One of the premises of the American founding is that the only legitimate government power is “just” power derived from the consent of the governed, or as the Declaration of Independence put it:
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, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
This is recognized as a statement of the universality of the unalienable rights of Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness, but what did the Founders mean by “just” government power?
Surely, they meant a government constrained to protect all the liberties known to the English Common Law, and the procedural protections, such as trial by jury, that go along with the English Common Law for all citizens.
And just as surely, they meant something deeper and more important: that a “just” government is an honorable and moral government.
Today, the notion that American government, at any level, is honorable and moral would be found to be laughable by a large percentage of the population, because those who have obtained, through election or employment, the levers of government power have made the premise of an honorable and moral government laughable.
Consider some of the following examples of government dishonor and immorality:
The process has become the punishment. In the case of Matthew Martin, who was recently acquitted of all misdemeanor charges related to his participation in the January 6, 2021, march on the U.S. Capitol. The Santa Fe, N.M., man was arrested a year ago in April of 2021, he faced a myriad of charges including “entering and remaining in a restricted building; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building; violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.”
Mr. Martin was acquitted in a bench trial because the evidence showed that, far from being a rioter or “insurrectionist,” he was waved into the Capitol by the Capitol Police, a fact known to the prosecution and verified by video evidence.
However, as a result of his unjust indictment and prosecution, Martin lost his job as a senior engineer at a company that does work for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and the security clearances necessary to get a similar job in the future. Where is the honor or morality in a government that loads specious charges into an “over-indictment” and knowingly prosecutes an innocent man?
Entrapment of political opponents by the FBI has gone mainstream. Drug dealers sometimes get off “buy and bust” charges by claiming government agents entrapped them. So, it is interesting to see how this questionable technique has morphed into a tool of political oppression. Just before the 2020 presidential election, and held in jail for over a year, after nearly four weeks of testimony and a full week of deliberations in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, Brandon Michael-Ray Caserta and Daniel Harris were found not guilty of conspiring to kidnap Michigan's Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a potential life offense.
Defense lawyers demonstrated any scheme to kidnap Gov. Whitmer was the creation of government agents who were embedded in the group and manipulated the men, and the jury agreed.
What really happened was government agents created the bogus plot and destroyed the lives of half-a-dozen men, so they could influence the 2020 presidential election by blaming former President Donald Trump for fomenting anger over coronavirus restrictions and refusing to condemn right-wing extremists like those charged in the case.
Lying has become a central strategy of Leftist government. Let’s stipulate that government, no matter which political party controls it, has a difficult relationship with the truth, if the truth makes it look bad. That’s what one might call “defensive lying” or lying to avoid responsibility for an adverse event.
But what has arisen in the past decade or so is a new regime of government lying, which one might call “offensive lying” in which the facts are averse to some desired policy outcome, so advancing a lie to replace the facts becomes the central driver of change.
The Trump – Russia hoax is the most egregious example of this phenomenon of weaponized government lying, followed closely by Anthony Fauci’s weaponized lying about COVID, but it also occurs right down to your local schoolboard and school district.
“When we tell you that our schools aren’t teaching Critical Race Theory, that it’s nowhere in our standards, that’s misdirection,” Tony Kinnett, who worked as a science coach and administrator for Indiana’s largest school district, said in a video posted to Twitter.
“We don’t have the quotes and theories as state standards per se,” he said. “We tell our teachers to treat our students differently based on color. We tell our students every problem is a result of ‘white men’ and that everything Western Civilization built is racist. Capitalism is a tool of white supremacy. Those are straight out of Kimberle Crenshaw’s main points verbatim in ‘Critical Race Theory: The [Key] Writings That Formed the Movement.’ This is in math, history, science, English, the arts, and it’s not slowing down.”
Making matters worse, Kinnett posted screenshots of school district documents directing principals to tell parents who asked if CRT was being taught at their child’s school: “No. CRT is not curriculum taught in any schools within the Indianapolis Public Schools District.”
“Parents, when we tell you Critical Race Theory isn’t taught in our schools, we’re lying, keep looking,” Kinnett added.
