He takes great pains to show how Progressive Statists depend upon a rejection of God, so that they can claim His powers as their own.  In the same way that the theological Leviathan represents the deadly sin of envy, the American Leviathan is envious of all forms of power outside its own.

Ultimately, to choose the unelected administrative state over the constitutional republic and the protection of Americans’ natural rights is to worship government above all else.  The American Leviathan is an obscene and false god.

In his deftly written and often moving defense of the American Republic as founded, Ryun makes a compelling case for why Americans must slay the Leviathan that has co-opted their form of government and stolen so many of their individual liberties.  He describes Woodrow Wilson’s disdain for popular sovereignty as the unofficial credo of this un-American and unelected “blob,” in which bureaucrats operate with scant oversight.  He excoriates Progressive Statists’ naïve belief in the perfectibility of human nature and their dangerous faith in a ruling class entrusted with limitless power.  He explains why the Leviathan’s attacks on natural rights can succeed only by rewriting both the Constitution and the story of America’s founding.

He diagrams how the rise of an all-powerful bureaucracy is meant to replace private property and personal freedoms with concerns for “social justice” while turning the State into a quasi-divine entity capable of offering spiritual salvation.  He proves that today’s “ruling elites” see representative democracy as “not just an inconvenience, but even more so an enemy and danger to the state.”  He shows through countless examples that the vast bureaucracy is antithetical to the Constitution’s separation of powers.  And he warns that those who have an “unshakeable faith” in the State’s “non-negotiable standards of right and wrong” will not hesitate to eliminate those Americans who oppose it.

America First Republicans, Ryun argues, must reject the legitimacy of the administrative state: “This is The Thing. Nothing else matters.”  After a century of concentrated power “in the hands of a credentialed idiocracy who believe they are the final arbiters for government and society,” this is what we know: “The entire premise of the administrative state has been proven a farce.”  He concludes that “it is time to declare political war” on the American Leviathan, “to tear it apart piece by piece, and to restore the Republic.”  In a final chapter entitled “Slay Leviathan,” Ryun implores: “Break the State.”  In that chapter, he describes exactly how President Trump should do so.

I have an expansive collection of writings from the earliest days of the American Republic.  I hold them dear because they are a window into some of the greatest minds in human history.  I will admit, though, that there is a wary voice in the back of my own mind whispering that there may come a day when the words of the Founders are more important as practical how-to guides than as intellectual heirlooms passed through history.  In defending our country from those who wish to destroy it, Ned Ryun’s new book is one of those sources I want within reach.  It’s a life-saving axe for those “in case of emergency, break glass” moments.  And, I think Ned would agree, it’s time to break the glass.

There was some platitudinal outrage, to be sure, but if the pre-eminent news organs in the United States had truly wanted to defend free speech from government tyranny, they would have robustly condemned Obama for presiding over an administration at war with the First and Fourth Amendments. They would still be running stories to this day reminding Americans that nobody of consequence from the Obama government has been punished. And they would never stop pointing out that neither Obama nor his lieutenants have ever apologized for their impeachable offenses or naked betrayal of their constitutional oaths. Judged from their tepid response, it would appear that most corporate news reporters tacitly approved of Obama’s government conducting espionage operations against the press — at least so long as the “right kind” of reporters were the ones being targeted.

To the great consternation of the Obama regime and its praetorian press supporters, Sharyl Attkisson has always been an “old school” reporter — which is to say, she follows important news stories wherever they may take her and regardless of how her investigations may affect the political fortunes of those fêted by The New York Times or CNN. With neither fear nor favor, she strives to reveal truth — not her truth or the preferred truth of those who pay her, but the truth. Because she sticks to that journalistic creed, she is a thorn in the side to those with power.

In another time or place that regarded journalistic independence as a requisite safeguard for preserving both free speech and a free press, Attkisson would be admired as an exemplar of her profession. And to those who appreciate her work, she is. But for far too many national reporters who would gladly sacrifice truth for the promise of future prestige, her story is best ignored. Why? Because she is a corporeal reminder that American journalism is fake.

