Shining Cities On Hills Take Centuries to Build but Can be Destroyed Quickly

 America’s Founding Fathers were nothing short of extraordinary.  Never before had a group of men come together to do things that would so change the arc of human history.  To a man it’s likely that they agreed with Sir Isaac Newton’s adage from 1676:  "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." This particularly applies to the two men most responsible for the nation’s founding documents, Thomas Jefferson & James Madison.

Jefferson, whose extensive library was the basis upon which the Library of Congress is built, was extraordinarily well read.  From Plato and Plutarch to Chaucer and Shakespeare to Blackstone and Burke, he was a voracious reader. Perhaps none more so than the giant of the enlightenment’s, John Locke. In addition to the intellectual arsenal all of this gave him, there were specific documents he drew upon in writing the Declaration of Independence.  Among these were his own draft of the Constitution of Virginia, George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights as well as the English Bill of Rights and its antecedent, the Magna Carta. 

Madison shared Jefferson’s familiarity with Montesquieu, Locke, Blackstone and crafted the Constitution with many of the same sources in mind. Given the different functions of the documents, Madison focused the Constitution on the fundamental nature of man and the need to constrain men’s most based instincts while Jefferson’s Declaration was focused on the passions that impel men to act.

The nation they bequeathed to us is of course, imperfect, but it is extraordinary nonetheless.  Based on these documents and the 2000 years of western civilization that preceded them, it has evolved with principles that have been, in aggregate, the most providential in all in human history. Fundamental elements such as freedom of speech, press, religion, the rights to a fair trial and to be free from government molestation in your home created an almost crystal clear limitation on the powers of government and the tyrannical nature of men. At the same time, outside of the explicitly government sphere you have things like private property, Capitalism and the Judeo-Christian tradition that reinforced the framework of the nation.

As everyone knows, America had extraordinary challenges from the beginning, starting with her Original Sin. But throughout she has had at her disposal in the form of the Constitution the tools to evolve and overcome her imperfections and advance. 

The culture Americans have today, or at least did until recently, focused on things like community, church, freedom of speech, limited government, private property, merit & individual achievement.

All of that took generations to build.  It took patriots standing on the shoulders of giants to build… And the result has been nothing short of spectacular.  For most of the last century the United States has been the most powerful nation in the world from both a military and economic perspective, and perhaps most of all, from an opportunity perspective.  From universities to Silicon Valley to Wall Street to main street, America has led the world in scientific advances, economic advances and, again, opportunity.  This is nowhere more clear in the fact that of the 954 Nobel Prizes awarded since its inception in 1900, over 404 of them (42%) are Americans, and of those 404, approximately 35% are immigrants.  And it’s not just intellectuals. There’s athletics. Of the 21,000 Olympic medals awarded since the revival of the Games in 1896, Americans have won over 3,000 or 15%. In this year’s games, approximately 10% of the American team was made up of immigrants or children of immigrants. And money. Of the world’s 2,781 billionaires in 2024, 29% of them, or 813 are Americans. Of those 813, approximately 11% are immigrants. 

All of this suggests that immigrants are good for America.  That’s true.  But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem.  We do. Because culture matters…

Unfortunately what we have seen over the last 30 years has been a flood of illegal immigrants from nations with no concept of the basics of American culture. The breakdown of the countries of origin tells the tale. The top ten nations from which illegals hail are as follows:  Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Columbia, Ecuador & El Salvador. Together they make up 80% of the illegals crossing our border. Those nations have no sustained history of free speech, limited government, private property, free elections or Capitalism. Contrast that with the previous waves of migration (1840-1889 & 1890-1911) when 89% of immigrants came from fellow European nations with overlapping western values. 

It is simply not sustainable for a nation to import tens of millions of people from nations with cultures that are anathema to its own. Indeed of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world, eight are in the countries listed above. The basic elements of western culture, of American culture are not found in DNA, they are found in communities, in the shared history of the citizens and in the laws of the nation. Large numbers of immigrants from nations with different mores can be destabilizing. From crime to the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to support illegals to the strains on services such as education and healthcare to the dollars sent back home, illegals do harm to America.  Just this past week we’ve seen reports of Venezuelan gangs taking over  neighborhoods in Colorado and unleashing chaos in Dallas while 75% of arrests in midtown Manhattan are illegals. 

The only solution is deportation. By the millions. It will be ugly, it will be difficult, it will take courage in the face of withering media assaults and Democrat lamentations, but it is necessary.  If we do not build a wall and send the illegals home, it will be seen as an open invitation to the entire world to cross our border… and as Roy Beck explains with gumballs, that’s not sustainable.

Culture matters. The reality is, not all cultures are equal. If they were there wouldn’t be millions of people seeking to cross our borders. Western civilization in general and American culture in particular has taken centuries to develop, and a quick look around the world will demonstrate that cultures and civilizations that maintain themselves for centuries are few and far in between. 

If Americans don’t recognize that what we have is a gift and is something to be valued and protected, our shining city on a hill will soon devolve into the morass of chaos, violence, scarcity and tyranny where much of the rest of the world resides. If we really want to show compassion to those longing for what Americans have, the solution is not to open our borders and let them in, but rather seek to export the basic elements of freedom which are at the foundation of our success. There’s an adage of much disputed origin that perfectly articulates the idea:  Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. Our goal should not be to suckle the millions of illegals who swarm our borders and overwhelm our cities, but rather we should be to export the fundamental tenants of freedom and prosperity to the billions around the world so they can build their own shining cities on their own hills…

White Pride... Is that a thing?

