Do you feel like you’re living in the years before the Civil War? I do.
Here’s the news the North is getting this evening:
“House memo states disputed dossier was key to FBI’s FISA warrant to surveil members of Team Trump”.
And here’s the news the South is getting this evening:
“What the Nunes memo actually proves (Not much)”.
The actual memo affirms what those of us who care, and who pay attention, already knew: Our government does not respect the people.
The United States of America was founded, in all seriousness, as a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
If you read the memo, you can observe the glaring truth: Our government no longer has any respect for the Constitution, for the people it supposedly protects and none for the rule of law.
President Trump truly is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. That’s why he did what no Democratic or Republican President would ever have done: Release the memo.
Not only did releasing the memo show respect for the people who supposedly are the government’s boss. It also showed respect for the rule of law, something absent in the Department of Justice and FBI during the Obama years and, presumably, up to the present day.
The government has, in a very real sense, become our enemy. In America, that’s shocking news. About half of us now realize it, which is how Donald Trump became President in the first place. We put him in there to try and put the government back on the side of the people. That’s an uphill climb, even now.
On the positive side: It’s wildly refreshing and an enormous relief to have the non-partisan Trump on the side of the Constitution and the people in the White House.
But at some point, we have to look deeper. What’s the real reason the government does not respect the people? Because the people — the majority of us, at least — made a deal with the devil. It started about a century ago. For decades we gradually traded some of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution in exchange for “security”. Security, in this context, refers to perks, favors, and the wealth of others.
That’s how we got the swamp.
If we, the people, had not surrendered some of our rights for the sake of perks — now a massive welfare-entitlement-regulatory state — there would be no swamp. The cynics who rule us in the Imperial nation’s capital know this, which is why they sneer at us.
Who are we, after all, to claim rights and sovereignty over the government when we demand things the Constitution never promised? How can we reform the government before we reform ourselves, which means limiting and changing what we demand of our government?
Once the people of a nation founded on the principle of individual rights, including property rights, start to surrender even a little of that liberty for the sake of security, those people will eventually end up with the kind of government so sadly illustrated in that memo.
America was the first nation in history to be founded on the inalienable rights of man. America’s challenge going forward? To be the first nation in history to restore the rights of man, after having compromised so many of them away.
The second has never been done. But before America, neither was the first.
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