Contrary to the banal assurances that come out of the mouths of intellectual flyweights such as Jim Acosta, reporters regularly do pick sides, omit important facts, and manipulate the coverage of breaking news. Almost all practicing journalists these days are creatures of the left. Fabian socialists, Marxist ideologues, or Democrat partisans — however else they might self-identify, they all view themselves as romantic figures destined to influence history. Who, What, When, Where, and Why are for the schlubs. They are here to engineer narratives, and they take their jobs quite seriously.

“Narrative engineer” is such a perfect sobriquet for today’s reporters. It appeals to their special brand of vanity. Most would love to be known for their literary talents but lack the skill to tell good stories. Most wish others would see them as having the kind of brainpower associated with engineers, but alas, they struggle with basic geometry. Thinking of themselves as master builders of human events allows journalists to carve out a privileged caste for themselves that lies somewhere between that of the academic and the priest. And if anyone honored them as “professors” or bowed deferentially in their presence, members of the journalistic clergy would certainly not object.

This kind of pomposity offends “old school” reporters. In fact, one of the easiest ways to discern whether a journalist is more interested in discovering the truth or engineering a narrative is to look at that person’s bio. “Narrative engineers” love to highlight their journalism degrees, fellowships, exotic assignments, and the list of important corporations that have paid them to say what those corporations need them to say. “Old school” reporters don’t care about telling you where they went to college — or if they even attended one. Rather than refer you to their updated C.V.s, they’d rather let their work product do the talking. They’re not fond of flaunting awards or illustrious former employers because both tend to reflect the mission statements of powerful corporations or wealthy patrons — the exact kinds of groups and people “old school” journos inherently distrust.

Good muckrakers are suspicious of power — in all its forms. If a self-described expert says that something is true, the muckraker says, “Prove it.” If an agent of the government says that something is true, the muckraker says, “Prove it.” If another journalist says that something is true, the muckraker still says, “Prove it.” Neither titles, nor positions of authority, nor membership in the journalistic clergy connotes absolute truth.

In fact, all of those things are red flags to any good reporter. If something is so complicated that its comprehension requires expertise, then it is imperative that dissenting experts be consulted as intellectual counterweights for discovering hidden bias. If a government minister asserts something as true, a reporter must assume that it is false. What good is a Fourth Estate if it does not maintain a position that is in constant tension with — if not diametrically opposed to — all those holding the reins of political power? And when a journalist reports something as truth, the first thought from other journalists must always be: let’s see your sources. Only by knowing who is saying what and why that person is saying it can anyone judge a statement’s veracity. A journalist who accepts another journalist’s recitation of events without first scrutinizing the sources for that information is no journalist at all!

If you take to heart the last paragraph, then you will agree that journalism as a truth-seeking profession is dead — or, if not dead, at least flat on its back and gripping its chest like a fat man after one too many sausages. It is rare these days to find reporters who value research and legwork over prepackaged sound bites from the White House. It is far easier to be fed information than to track down and discover the truth. Reporters would rather consult their on-demand contact list of “who’s who” government celebrities than look for unknown and powerless insiders with important stories to tell.

In many ways, journalism has become the apex manifestation of credentialism — or the celebration of prestigious credentials. In the old days, an editor did not care where a young reporter went to school or whether he played tennis with some Cabinet secretary’s daughter. What mattered was what stories the cub was right then pursuing. The job was to be such a pain to those with power that City Hall put you on a watch list. Newspapers weren’t looking for golfing buddies or acquaintances from the country club; reporting was the vocation of choice for blue-collar Americans who enjoyed sticking it to the man! Somewhere along the line as colleges began teaching students what to think instead of how to think and mega-corporations scooped up newspapers for pennies on the dollar, hard-nosed journalists were replaced with brown-nosing sycophants.

What are “narrative engineers,” after all? During the Cold War, we called them “Soviet propagandists.” In the world of espionage, they are known as “disinformation specialists.” In every time and place, they are skilled liars who distort reality and peddle falsehoods. They are regime protectors and agents of the State.