Although the first person killed in the American Revolution was a black man with native American blood – Crispus Attucks – the reality is, every man who signed the Declaration of Independence and was involved with the crafting of the Constitution was white.  Simply put, there would be no United States without white men.

After almost 250 years however the life of the average American is not directly impacted by what those white men did in Philadelphia.  Indirectly however, we experience the world build upon their foundations every day… and most of that world was the result of the inventions and innovations of other white men.

If you woke up this morning and did anything other than work on a farm, you can thank Cyrus McCormick.  When he invented the mechanical reaper in 1831 farming hadn’t changed in a thousand years, where one man with a scythe and two helpers could harvest two acres of grain a day.  McCormick’s early reaper allowed a man to double that and his later reapers multiplied that many times.  His introduction of payment plans made his machines the workhorses of a dramatic increase in efficiencies in farming.  At the time of his invention 80% of America’s population was either directly or indirectly involved in farming.  Today that number is closer to 2%.  So in essence Cyrus McCormick freed up almost 80% of the population to go out and do pretty much anything… from becoming entrepreneurs, to florists to baseball players to scientists, to plumbers to Instagram models and, yes, sadly, professional race grifters and activists.

Another white guy who had an extraordinary impact on America today was Henry Ford.  Many people think Ford invented the automobile.  He didn’t.  But his auto manufacturing production line brought the car from a luxury item only the rich could afford to a product tens of millions and eventually billions of people around the world could afford.  With that unprecedented access to cars the universe opened up for Americans.  Transportation limits on where they could work, live or go to school evaporated.  Suddenly they could drive anywhere they wanted, not limited to where public transport went or how far their horse could travel in a day or how far they could walk. Today 250 million Americans drive three trillion miles a year, six times the distance the earth travels around the sun!

There’s also Willis Carrier, the man who invented modern air conditioning.  Every summer as temperatures soar across the country, scorching everything in their path, most Americans can retreat to their homes and relax in air conditioned comfort or enjoy a movie theater or restaurant that would otherwise feel like a sweatshop. The degree to which the air office spaces changed the face of America is hard to exaggerate.  While manufacturing steel or working on a farm might not be impacted greatly by the invention of air conditioning, many of the things Americans do for work would be much more difficult if not impossible without it.  Things like medical research and high tech manufacturing or more mundane things like computer programming or working in a superstore or busy restaurant.

Then there is Elisha Otis, inventor of the safety elevator.  Take a look at the skyline of any American city and you’ll see buildings that stack 30 or 50 or even 100 floors high.  Of the tallest, skyscrapers of 40 or more floors, New York City alone has 250, and there are almost a thousand across the country.  None of those, or even the tens of thousands of buildings of just 10 or 20 stories high wouldn’t be possible without Otis’s safety elevator.  His presentation at the 1853 New York World's Fair helped usher in the advent of skyscrapers by giving much of the public the confidence to ride in elevators.

And there are countless more including George Eastman, the personal camera innovator, Charles Goodyear who put tires on our cars, the Wright Brothers and their airplane, Samuel Colt and his guns, Isaac Singer the sewing machine magnate, Levi Strauss and his jeans, Leo Baekeland who brought us plastic, and thousands of others.  To those historic figures you can add (for better or worse) contemporary white men Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andreessen and in reality, millions of others. 

The fact of the matter is that these white men built much of the world we live in today. There’s no group of people in human history who have had a greater impact on mankind than white males in general, and American white males in particular.  The world they created may not be perfect, but measured against virtually every culture that came before them the level of freedom and prosperity isn’t even close.

As such, we should celebrate White Male Pride!  Yay!

But here’s the thing, although these white men may have accomplished much, white men have also done extraordinarily bad things… from Jack the Ripper to Hitler to Stalin to Teds Kaczynski and Bundy. 

We can’t celebrate white male pride because white men are not monolithic.  Some white men are great and others despicable human beings.  The thing that made America great wasn’t the fact that her Founding Fathers were white, but rather it was the ideas they had and the framework they put in place. 

The notion of white pride is simply absurd. But the truth is, so too is black pride and gay pride.  George Washington was no more of a representative of all white males than was Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter.  Equally, MLK was no more a representative of all black males than was Samuel Little, the nation’s deadliest serial killer. 

And while celebrating white males is absurd, we should nonetheless be grateful for the things that some of them bequeathed to us that have allowed Americans to live lives that kings couldn’t have imagined just a century ago. 

And that legacy isn’t due to skin color, it’s due to a culture that developed individual rights, freedom and representative government over more than two millennia, and happened nowhere else on earth. Those basic elements, when combined with free markets and limited government, found their apex in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution.  Today the nation built on those foundations is the most robust and prosperous in history. 

But that prosperity can only survive if the fundamental tenants of its culture remain strong. Sadly they’re not, and that’s why America is fraying.  The Democrats’ balkanization of Americans by race and sex have taken Americans’ focus off of creating more prosperity and instead put the focus tribalization and redistributing wealth, with the full weight of the government, media and academia driving the transition.

