The federal government spies on every email, text, and call you make.  It uses your phone's location services to pinpoint where you are at all times.  It knows which I.P. addresses are associated with online comments that have been deemed "politically incorrect."  Its partnerships with Amazon and Walmart let it know what you're reading and buying.  Its partnerships with Google and Facebook let it know what you're thinking.  Its partnerships with Twitter and Hollywood allow it to censor unapproved messages before too many brains have the opportunity to consider new thoughts.  Its alliance with credit card companies allows it to track all your financial transactions and thereby understand your habits, preferences, choices, and addictions.  Its alliance with cellular companies allows it to monitor all your movements, contacts, and associations.  And all of these consumer comforts that are used by the "national security" surveillance state to watch everyone in real time constantly measure every American's potential for subversiveness, even when that American is engaged in the most mundane things during the course of an ordinary day.  

Now, whom does the government fear most under these conditions?  Hint: It is not the millions of illegal aliens who pour through our uncontrolled borders (during supposedly the greatest pandemic threat in a century), or foreign governments that bankroll American elected officials (How else could Biden and other lifelong politicians be millionaires?), or the threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack taking out America's aging electrical grid (because Congress's "infrastructure" spending won't bother fixing actual infrastructure when there are so many campaign donors and special interest groups to pay off).  

Rather, it is the person who has no problem walking away from the government's panopticon to go hunting in the woods, who decides to pay in cash, or who has woken up to the reality that the federal government is in the business of control.  It is the solitary American capable of questioning the government's official State narrative and willing to think for himself who scares the bejesus out of the powers that be.  It is the patriotic grandmother who has the temerity to show up at the nation's capitol after a heavily disputed election to wave a Trump flag while drinking hot chocolate.  It is the parent who has the gall to believe that the public should be in charge of public education.  It is the humble police officer publicly outed and fired for privately giving a word of encouragement to an innocent teenager politically persecuted for defending his life against a State-sanctioned Antifa mob.  It is the health care worker, firefighter, blue-collar worker, or soldier who refuses to let Big Brother pump him full of experimental gene therapies for the remainder of his life just because people who wear their prestige like crowns proclaim, "You must because we say."  In other words, governments pretending to protect freedom are most afraid of individuals who insist on being free.  

Does this seem like a system that is destined to survive?  

Although I am deeply sympathetic with those Americans who throw up their arms in hopelessness and fatigue at the growing authoritarian State that is visible everywhere, I would point out that self-sustaining human systems function best when individual, voluntary acts interchange organically and invisibly to keep the societal machine running from the bottom up.  When coercion and surveillance are required to artificially keep society intact through a top-to-bottom tyrannical squeeze, the whole system is at risk of collapse from a single dissenting voice that chooses to throw sand into the rusting, brittle cogs.  When the social fabric is knit together with individual free will, you get an American flag for which people are willing to die.  When governing elites choose to push their sinister interests upon the masses through the threat of punishment and the attractiveness of cheap rewards, you get a meaningless, multicultural ball of yarn that free-thinking people learn to kick around for sport.  

Authoritarianism has taken root in America?  Yes.  The police state is beginning to enforce its will at the expense of dissent?  Certainly.  All hope is lost because the political left's "long march through the institutions" is heading up the front drive toward total victory?  Au contraire!  The State's slow yet relentless takeover of society may have achieved success this last century by dedicating its enormous energy to rounding up all the independent-minded frogs and throwing them into the same barely simmering pot under close watch until those in power became hungry enough to feast, but now our totalitarian cooks have begun boiling the societal pot with such intemperance that the more slippery frogs have begun squirming to safety and threaten to topple over the whole cauldron, leaving the tyrants with nothing to eat.

Watching the government lay down fresh mandates and executive orders demanding that citizens submit to its will or suffer the consequences should be seen not as a sign of unstoppable power, but rather as evidence that its grip on power is spinning out of control.  For the time being, even its most important objectives — training Americans to accept forced injections and digital passports — have been put on hold because too much of the workforce has said, "No."  What's the lesson here?  That pushing back on the immoral and unconstitutional dictates of a government exercising illegitimate power works!  And, even more importantly, that the government is more afraid of the people than the people should ever be of their government!

Let me be clear.  We have had a three-body problem in the United States since World War II: (1) the Democrats have been steadily pushing Marxist socialism upon the American people while claiming to liberate them; (2) with the exception of small reprieves provided by Presidents Reagan and Trump, Establishment Republicans have falsely presented themselves as stewards of the inalienable rights and liberties defended by our Founding Fathers while actually providing aid and comfort to the Democrat's Big Government conquest of America; and (3) a nefarious shadow bureaucracy made up of the permanent D.C. Leviathan, multinational firms, and a financial aristocracy controlling and manipulating the dollar's value and therefore each American's personal wealth has pushed unprincipled elected "leaders" to do what's in its sinister interests while actively harming the best interests of the people they purport to represent.  This was as true thirty years ago as it is true today.  What is the difference now?  The cat's out of the bag, and more and more Americans are acutely aware that the U.S. government works against their self-determination.

On this side of the battlefield, our banners proclaim, "free speech," "freedom of conscience," and "free will."  Our warriors cherish liberty; the right to own property through the efforts of one's own labor; the right to approach the world with an open mind capable of seeking universal truths; and the certainty that they, and not some king or queen, are responsible for their own destiny.  On the other side is a crumbling system dependent on State propaganda, censorship, threats of force, and total control.  Those are all fearsome tools of government, to be sure, but they don't look so attractive when held high atop banners for all to see, nor do they rally the hearts of men to charge forth against some enemy army, especially when that might mean willingly sacrificing themselves in defense of the intangible virtues of glorious ideas that sometimes require the "last full measure of devotion" to persevere.

So the world is waking up to the reality that only one real conflict exists — that between individual liberty and total State domination.  Thanks to decades of taxation and money-printing, states sure do have a lot of pretty toys.  But with history as a guide, I'll bet every time on those poor souls who choose to defend freedom.

Image via Pxhere.

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