None of those vile synonyms for modern journalism describes Sharyl Attkisson, though. She’s a truth-teller who doesn’t curtsy to the powerful. That’s why Barack Obama treated her like a domestic enemy.

He has never owned anything.  He rents his bedroom, his furnishings, and his meager entertainments.  Each month, a digital account associated with his digital ID receives a number of central bank digital currency units.  How much he receives depends upon the number of hours he works at his government job, how much the government values his work, how much the government taxes him for the privilege of using public infrastructure, and how much of his income the government decides should be redistributed to other citizens in need.  After taxes, rents, utilities, and other assorted municipal, state, federal, and international fees are deducted from his earnings, he has little — if any — discretionary income.

If he chooses to save that income to invest in his future, the government informs him that his central bank digital currency units disappear within ninety days.  If he tries to purchase something that the government has banned, he forfeits what he currently has.  If he does something that the government deems contrary to his well-being, his social credit score decreases, and a fraction of his discretionary income disappears.

Every few weeks, a digital doctor (running on artificial intelligence) appears on the video screen in his apartment with a detailed list of all the “unhealthy” things he has done since their last interaction.  He is informed that a portion of his temporary savings will be redistributed to citizens with healthier habits.  His A.I. health monitor tells him that he must immediately report to the closest pharmaceutical distribution center so that he can be injected with the latest “vaccines.”  Failure to do so will result in the deactivation of all electronic entertainment devices and a permanent mark on his social credit record.

He is unhappy, and because the State’s A.I. supervisor has detected his unhappiness, the display monitor in his apartment encourages him to find personal meaning by “joining the fight against global warming.”  For a while, he does just that.  He attends community meetings in his apartment building where government officials talk about the importance of “saving the planet” by “owning nothing.”

He chats with anonymous strangers (bots?) on the State’s social media platform, and they all agree that the sacrifices they’re making to save the world are definitely worth it.  He wakes up one morning to discover that his social credit score has risen and that he has been rewarded with a few extra central bank digital currency units.  Still, our future man remains unhappy.

Then one day sirens blare, and his apartment monitor flashes with breaking news: the country is at war.  He listens intently but can’t figure out which foreign nations are attacking.  The trusted news anchors tell him that peace, prosperity, and freedom are all at risk.  He steps outside his tiny apartment to find other solitary renters fired up and talking excitedly about the battles to come.  He walks back inside to find his A.I. supervisor informing him that he has been personally selected to protect the homeland from its enemies.  For the first time in many years, our future man feels alive.

He soon finds himself in boot camp, where he enjoys regular exercise, discipline, and camaraderie.  Six months later, he and his new friends are shipped overseas.  Strangely, in all this time, nobody has explained whom they will actually be fighting.  All he knows is that they’re at war with “the authoritarians” who wish to “take our democracy.”  There is anticipation in his camp and endless talk of adventure.  Then, when everyone least expects it, a thunderous swarm of drones attacks from overhead.  Nobody has time to react.  Explosions seem to come from out of nowhere.  He sees the bodies of his friends torn to pieces.  Then everything goes dark.

He awakes in a hospital severely injured, is called a hero, and is later sent home.  When he arrives, he notices breadlines outside the government’s genetically engineered food distribution centers.  He hears a beggar on the street joke that they should call them “insect-lines,” since that’s all there is to eat.  He learns that someone else has moved into his old apartment, but he is offered a new one because of his military service.  It is smaller and has even fewer furnishings than the one he lost.

He realizes that most of his former neighbors never returned from war and that many of the newcomers now living in their apartments look and sound like those people he was told to fight overseas.  Nothing makes sense.  His injuries torment him.  He feels even more lost and lonely than before he went to war.  His A.I. supervisor informs him that he has been added to a list of people considered “potential domestic terrorists.”  Remaining on this list will make it hard for him to work and live.

Then, one day, his digital doctor asks if he would like some assistance in ending his life peacefully.  “You can save others,” he is told, “by permanently reducing your carbon footprint.”  In agony, he wonders, “How did we get here?”