No nation in history has prospered by redistributing wealth.  It’s against human nature and a recipe for tyranny.  The key to prosperity is creating more wealth and the Democrats have undermined that as they vilify whites, both past and present, for the crime of being white.  The truth is, we don’t need black or gay or white pride. What we do need however is pride in the successes America has achieved and the building blocks of freedom that made that success possible. 

Just as comparison and envy are the roots of evil, gratitude and conscientiousness are the fount of prosperity. Although it’s verboten to mention in woke 2023, the reality is that white men built much of the world we live in today. We can be grateful for their efforts without making them gods or denigrating anyone else.  The beauty of America, particularly in the 21^st century is that anyone can succeed.  We should look to history with curiosity seeking to find inspiration in what those men (most of whom happened to be white) accomplished, not with scorn and disdain for their sin of being men of their times. 

Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA

The Left Sacrifices Actual Greatness for the Illusion of Perfection

In 1776 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence and thus began a war with Britain.  When the war was concluded in 1783 American casualties would number 25,000 dead and 25,000 wounded.  Those 50,000 casualties paid the price so that a new nation, founded on the ideas of freedom and liberty, could take its place among the nations of the world. 

Eighty five years later the United States was at war with itself and eventually 360,000 Union soldiers gave their lives to extend that promise of freedom and end slavery.  Seventy five years later 405,000 Americans would die in an effort to save freedom from tyranny on two continents. 

Over the course of almost 250 years approximately 1 million American men gave their lives in defense of freedom, the vast majority of which were volunteers.  While their individual reasons for enlisting were likely as varied as their life stories, all made the decision that the nation was worth fighting for and indeed dying for if necessary.

Over the lifespan of our nation those million men sacrificed their lives and tens of millions of others put theirs on the line to defend the ideals set out in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution.  And despite the current crop of leftist brass leading the Pentagon, most servicemen and veterans are and have been extraordinary patriots.  But here’s the thing, America has been so incredibly successful in fostering peace around the world, been so extraordinarily successful in crafting the prosperity at home that relatively few modern day Americans ever have to bother putting on the uniform in the first place, nevermind actually fighting in a war in which they are asked to risk their lives. 

Most of those on the left who tell us that America is a fundamentally racist nation have never had to serve in a military environment, one of the most colorblind elements of American society.  No, most of them are pampered college educated agitators with very little skin in the game in terms of doing anything productive at all, not protecting the nation, not building the nation, not improving the nation. Others are minorities who have listened for years to grifters selling the fiction of serial victimization.  They attack the United States for not being the nirvana that Marx wrote about or the racial paradise Nikole Hannah-Jones pretends Cuba is.  (Ironically, Marx, a chronically unemployed writer who was perpetually supported by Engles, scion of a wealthy family with textile interests, spent his time theorizing and critiquing capitalists… including textile manufacturers… Similarly absurd, the nirvana we are told is Cuba is is today wracked with civil unrest as the poverty stricken population revolts against 70 years of communist oppression.)

Few on the left have life experiences that would enable them to understand the United States for what it really is… an imperfect nation with extraordinary goals where citizens have enjoyed unprecedented freedoms and achieved unparalleled prosperity.  Most of them have been indoctrinated into the mindset that defines the United States by its worst failures, never to be mitigated by its overwhelmingly more common successes.  Slavery and Jim Crow were indeed dark marks on America’s history, but a civil war to end the former and more than half a century of laws, programs and expenditures to overcome the latter count for nothing to redeem the nation. 

That is a hallmark of the left, like Marx… little experience but lots of ideas. How many modern leftists risked their lives for their country?  Probably not a lot.  How many of them risked every penny they had (or more) to start a business and find themselves forced to walk on the tightrope between paying the landlord, suppliers, and making payroll, all while trying to market their product, fight off competition and jump through a leviathan of regulatory hurdles?  Again, woefully few.  How many of them worked on a factory floor or an oil rig or were plumbers or welders or janitors, as they sacrificed much to try and give their kids opportunities they didn’t have? Certainly not many.  As America has became more white collar, more information centric and more focused on cheap imports over the last quarter century or so, many parents pampered and spoiled their children, creating an army of adult adolescents with few real responsibilities, rarely risking much of anything and even more rarely encountering opposition of any sort.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. One of the reasons Donald Trump was such a great president was that he was an actual businessman – granted, one who inherited much from his father.  But despite his father’s success, Trump was a successful businessman operating a real estate business in shark infested New York City, one of the most difficult cities in the country to navigate.  He dealt with New York’s kleptocratic regulatory boards, corrupt unions, and predatory banks all while focusing on making payroll, hitting deadlines and producing a product consumers would exchange their hard earned money for.  Donald Trump is not some Wall Street genius making billions by selling obscure financial products to giant retirement funds, nor is he a Silicon Valley prodigy who sold some selfie app to Facebook or Google. He’s a businessman who builds actual things.  At the same time he’s not some academic savant living in an ivory tower with no communication with the real world, a “journalist” with tunnel vision nor a Hollywood puppet speaking someone else’s words for a living, while flying around on private jets and living in mansions protected by ex Mossad agents. 

