More people around the world are—at least nominally—free than at any other time in history. Free from monarchs, dictators, communism, fascism. Free from serfdom, servitude, slavery, deprivation, and extreme oppression. This has ironically led many to take their freedom for granted. Especially in the West. Perhaps the longer you have had something the less you cherish it. Because never before in human history have so many people willingly ceded control of their minds, souls, and bodies to others. Examples of this are legion, perhaps none more illustrative and chilling than the reaction to government mandates and restrictions put in place during the coronavirus plandemic pandemic.

Healthy people must stay in their homes for two weeks a year or more? No problem. We have to cover our breathing apparatus with masks, indoors or out? Check. My job is “nonessential?” Yes, sir. I can’t go see my dying grandmother? Okay. Daughter can’t get married if she wants all her friends and family to attend and share her joy? Whatever you say. “Experts” say I must inject an unvetted foreign substance into my body if I wish to attend college or keep my job? Thank you, sir, I’ll have another! We must keep at least six feet apart from all other homo sapiens and eat our Thanksgiving dinner outside? Big Brother knows best!

Whether submitting to hoaxes, obeying frauds, or allowing “educators,” “journalists,” Big Tech tyrants, corporate charlatans, and unelected bureaucrats to tell us what to do, how to speak, how to think, and what is right, far too many of us have effectively knelt before the emperor. But the emperor has no clothes. It is time for us to acknowledge this fact.

(A brief aside: Those who would enslave us spent four years telling us that President Trump was an emperor, a tyrant. They opposed everything he did or said simply because he did or said it. Turns out, most of what he said was correct. And he was one man fighting, for us, against the vast systemic bigotry of The Left. He was, in fact, the anti-emperor, the embodiment of a true anti-fascist.)

Too many of us have put up with exorbitant taxes, punitive regulations, mindless mandates, and policies that make us less happy, less free, and at greater risk of being physically harmed or killed. Enforced mask mandates for us but not for those burning down our cities. Protect our borders? No way. Defund the police? You bet.

This madness has to stop. But it can only stop when the vast majority of people no longer choose to be slaves and victims. When unprecedentedly large numbers of people effectively willingly enslave themselves, when they outsource their free will to a government entity, it is a sign of mass insanity, an Age of Delusion. “Voluntary” slavery is anathema to an individual soul, a free society, and to God Himself.

Leftists don’t want us to remember, let alone laud, our Founders, old white men that most were. But, though they were classical liberals—meaning they would be conservatives today-- they were true progressives. Their knowledge, brilliance, self-sacrifice, and courage changed the world for the better, ushering in an age of freedom, invention, and reason. Some called the results of their endeavors the “5,000 Year Leap.”

And they threw off an oppressive government, in part, because of a mild tax on tea.

As we approach Independence Day, July 4, 2021, I’ve found myself looking out at the world and in at my children. “Are we too far gone?” I have asked myself. “Can we still save the republic?” Has the unique quest for equal opportunity morphed into a demand for equal outcome, or equity?

I recently received, via regular old mail, a notice from Hillsdale College, perhaps the last bastion of actual “higher education” in America. It bid me a “Happy Independence Day,” and followed that up with a plea to help preserve the only nation ever “conceived in liberty” by participating in the “Preserve the Declaration Project.”

John Trumbull's 1817 'Declaration of Independence, which hangs in the Capitol Rotunda.

I humbly ask you to do the same. Simply go to hillsdaleforliberty.com/declaration and download the free commemorative copy of the Declaration of Independence. Sign the pledge to read the Declaration on July 4th, and then read the Declaration to your family and friends on the Fourth of July during your cookout/party/observance. That’s it.

As Abraham Lincoln said of the hundreds of thousands who were killed fighting to end slavery and preserve the Union:

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

158 years later, is it too late to keep government of the people, by the people, for the people, from perishing from the earth? Is it still possible to have a new birth of freedom? Can we save the “last, best hope on earth?”

I honestly don’t know. But let us try.

Dear Lord, let us try.

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