The shortest answer to our future friend is this: governments abandoned sound money.  They replaced gold coins with paper currencies.  They made it illegal for ordinary citizens to conduct business freely and demanded that government-issued bills be used in economic transactions.  Then they gave private central banks the authority to print these paper bills whenever they determined that doing so would be good for the economy.

Whose economy do wealthy central bankers protect — Wall Street’s or that of the working class?  Although putatively charged with financial duties to maximize employment and minimize inflation, central banks function as market manipulators and money printers for overspending governments.  By increasing the supply of paper currency, the price of consumer goods rises.  However, the numerical price of stock market shares also goes up.

These capital assets do not gain any real value, but their rising prices give the illusion of economic growth.  Many bad companies that would never survive in a free market become lucrative investment opportunities in fake markets.  Easy money sustains companies that produce no market value.  Who loses most in this artificial arrangement?  The poorest people who have no stocks and only limited cash savings.  They have watched the hundred-dollar bill hidden under their mattresses lose most of its value over the last fifty years.

Neither fiat currencies nor central banks have any functional place in free societies.  Governments that manipulate the value of money rig markets and steal from the working poor.  The wealthiest end up owning everything, while everyone else tries to balance life precariously on a tightrope of consumer debts, mortgages, long-term loans, and the growing prospect of insolvency.  This world that financial and political elites have built is unsustainable.  It is also a kind of economic slavery.

Because it is unsustainable, those who have benefited most from its creation will do anything they must to survive its collapse.  A crashing dollar does not matter if those who control the financial system today control the central bank digital currencies of tomorrow.  Gross inequality and rampant poverty do not matter if governments can convince unhappy citizens that climate change, disease, and war require them to own less and sacrifice more.  Growing public anger does not matter if those with armies can censor speech, throttle food supplies, foment wars, and imprison dissidents.

Ponder this: how much of the story above seems foreign, and how much of it seems painfully familiar?  Your answer tells us just how much time we have left.

Image via Picryl.

It’s enough to make an observer wonder whether an awkward kumbaya truce could spontaneously break out, in which antagonistic foes raise a curious eyebrow and timidly ask, “You mean, you’re against fascism and racism, too?” before taking off their masks, throwing down their cardboard signs, and apprehensively shaking hands.  Of course, that never happens, so very angry Americans continue to denounce one another in nearly identical terms.

The whole thing would be funny if it were not so serious.  And it’s serious because the resulting confusion leaves Americans who might otherwise agree about an awful lot instead reaching for one another’s throats.  The more time they waste fighting, the easier it is for their real enemies to get away with all kinds of mischief without anyone noticing.

Who are their “real enemies”?  Well, regardless of any American’s particular ideological beliefs, those who most affect their lives (outside their families and friends) are almost certainly people with wealth and power — and not the vast majority of their working-class neighbors just trying to earn a living.  Because wealth and power remain in the hands of a small collection of political and financial “elites,” they benefit when citizens with neither wealth nor power choose to attack one another.

Another way to think of this is to ask a simple question: what is the greatest threat to any political system?  Is it the threat of foreign invasion?  Economic depression?  Disease?  Of course not.  It is the possibility that those controlled by the system will overthrow those doing the controlling.  Every government in the world — communist dictatorship, theocratic regime, or so-called constitutional republic — claims to be working for the people.  But when the “elites” of those governments speak behind closed doors, their efforts are directed toward subduing the people.  Governments invest in the illusion that their power is limitless and that the people have no other choice but to obey.  Whenever common people recognize that they are the ones with inherent power, the government’s illusion of control is shattered, the system is upended, and a new era with novel organizing principles arrives.