Trump may have the planes and the mansions and the security, but his words are his own and he is very much a man of the people.  In what was possibly the single most accurate tweet of all time, Trump said:  “In reality they’re not after me. They’re after you, I’m just in the way.” And that’s the key to all of what’s going on in America today.  The digital revolution, social media and government handouts have fundamentally transformed America from a hardscrabble place where people rolled up their sleeves and built tangible things, grew or extracted an income from the ground and signed up to defend their nation to one with overindulged snowflakes where virtually everything is digital, business is little more than delivering things built somewhere else by someone else and government largesse that makes actual work seem like a sucker’s game.

America today is allowing itself to be destroyed by groups of people who neither share its values nor its understanding of what’s necessary to build or defend a successful nation in the real world.  They, much like their gods, Marx, Sanders and Hannah-Jones, live in ivory tower worlds where virtually everything is theoretical because none of their ideas actually work in the real world.  They never concern themselves with building anything, improving anything or designing anything that actually survives an encounter with the real world. When you operate in the universe of ideas, everything is perfect because it’s never subjected to reality.  Much as the French learned at the end of the end of the 18^th century, such theoretical perfection rarely survives exposure to the kilns of actual life, and giving the reins of society to simpletons who invoke such perfection is the fastest road to abject failure.        

Democrats and the Tyranny of the Mob

Forty years ago there was a great show on NBC called Hill Street Blues.  It was an early player in the gritty police drama genre, a-la The Wire or Bosch. The ensemble show was led by Daniel J. Travanti playing Capt. Frank Furillo and his love interest, the stunning Veronica Hamel as public defender Joyce Davenport.

In one episode the police had arrested a suspect for a particularly heinous crime and Davenport was his attorney.  There was a giant mob in front of the jail demanding the suspect’s head.  Furillo knew the suspect was guilty but the man refused to confess. 

In order to “encourage” the suspect to confess, Furillo told Davenport that her client was being released.  The suspect, knowing that if he walked out that door he would be set upon by the frothing crowd, decided to confess.  Davenport was furious so we expect Furillo might have been sleeping on the couch that night…

That episode was an example of mob rule, albeit one orchestrated by government.  The more common form or mob rule is what happened down in North Carolina some weeks ago when the University of North Carolina gave in to the literal mob outside their doors and offered Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure.  The university had previously offered the writer of the insidious 1619 Project a five year contract – sans tenure, and she had accepted.  Soon however Hannah-Jones decided that such a contract demonstrated UNC’s racism and soon the university was overrun by a mob demanding she be granted tenure.  And as the cowards that university administrators typically are, they complied and offered her tenure.  Something happened on the way to their final capitulation however… after the offer of tenure that Hannah-Jones had demanded came through, she decided she she’d rather not. 

That is episode is a microcosm of exactly what is going on in America today:  Somebody feels aggrieved, social media engages and enrages an army of supporters to protest against the racist in question and they eventually apologize and acquiesce to whatever is demanded of them. 

That’s not quite how a civil society is supposed to operate.  That’s particularly true as it relates to government action.  If Target or Facebook or Coke or Nike or Disney want to beclown themselves by genuflecting at the altar of wokeness that’s their business and citizens have the option of shunning their products or services.  With government however, there is no such freedom.  Government, by its very nature applies to all citizens equally, or at least that’s the theory.  As such, when government bows to the mob and acquiesces to its demands, the rule of law suffers. 

The last few years have been a virtual tour de force of government acquiescence to the mob.  One of the early examples of this was Baltimore and its previous mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.  As the chaos erupted across the city, the mayor not only acquiesced to the mob, she literally gave them permission to wreak havoc: “We also gave those wished to destroy space as well.”  That is the definition of mob rule, and the mayor of a major American city let it happen.  As is usual with Democrat treachery, little thought was given to the rights of innocent citizens whose property was destroyed, whose lives were put in jeopardy or whose freedoms were quashed as they hunkered down in their homes hoping to survive the chaos and violence.

Not to be outdone by the vacuous Baltimore mayor, in the summer of 2020, in the midst of telling Americans that they needed to essentially live like hermits to battle Covid, mayors across the country not only allowed mobs to rampage via “mostly peaceful” demonstrations, they took up the mob demands of “Defund the Police”.  The result has predictably been a skyrocketing of violent crime across the country with cities like Portland, Chicago and New York leading the way.

The extraordinary thing about this acquiescence to the leftist mobs is that it runs contrary to the wishes of a majority of Americans, by a wide margin… and of virtually every demographic.  But that is the modern Democrat party, which sits somewhere to the left of Stalin. Their goal is not to make the country a better place for their constituents, nevermind all citizens, it’s not to empower Americans to find success and pursue happiness, it’s not even to reduce crime or improve schools.  No, Democrats, like most politicians, seek one thing:  Power.  And they’ve found the most base element of human nature to gain it and hold it: violence of mob.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Our Republic was crafted specifically to protect citizens against mob rule.  The United States has never been a democracy because the Founding Fathers understood that mob rule was a recipe for tyranny and thus crafted the mechanism of our Constitution specifically to protect the nation from such. The staggered terms of office, the states appointing Senators, the recognition of individual rights in the Bill of Rights and more, all of those things were intended to limit government power and restrain the unbridled passions of mobs seeking to wield the levers of power. James Madison wrote in the very first line of Federalist #10:  “Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”

Madison was talking about majority factions taking control of the government and using that position to trample on the rights of the minority.  But today the mob doesn’t even have to go through the process of convincing a sufficient number of citizens of the benefits of their positions to get voted into office.  Why bother trying to debate ideas or convince voters when you can accomplish your goals by utilizing violence or the threat of such to get the government – or private sector to do your bidding?  The reality is, violence is an extraordinarily efficient means for accomplishing one’s goals, and it’s made that much easier when the government officials charged with enforcing the laws are sympathetic to your cause, or worse complicit in the threats of said violence. 