For getting in the way of advancing the lies about Critical Race Theory, Tony Kinnett was fired for telling the truth and sharing that Indianapolis Public Schools recorded children in required racial justice sessions, not sending IPS the personal info on two Twitter users, quoting school administrator Dr. Payne’s racist comments to students, and sharing public files.
The governing class is using the vast power of government to engineer a new class of values-free leaders and clients. “Fundamental Bible-believing people do not have the right to indoctrinate their children in their religious beliefs because we, the state, are preparing them for the year 2000, when America will be part of a one-world global society and their children will not fit in.” the late Democrat Nebraska state Senator Peter Hoagland, said in a radio interview in 1983.
We managed to pass the year 2000 without being part of a one-world government, however, the move toward such an abomination is accelerating in large measure because America’s leadership class has been using the power of government at every level to erase Americanism and to create a new values-free class of leaders and clients.
Up until recently it was assumed that to understand the story of the United States of America, it was important to have a proper appreciation for the Judeo-Christian culture of colonial America. By almost any measure, colonists of European descent who settled in the New World were serious Christians whose constitutions, laws, and practices reflected the influence of Christianity.
Erasing that idea is central to this effort is to use the government to convince people that it is the only legitimate vehicle for granting rights and benefits, or as Mary Parker Follett put in her groundbreaking book The New State, “Democracy has meant to many "natural" rights, "liberty" and "equality." The acceptance of the group principle defines for us in truer fashion those watchwords of the past. If my true self is the group-self, then my only rights are those which membership in a group gives me.“
Thus, Judeo-Christian ideas about the sanctity of the individual go out the window and government defines special group rights, not universal individual American rights, and individuals are taught to claim those rights based on group identities created by the government. The end result is that government entities, such as Congress, schools and cities, allocate rewards and punishments based on group identity.
Takoma, Washington adopted a "culturally responsive" discipline regime, which considers a student's race before punishment. It means white students will likely be punished more harshly than students of color. New York prioritized lifesaving COVID antibody treatment based on whether the patients “Have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness [and] Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.”
Educators are reengineering the very bodies of their students by actively keeping information about something as critical as a student’s gender identity preference hidden from parents—an action in direct contravention of legally guaranteed parental rights, and in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. And they are creating secret clubs and “safe spaces” to indoctrinate children in gender identity ideology and groom them for participation in alternative lifestyles, including the permanent mutilation of gender reassignment surgery.
When Virginia’s Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said during a 2021 debate, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” he wasn’t talking about math, he was talking about protecting the leading role public education teachers have taken in promoting transgender ideology and the normalizing of pedophilia and homosexual grooming in our schools.
In each of the examples cited above the goal of government is to create a new person who identifies not as an American citizen with universal rights and the responsibilities of citizenship, but as a member of a special group, with special government granted benefits and advantages over other groups.
In his recent article How Soft Authoritarianism Disables Millions Of Americans, our friend John Anthony founder of Sustainable Freedom Lab LLC suggested that what we are experiencing is a phantom constitutional republic. Officials are elected by the majority but learn to game the system to rule despotically and what looks like a bug is actually a feature of the system.
And he is right. What would have been unthinkable a few years ago is now mainstream. From kindergarten to law school students are taught that the traditional moral and legal underpinnings of our Western Civilization and the rule of law founded on English Common law are not just unnecessary but wrong – racist, sexist, and based on greed and the arrogance of the individual.
The result is a government that knows no bounds other than preserving the power of the ruling group. Judged against our traditional precepts of constitutional liberty, a government that frames gullible critics, destroys the lives of political opponents with specious charges of “insurrection,” creates new groups with special rights and advantages over others and works to convince children that only the government can help them decide who they are is neither moral nor honorable. Absent those two underpinnings no government can be considered to be just or legitimate, leaving those of us committed to preserving constitutional liberty under God’s laws to ponder what to do next.
constitutional liberty
critical race theory
Matthew Martin
FBI
January 6
Justice system
parental rights
pedophilia
transgenderism
gender bias
COVID 19
entrapment