Seen through this lens, it is easy to understand why governments have a vested interest in stirring up domestic conflict.  A peaceful and well mannered society might engage in respectful debate and start asking serious questions, such as: why should private central banks be allowed to print money and devalue personal savings?  Why should America be financially squeezed by a bunch of multinational corporations that use cheap labor overseas and bully small businesses into bankruptcy here at home?  Why should foreign investment houses own so much land and property in America when fewer Americans than ever before can afford to own a home?  When government authorities use outside companies to censor Americans’ speech and spy on their private activities, do such workarounds really trump the Bill of Rights?  When corporations work hand in glove with government bureaucrats to track and police citizens, hasn’t our system of government transformed into something we would have once recognized as classically fascist?

These important questions and others might lead common citizens to think more clearly about their government’s priorities before arriving at another uncomfortable question: does the government really represent the people’s interests, or does it represent the interests of its corporate partners?  Such discussions threaten to shatter any government’s well-guarded illusion of control.

The political system can’t have that, so the corporate news media blast out daily reminders that “racism” and “extremism” are the real threats to peace and prosperity.  On television and on social media sites, the message is clear: trust the government but distrust your neighbors.  If everybody is more worried about Donald Trump’s personality or Taylor Swift’s political endorsements, nobody has time to wonder how we’ve reached the point when the federal government’s fiscal burden consumes 93% of America’s total accumulated wealth since its founding or how global debt now exceeds $315 trillion.  The wealthiest and most powerful people in the West take from everyone else and then set society on fire with engineered division and hate.  They are civil arsonists committed to destroying the evidence of all the damage they’ve wrought.

You can tell that financial and political “elites” are becoming desperate in their attempts to maintain power because they resort to little more than childish name-calling these days.  The great bugbear this decade is the “far right.”  Nobody explains why the “far right” should be feared more than the “far left,” when the theft and mass murder perpetrated by communist regimes over the last century dwarf the atrocities committed by all other ideologies in human history.

Nobody explains how the “far right” socialists of Hitler’s Germany can be distinguished from Venezuela’s “far left” socialists today.  Rather inexplicably, corporate news organs and academic institutions lump everyone who believes in limited government, national borders, self-determination, and personal liberty into the same category of WWII fascists who promoted totalitarianism, empire, dictatorship, and subjugation to the State.  Most citizens who are mislabeled “far right” distrust government and despise the notion of corporate control over society.  How that makes them “fascist” is a linguistic mystery.

What makes more sense is that Western governments fear the emergence of liberty movements not because they will one day be marching under the Arc de Triomphe, but rather because they represent a renewed public rejection of centralized power.  The more centralized the governing authority (e.g., the U.S. federal government, the E.U., and the U.N.), the more worried it has become that common people will reclaim sovereignty over their personal lives.  Consequently, the mouthpieces for the axis of corporate and government power in Western capitals — which is socialist in spirit and fascist in principle — slander citizens who are opposed to Big Government as somehow being the ideological descendants of Hitler’s Nazi Party.  It’s horse pucky.

Those who are nonsensically labeled as “far right” do have all too frequent encounters with fascism.  It’s just that those experiences come in the form of corporate-government beatings from the same people and institutions claiming to “protect democracy.”  During the Reign of COVID Terror, social media companies threatened and censored citizens who questioned the government’s monopoly on scientific debate, the need for school closures and economic lockdowns, or the efficacy of the pharmaceutical industry’s experimental “vaccines.”  Fascist tyrants such as Justin Trudeau used his partnership with banking institutions to seize citizens’ savings and mortgaged properties when they protested against his COVID authoritarianism.  Cellular companies kept track of citizens’ movements and reported those violating house arrest to the police.

This kind of corporate-government fascism has become commonplace.  European governments dedicate enormous resources to monitoring citizens’ online speech and punishing those who express unapproved opinions, and tech companies are quick to assist these bureaucratic bullies in their hunt for “offensive speech.”  A UK man was recently arrested for engaging in “anti-Establishment rhetoric” in a social media post.  Google openly admits to manipulating search results in ways that promote the talking points of their government partners while hiding dissenting voices.  Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Pharma don’t operate independently of Big Government.  They are one and the same.

It turns out that everyone hates fascism except for Western governments and their corporate friends.  That’s why they demonize citizens who cherish liberty.