The tyranny of the mob we are seeing spread out across the country would no doubt have saddened the Founding Fathers, but it likely would not have surprised them.  Ben Franklin, when asked about the kind of government that emerged from the Constitutional Convention responded “A Republic if you can keep it” while Alexander Hamilton observed “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” There’s something sadly ironic that a nation founded by such intellectual giants should be felled by imbeciles like Joe Biden, Nikole Hannah-Jones, AOC and Bill de Blasio who have the luxury of attacking it only because it created sufficient prosperity in the first place that they never had to actually do anything productive in their lives. 

The Hill to Die On: Will Ted Cruz and Rand Paul Take Their Oaths Seriously and Help Mo Brooks Save the Republic?

In 1776 56 brave patriots signed their names at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence; a document that spelled out the specifics as to why the 13 colonies were making a break with England and King George.

Signing that document was treason against the British and every single man, some with names you know, Benjamin Franklin, Sam Adams and of course John Hancock, and some you may not such as Thomas McKean, Button Gwinnett and Arthur Middleton, risked literal life, limb and property by doing so. Had the British prevailed, they very well may have ended their days in front of a firing squad or at the end of a hangman’s noose. Yet still they signed.

The interesting thing is, only about a quarter of the population actively supported the break with England at the time the Declaration was signed. Another quarter, largely those whose fortunes benefited greatly from the connection with England (which some of the signers did themselves) wanted to remain part of the Empire, while fully half the population were what we’d call today “undecided”.

The reality is, leaders do what these men and others did… they led, they fought and they went home and convinced their fellow citizens about the righteousness of their cause and inspired others to join the fight. And in the end, they prevailed, and in doing so they set forth a path that changed the course of human history, much for the better.

Today America finds itself in a place not so different from that which the thirteen colonies faced 246 years ago. While the thirteen disjointed colonies faced the greatest empire the world had ever known, patriots today face the greatest propaganda machine in human history: The Democrat / Media / Tech Industrial Complex.

There are two big differences however. The first is that the thirteen colonies had the benefit of 54 men who were willing to stand up and challenge the King and Parliament in order to do what they knew to be right. Today patriots find a largely barren wasteland of leaders who are willing to stand up as the Democrats and their cabal seek to steal an election in broad daylight.

The other difference is that in 1776 war was the last option available to the patriots. In 2020 patriots still have one last option before something drastic… and the odds of it succeeding are as slim as those faced by the thirteen tiny colonies taking on the most powerful empire in the world.

As the Hill detailed earlier in the week, there is a Constitutional tactic through which the Republic can be saved… and make no mistake, that is exactly what is at stake here.

The tactic involves senators and representatives using the procedures outlined in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act (ECA) to delay the acceptance of the electors to a point where the House would then choose the President, with each state having a single vote. Given that Republicans control a majority of the state delegations Donald Trump would be declared the winner.

This would be a long and arduous process, something like Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” spending a month reading scripture. No doubt the patriots who choose this path will be tarred and feathered in the press, have their families doxed on social media, and very likely be thrown under the bus by Mitch McConnell and other “leaders” in their own party. In a word, for a while their lives would be made miserable for the crime of standing up to those who would steal the election from the American people.

That’s what real leaders do. That is what real patriots do. In the 200 plus years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of our Constitution, millions of men and women have put everything – up to and including their lives – on the line after swearing a military oath that starts with this: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;” Congressmen and senators take a similar oath, but it’s very rare that they risk much of anything, let alone their lives, after doing so. Most senators and congressmen leave office far richer than when they entered politics or at a minimum are able to parlay their service into lucrative lobbying positions on K Street. Can one be a politician and a leader and a patriot simultaneously?

Now is the time for patriots who serve in Washington to actually show that they take their oath seriously. While the Communist Chinese may indeed have influenced our election, the real threat to the Republic, to the Constitution, is a domestic one and it presented itself on November 3rd when fraud changed the outcome of the presidential election. Beyond the God given rights protected by the Constitution nothing is as sacred to Americans as their right to vote. Period. Full stop.

If the integrity of our elections is lost then nothing else matters because at that point no one is accountable to voters, the rules and the Constitution ceases to be anything but a faded piece of paper. As such, now is the time for patriots in Washington to stand up and actually do that which they swore to do. No more assuming “We’ll win next time”. No more thinking the other side plays by the rules. No more assuming that everything will blow over and we’ll be back business as usual soon. No. This is the hill to die on because beyond this hill is a Stalinist tyranny like the one George Orwell warned us about. Tens of millions of Americans have seen the writing on the wall as written by Antifa and Black Lives Matter and AOC and other Democrats who seek to punish Trump supporters. Not sure? Think Stalinist purges can’t happen here? Think again. Look at what was done to Donald Trump over the last four years when every single Democrat involved knew that the charges were fiction. And he was (and is) a billionaire President loved by tens of millions and they only controlled ½ the legislature for ½ his term! Once in power imagine what they will do to average Americans who just trying to make ends meet and wants to be left alone, a small businessmen who just want to make a living, or senators or congressmen who stand in the way of their plans for domination…

