America is in a civil war. Not a cocktail party war like Vietnam or Afghanistan, where Americans stand around and talk about it but relatively few are personally affected. No, this is a WWII-level existential threat war where the difference between victory and defeat is literally freedom or tyranny. One need look no farther than what Adolph Trudeau is doing in Canada right now to understand what the future holds.

This war has been simmering for decades and most Americans didn’t even notice. Now it’s obvious. Virtually every element of traditional American culture is being destroyed. The left has decided that the United States is a plague on humanity and must be eliminated.

In this case, the “left” consists of government, media, big tech, big business, and academia, among others.

Here’s a short list of their targets:

• Turning schools into leftist Indoctrination centers
• Government control of your neighborhood
• Open borders
• Money / Driver’s licenses / Voting for illegals
• Legalizing crime / No bail
• Encouraging / Empowering homelessness
• 2^nd Amendment
• Censorship
• Gender reimagining
• Control over your body
• Free exercise of religion
• Peaceably assemble
• Men having babies
• Banking
• Climate Change
• CRT
• Government spying on citizens
• Girls’ sports

And of course, most problematic of all is their successful coup d’état.

With that and more, do we still live in a free country? Obviously not.

Which brings us back to war. Ask yourself, if someone declared war on America, what more might they do in victory? Other than killing you or turning you into slaves, what more is there?

Some argue we’re not in a war, citing polls that show a majority of Americans don’t like those leftist positions. That’s accurate, but it doesn’t matter. The majority doesn’t count. The people who “count”, the opinion-makers, those in academia, media, high tech, etc., are the hardcore leftists behind all of this and, as we all know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Americans have traditionally been ambivalent about government. For most, politics was something to be endured every four years and, after the election, life went back to normal.

Image: United States Capitol (edited) by Martin Falbisoner. CC BY-SA 3.0.

But no longer. If you were a Teddy Roosevelt partisan or a fan of Truman or Ike, whether your guy won or lost didn’t matter tremendously to the average American. Maybe your taxes would go up or down a bit or maybe the price of gasoline or chicken might change a bit, but that was it for most people because government, particularly the federal government, had little impact on their everyday lives.

Today, not so much. In 2022’s America, the federal government daily affects almost every aspect of American lives; e.g., the price of gas, grades of meat, rate of pay at work, MPG for your car, Epi-Pens, not to mention vaccine mandates, gun regulations, and shipping illegal immigrants to your neighborhood. But it’s not just the federal government. It’s state and local government as well. From inane licensing requirements for hairdressers, bartenders, and Uber drivers to union-centric dysfunctional schools and gun laws that outlaw the Second Amendment in all but name, the fists of the federal fit perfectly into the state and local regulatory gloves, together strangling American freedom.

But government’s not the only front in this war. There’s culture too. From social media—the 21st century’s public square—to mass media to academia and big business, the left dominates. Not just dominates as in winning but dominate as in ruling over everyone else. Live and let live is not an axiom the left recognizes or exercises. No, the left demands fealty or will crush you. Leftists will destroy your business, get you fired or banned from social media, take your kids away, kick you out of college, and anything else they can think of.

Today, we’re seeing the government leviathan becoming even more powerful as it assimilates with the leftist borg. We saw it for four years as the FBI worked side by side with the media to tarnish Donald Trump’s name and destroy his presidency. Now, Joe Biden has encouraged silencing “misinformation”—that is, anything contradicting the leftist narrative.

At the same time, the federal government has essentially established a gulag to house political prisoners who participated in the “insurrection,” despite the police inviting many into the building, some never entering the building at all, and most having been involved in no violence whatsoever. Some of these “terrorists” have been sitting, without charges or bail, in jails for over a year. That treatment stands in stark contrast to how Democrat-run states and the feds treated those who participated in the violent and deadly BLM / Antifa riots of the summer of 2020, most of whom were bailed out in the unlikely event they ended up in custody in the first place.

All of this points to a fractured America. Observations about “majorities” give one hope, but the reality is that unless the “majority” who reject leftism react, it won’t matter because, as we’re seeing in real-time in Canada, the wall between freedom and fascism is fragile and, once it’s breached, it’s likely game over.

If the Republic is to survive, it will be up to that “majority” to do something to arrest the slide into tyranny. The GOP needs to take a page from Newt Gingrich and give them something to focus on, to talk about, and most importantly, to vote on. The Contract with America was pivotal in nationalizing the election, and that’s exactly what we need now—a message that patriots can rally around.

The fronts upon which the left is attacking are too numerous to defend against simultaneously. The battle lines need to be streamlined just as the Contract did. As such, here are Five for Freedom—five commonsense items that all GOP candidates or officials must agree with if they want to win. If candidates refuse on any one of them, they should be primaried or defeated in favor of someone who does support them.

1. The 2020 election was fraudulent and such fraud cannot be allowed to occur again.

2. Covid mandates are unconstitutional and must stop.

3. The #1 job of the federal government will be to seal the southern border.

4. The United States must be energy independent.

5. CRT has no place in American schools.

If any candidate running on the GOP ticket can’t support these five positions, he or she has no place in the GOP. The threats to liberty are too numerous and the threats to the Constitution too grave to elect someone who will waffle on these basic principles.

If there is indeed a majority of Americans that is interested in saving the Republic, they have to have something to rally around. Thus far, the GOP has done an atrocious job of focusing America’s attention. The GOP needs to do that now and Five for Freedom is the tool to do just that.

It’s likely it will have to happen over the objections of establishment Republicans like McConnell, McCarthy, and Ronna McDaniel, but so be it. At the end of the day, you’re either on the side of freedom or you’re not. As the last two years have demonstrated, liberty is fragile and without citizens willing to stand up for it, it vanishes.

This is the time, this is the place, and Five for Freedom is the weapon with which patriots can vanquish the Borg of woke leftism that has been seeking to assimilate America for decades. The only question is, does the GOP have the courage to wield it?