Who is hands-down the worst mass murderer in human history? In a single word: government. When it is not finding ways to kill people beyond its borders, it is crafting justifications for killing citizens within. Those who nonetheless persist in holding any government up as a model of virtue and decency are either too naïve to understand that they champion a cutthroat or so depraved that they gladly serve as its accomplice.
The reason no government lasts forever is because its homicidal tendencies eventually force ordinary people to act, whether they want to or not. Sometimes, as with Nazi-controlled Germany, outsiders end a murdering State’s reign of terror before that terror spreads even farther. Sometimes, as with the collapse of the Soviet Union, insiders must bring down the Leviathan from within the bowels of the beast. Either as common soldiers or revolutionaries, though, it is always normal people who must do the heavy lifting. No government will prosecute and sentence itself.
The question for ordinary people invariably remains the same: when should a government be properly understood as such a threat to the lives and liberties of its citizens that good and decent people must act in concert to prevent greater harm?<1>
The author of this, Mr. J.B. Shurk, is a superb observer and writer. I recommend his article in its entirety to you. I’ll only quote one of the questions he asks relevant to the issue of when should decent people act. To wit,
“Is [the threat to our lives and liberties intolerable] when the courts so distort the plain meaning of the nation’s Constitution as to rewrite it without the public’s affirmation?”
Believe me, that is exactly what has happened. The inspired constitutional structure devised by the Framers and Ratifiers has been stood on its head in part because of the mindless citizens who blithely approved the 16th and 17th Amendments authorizing, respectively, the income tax and the direct election of senators. The income tax was the equivalent of handing the national piggy bank to the grifters and psychopaths who inevitably rise to dizzying heights in every government; the direct election of senators simply destroyed the control that state legislatures had on their senators.
Now the politicians have unimaginable funds to dispose of how they will and the only way of controlling our senators is for citizens to write stern letters to them or speak to their lowly but invariably pleasant staff on the telephone. Here in Wyoming each letter writer and phone caller is one of some 363,000 registered voters so you know your complaints and suggestions will be taken very seriously.
More to the point, however, the Supreme Court has “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” like the aviator John Gillespie Magee Jr. and turned the Constitution on its head. If you thought the “enumerated powers” doctrine was the absolute upper limit on what the Court would let the Congress get away with, well, think again. Try the “kitchen sink” doctrine. Authorization for anything and everything any dirtbag, liberty-stealing, kiddy-sniffing, war pig of a politician wants to do can be found lurking in every period and underneath every due process or interstate commerce clause of the Constitution if the learned and not-so-learned justices will just do their duty and call Rachel Maddow on the secret hotline and axe her. Crimenently.
At least since the New Deal brought to us by Saint Franklin, the Supremes have done all in they/their power to transform the federal government from its constitutional role as a small, neutered actor on the national stage to the out-of-control, untouchable, unaccountable, arrogant, dissembling, murderous, thieving monstrosity it is today. The states were meant to be the repository of any and all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government (and not denied to them) by the Constitution. Instead, today the states wait meekly for their subsidy checks and approved school text books from the federal government.
The nation’s lawyers and every state bar association haven’t exactly covered themselves with glory either as this tectonic transformation of the foundational principle of the U.S. Constitution has been as invisible to them as Hillary Clinton’s ginormous, bribe-hoovering Clinton Foundation and her jaw-dropping health problems on the presidential campaign trail. The corrupt corporate press “couldn’t” see any of this either but you get my point about the bar associations.
Nor will the bar associations say boo about the bar association abuse of Trump’s lawyers or the contemptible prosecutorial and judicial oppression of Trump, his associates, and the January 6 defendants. But that’s another story.
And, meanwhile, liberty dies the death of a thousand cuts unnoticed by the Supremes. But I do like the part about “the land of the free.” It gets me right where I live.
Notes.
<1> “If We the People Were Actually in Charge.” By J.B. Shurk, American Thinker, 10/8/23.
At least they have nice white clothing. "Swan Lake." That's choice.