There is nothing usual about America in 2020 and what we’ve just experienced was not just another election loss. It was a coup in the literal sense of the word and the Democrats were willing to do it right in front of us because they were pretty sure that no one would do anything about it. This is a call for Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and all ostensibly Republican senators join Congressman Mo Brooks and his army to show Democrats that they were wrong in their calculations and that you take your oath seriously and will fight to protect the United States from these domestic enemies of freedom. It will be challenging and there will be countless people seeking to derail you, from both sides of the aisle. No doubt the media, friends and maybe even some family may seek to knock you from the path – as Benjamin Franklin’s son sought to do with him – but if you keep the faith, if you fight the good fight, we will win and when the history of the 2020 election is written you will find yourselves in the same company as those 56 intrepid men, they having birthed our nation and you having saved it.

www.EverySingleElector.com

240 Years and Counting... Notes on the Declaration & the Constitution

Two hundred and forty years ago our founding fathers decided to risk their lives and livelihoods to begin a new nation by signing the Declaration of Independence. It was, in the eyes of the British, nothing less than treason… which indeed it was. Although the skirmishes that led to the break had been going on for a decade, when the final break came something extraordinary happened. A new nation was formed based solely on the rights of men. For the first time in human history a nation was founded not on geography or blood or dynasty or even religion. No, the United States was founded on the notion that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A nation however, regardless of its ideas, cannot function without a government that is made of something more than statements of what you believe and what you have fought against. In our case, for 13 years the United States largely operated under the Articles of Confederation, which gave the colonies a framework with which to work together to fight the British. Although they allowed the Americans to cooperate sufficiently to defeat the British, once the common enemy was vanquished the document proved to be fatally flawed as it provided for essentially a powerless central government.

It was the failures of the Articles which led to the writing of the Constitution in 1787 and George Washington’s inauguration in 1789.

The difference between the Declaration and the Constitution is extraordinarily important. The former is a declaration of what the colonists did not want, what they were fighting against, and why they believed they had every right to break with the British. It says nothing about governance, citizenship, or how to deal with foreign nations or fellow states. That’s what the Constitution does.

Probably to the surprise of many, the Constitution – including the Bill of Rights – does not grant anyone rights. As explicitly stated in the Declaration, rights are endowed by the creator. The Constitution simply explicitly states which rights the government is prohibited from infringing upon. For example, it doesn’t say “Citizens have Freedom of Speech” or “Citizens have the Right of Their Religion”. No, it says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;” The assumption is, going back to the Declaration, that citizens have those unalienable rights, the Constitution simply states that Congress can’t take them away.

Just as the Declaration was groundbreaking, the Constitution was similarly so, only to a greater degree. Not only was the basic premise of the US Constitution that the power of government comes directly from the citizens, but it guaranteed – or at least that was the plan – the rights of citizens by explicitly prohibiting the government from abridging them. (Plus, it was all down on paper to be read by everyone!) The Bill of Rights was not intended to be exhaustive in terms of the rights citizens had. On the contrary. These were simply the most important rights in the pantheon of rights citizens have and those that governments most often seem to tread upon. They wrote the 10th Amendment to make that point crystal clear: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, initially didn’t even want a Bill of Rights because he believed it was redundant. He thought it was obvious that government could do nothing other than what it was explicitly empowered to do in the Constitution’s Articles and therefore there was no need for such a Bill. Sadly, as has been demonstrated by an endless parade of politicians in the 20th and 21st centuries, the limits on government Madison believed was so obvious are indeed not so obvious.

The Constitution was not a perfect document – although the slavery issue was not a fatal cancer as it's made out to be today – but it had in it the mechanism for its own improvement – or diminishment as the 16th and 17th Amendments prove. As such, as the nation grew and evolved it was able to adapt with the times, with everything from the 13th and 14th Amendments giving freedom and rights to slaves to the 22nd Amendment which sought to eliminate the chance of a defacto king. The problem today however is that virtually everyone in Washington, and a significant majority of Americans across the country have forgotten the basic premise of the Constitution, which was to empower the government to do an explicitly limited number of things and leave the people and the states to figure out the rest. Those limited things do not include mandating the purchase of health insurance, guaranteed free Internet access or subsidized housing…

But that is exactly what we have today. Politicians promise the moon and scratch enough backs to get Congress to pay for it. From protecting invented “rights” to abridging actual rights to providing free stuff to seeking to regulate entire industries, in 2016 there is nothing bureaucrats and politicians won’t try and do, regardless of the Constitution. With the Declaration of Independence our Founding Fathers chose to separate themselves from a government that was far less tyrannical than the government Americans face today.  Maybe it's time for another Constitutional Convention... And if that doesn't work, perhaps we should marry our Founder's actions with today’s mores of pretty much anything goes and consider another “right” that is not explicitly discussed in the Constitution: Secession. Somehow I think John Hancock would be happy to sign on.

