I am among those tens-of-millions of Americans fearful of a new civil war.  I despair of liberty's protracted endurance and deplore the ever-increasing likelihood that in my lifetime, I will bear witness to the end of this once-great nation.

Never in the history of these United States has the federal government more aggressively sought to deprive the citizenry of those inviolable rights enshrined in the Constitution.  The First and Second Amendments — edicts essential to freedom's preservation — have been savaged by the sitting Executive and Legislative Branches and only feebly defended by the Judicial.  We are a nation in decline, a nation in peril, a nation deeply, and I fear ineluctably, divided.

The Second Amendment exists for the purpose of ensuring that the people are able to stand against a tyrannical and corrupt government — such as that currently in power.  Only a government intent on subduing and subjugating its citizens deprives them of arms.  This is not the supposition of one man; it is a statement of historical fact.

As Hitler and his fanatics fomented enmity between German and Jew, as Lenin and his apparatchiks fomented enmity between proletariat and bourgeoisie, so Biden and his horde of postmodern leftist neo-Bolsheviks foment enmity between those who would preserve America and those obsessed with tearing her down.  Likewise, as Hitler and Lenin hastened to disarm the populations of Germany and Russia, so Biden and the Democrats are attempting to disarm Americans by dressing lawlessness and gun violence born of their own lax criminal policies in the the raiment of a national public health crisis for purpose of seizing emergency powers and eradicating the Second Amendment.  The methodology is old, tired, and patently obvious.

Censorship and propaganda, too — those proprietary tools of tyranny — have been adopted by Biden and his handlers.  To actualize their aims, Democrats have conspired with Big Tech to subvert freedom of speech.  They have suppressed dissent and penalized — even imprisoned — dissenters.  They have appointed themselves the supreme arbiters of truth and invoked the power of a partisan Judiciary to prop up their ill-gotten and facile authority.

Consider the reflex to totalitarianism glimpsed in the COVID responses of functionally socialist states the likes of the U.K., Australia, and Canada.  The selfsame aspiration to tyranny festers in the malignancy that is America's Democrat party.

As the sun sets on American unity and the battle lines between left and right are drawn, my family and I resign ourselves to the defense of liberty, the preservation of constitutionality, and the sustainment of those ideals for which our fathers — founding and familial alike — fought and died.  That we will soon be called upon to live up to the examples set by our forebears is the great terror and glory of our lives.

Image: Don Hankins via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).