240 Years and Counting... Some Notes on the Declaration & the Constitution

Two centuries ago our founding fathers decided to risk their lives and livelihoods to begin a new nation by signing the Declaration of Independence. It was, in the eyes of the British, nothing less than treason… which indeed it was. Although the skirmishes that led to the break had been going on for a decade, when the final break came something extraordinary happened. A new nation was formed based solely on the rights of men. For the first time in human history a nation was founded not on geography or blood or dynasty or even religion. No, the United States was founded on the notion that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A nation however, regardless of its ideas, cannot function without a government that is made of something more than statements of what you believe and what you have fought against. In our case, for 13 years the United States largely operated under the Articles of Confederation, which gave the colonies a framework with which to work together to fight the British. Although they allowed the Americans to cooperate sufficiently to defeat the British, once the common enemy was vanquished the document proved to be fatally flawed as it provided for essentially a powerless central government.

It was the failures of the Articles which led to the writing of the Constitution in 1787 and George Washington’s inauguration in 1789.

The difference between the Declaration and the Constitution is extraordinarily important. The former is a declaration of what the colonists did not want, what they were fighting against, and why they believed they had every right to break with the British. It says nothing about governance, citizenship, or how to deal with foreign nations or fellow states. That’s what the Constitution does.

Probably to the surprise of many, the Constitution – including the Bill of Rights – does not grant anyone rights. As explicitly stated in the Declaration, rights are endowed by the creator. The Constitution simply explicitly states which rights the government is prohibited from infringing upon. For example, it doesn’t say “Citizens have Freedom of Speech” or “Citizens have the Right of Their Religion”. No, it says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;” The assumption is, going back to the Declaration, that citizens have those unalienable rights, the Constitution simply states that Congress can’t take them away.

Just as the Declaration was groundbreaking, the Constitution was similarly so, only to a greater degree. Not only was the basic premise of the US Constitution that the power of government comes directly from the citizens, but it guaranteed – or at least that was the plan – the rights of citizens by explicitly prohibiting the government from abridging them. (Plus, it was all down on paper to be read by everyone!) The Bill of Rights was not intended to be exhaustive in terms of the rights citizens had. On the contrary. These were simply the most important rights in the pantheon of rights citizens have and those that governments most often seem to tread upon. They wrote the 10th Amendment to make that point crystal clear: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, initially didn’t even want a Bill of Rights because he believed it was redundant. He thought it was obvious that government could do nothing other than what it was explicitly empowered to do in the Constitution’s Articles and therefore there was no need for such a Bill. Sadly, as has been demonstrated by an endless parade of politicians in the 20th and 21st centuries, the limits on government Madison believed was so obvious are indeed not so obvious.

The Constitution was not a perfect document – although the slavery issue was not a fatal cancer as it's made out to be today – but it had in it the mechanism for its own improvement – or diminishment as the 16th and 17th Amendments prove. As such, as the nation grew and evolved it was able to adapt with the times, with everything from the 13th and 14th Amendments giving freedom and rights to slaves to the 22nd Amendment which sought to eliminate the chance of a defacto king. The problem today however is that virtually everyone in Washington, and a significant majority of Americans across the country have forgotten the basic premise of the Constitution, which was to empower the government to do an explicitly limited number of things and leave the people and the states to figure out the rest. Those limited things do not include mandating the purchase of health insurance, guaranteed free Internet access or subsidized housing…

But that is exactly what we have today. Politicians promise the moon and scratch enough backs to get Congress to pay for it. From protecting invented “rights” to abridging actual rights to providing free stuff to seeking to regulate entire industries, in 2016 there is nothing bureaucrats and politicians won’t try and do, regardless of the Constitution. With the Declaration of Independence our Founding Fathers chose to separate themselves from a government that was far less tyrannical than the government Americans face today.  Maybe it's time for another Constitutional Convention... And if that doesn't work, perhaps we should marry our Founder's actions with today’s mores of pretty much anything goes and consider another “right” that is not explicitly discussed in the Constitution: Secession. Somehow I think John Hancock would be happy to sign on.

1776 & 2014 - Complacency and Revolution

How long has it been since you thought about the American Revolution? In 2014 not that many of us spend our time thinking about the catalysts that caused that revolution over 200 years ago. Who has the time? Between jobs, families, bills, a bit of TV and some recreation and socializing, there are only so many hours in the day. That’s the beauty of things being settled… you can get on with other things. If we had to spend our days thinking about what kind of government we wanted, how would we get anything else done? It would be impossible. Think about election season every 4 years. From July through November we can’t escape it: campaign advertisements on TV and radio, signs on the side of the street, wall to wall press coverage and endless water cooler chatter. All that and we have a government that’ been largely settled for 150 years.

Sometimes however it makes sense to go back and look at why things happen. In the case of American independence and the Revolutionary War, it was not any single event that caused the war to begin, rather it was a series of things that took place over years.

Among these things were well known events such as the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Intolerable Acts and the conflict at Lexington & Concord. Then there were other lesser know but equally important events such as The Quartering Acts of 1765 and The Declaratory Act. In all the Declaration of Independence lists 27 grievances against the King. Among them are:

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

Importantly, the most significant lines in the Declaration of Independence are not among those 27, but rather in the 2nd paragraph.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…
… all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Americans today are acting as Jefferson suggested most people do… they are suffering evils rather than throwing off the yoke of a despotic government. Jefferson suggests however that when the abuses become too much, the people will indeed revolt. So the questions in 2014 are two: Are close to that point of abuse that sparks a revolt, and is it too late to turn the tables on the usurpers?

On the first question, the answer is a resounding yes. While 2014 may not quite yet be George Orwell’s 1984 with an all knowing all seeing – and listening – all powerful government… We’re close. We have a government that uses the police power of the taxing authority to silence its critics. We have a government that has decided that children can be punished for their parent’s mistakes, even if it was the government who made it. We have a government that spies on its citizens with impunity. We have heavily militarized local police forces across the country and every federal agency seems to come with its own SWAT team, regardless of its mission. We have an executive branch that brazenly ignores the clear language of the Constitution. And then of course we have the shrinking pool of citizens who are forced to pay stifling taxes in order to support a growing horde of those suckling at the government teat.

On the second question, is it too late, the answer is less clear. Human nature suggests that at some point those who shoulder the burden of financing the government’s largesse will revolt. Today we don’t see taxpayers manning the barricades and storming America’s Bastilles so we clearly have some time to reverse course and strip the usurpers of their power.

Settled can be good, but as Jefferson notes, it can turn to complacency. And complacency can lead to rot. Whether it’s the five year reign of Usurper in Chief Barack Obama or the last 40 years of creeping comforts and expanding government, Americans have assumed that we’ll get through everything just because politicians tell us we will. That’s not how things work. Freedom and prosperity demand vigilance. Neither can survive where a government decides that they are its to withhold or grant. In 1776 fifty six men risked their lives and decided that they could no longer abide the complacency of accepting tyranny. And they started a revolution. How many Americans will come to the same conclusion in 2014 and risk far less when they turn off the television and enlist as foot soldiers in an electoral revolution in 2016? Only time will tell.

King Barack, the Declaration of Independence and a Textbook Definition of Tyranny

The two great founding documents in American history are the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Today, more than two centuries after each was written, people often conflate the two. How often have you heard someone say “It’s my right… it’s right there in the Constitution… Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Of course, that phrase is not in the Constitution at all. It’s in the Declaration.

That conflation belies the fact that while both documents are important to our history, they are fundamentally different and do different things. The Declaration of Independence severed the ties with Great Britain, explained the grounds for that split and declared that each state was a sovereign nation unto itself. The Constitution on the other hand articulated how those 13 sovereign nations would come together to form a single nation and how the government would be structured, how powers would be distributed both between the federal and state governments as well as the framework of checks and balances within the federal government itself. A critical element in the passage of that Constitution was the Massachusetts Compromise, without which it would never have passed. It was the Massachusetts Compromise that forged the agreement to add a Bill of Rights as the first order of business when the new Congress met.

During the ratification much of the debate could focus on a Bill of Rights because the checks and balances were already in place within the original document itself: Staggered terms for presidents, senators and congressmen and lifetime appointments for justices; The president’s veto and Congress’ ability to override; The election of congressmen by citizens, senators by states and the president by the Electoral College; Representation in the House based on population and in the Senate by equal numbers, etc.

The whole point of the American Constitution is the United States is a nation of laws, not a nation of men. The founders were too early to have been able to reference John Dalbert-Acton’s famous 19th century quote "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." but they certainly understood the sentiment behind it. As such they gave us a constitution specifically implemented to avoid just that.  They were quite clear about how the government can enact laws. Congresses passes bills and the President signs them into law. The Executive Branch then implements and executes them. While presidents have a great deal of leeway, their job is to execute the law, not write it. The whole point of the Constitution was to have the law making power in the hands of the people’s representatives, not in the hands of a would be king.

Unfortunately King Barack doesn’t see the Constitution quite that way. To be sure, Congress has a long history of ceding power to the Executive Branch, largely enabled by FDR’s bringing the Supreme Court to heel, but nonetheless, there is a difference between Congresses’ ill advised delegation of authority to the President and his simply taking it. And that’s what we see in Obamacare.

When laws are somewhat open ended, like the 4,000 word document creating the EPA it should come as no surprise that the Executive Branch takes it upon itself to “clarify” the language as it implements the law. The result today is an EPA that is out of control. While that is a bad thing, it’s easy to understand how it came to be. Obamacare has no such ambiguity. It contains over 400,000 words – half the length of the Bible! And in those almost half a million words you find an employer mandate requirement that stipulates: “Effective Date- The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.” (Found under the section titled "SEC. 1513. SHARED RESPONSIBILITY FOR EMPLOYERS.") There is no ambiguity there. There is no opaque timeframe for the requirements to take effect. But that doesn’t matter to Barack Obama. In July of last year he changed the rules by Executive fiat… but not the law. That’s illegal. That’s unconstitutional. As Charles Krauthammer says, “That’s banana republic stuff.”

And there are many more instances of the same. We’ve known since 2008 that Barack Obama was not a fan of the US Constitution, but now that he is in charge of the reins of power, he seems to think that he doesn’t need to pay any attention to it at all. How many times have you heard him say something like “If Congress won’t act, I will”? Frankly, that’s a scary proposition for a country that has been largely free for two centuries. There’s a pattern here that seems troubling. Unlawfully seizing property from the rightful owners… check. Using the power of government to try and silence opponents… check. Lying to voters in order to gain their support for legislation… check. Then deciding that that law says what he says it says rather than what it actually says… check. That is a textbook definition of a tyrant and a decent into a banana republic. One can’t help but wonder how much time he’s putting into figuring out how to bypass the 22nd Amendment.