April 19, 1993

One of the recurring themes in my writing is you don't need to wait for someone to give you permission to be free - you are free to do what you want or need to do as long as it doesn't infringe on your neighbor, so just go do it. Our forebears set up a country where the government essentially has to ask permission to infringe on your freedom - you don't have to ask it for your liberties.

Of course, that is not exactly how things have played out over the years. Yesterday I emphasized how liberty was exercised on April 19 231 years ago. I was deliberately trying to avoid thinking about how liberty was trampled 13 years ago, live on TV.

Another theme I try to emphasize is be optimistic and, in the sense that most days the police aren't going to break down your door and seize your person and property, it doesn't hurt to be optimistic and unafraid. But somewhere today, police are breaking down someone's door and seizing persons and property, often to enforce bad laws. And outside Waco that day, the lawbreakers were the law enforcers. So while it doesn't hurt to be optimistic and unafraid and to expect the best, it also doesn't hurt to anticipate the worst, so that while most of the time you'll be pleasantly surprised, you also will be prepared should the worst happen.

I try to remind you and myself that freedom is a state of mind - "You can't take the sky from me" - and "they" can't. But I can't help but notice when a week goes by and the majority of my thoughts have been about stolen freedoms and lost liberties, as the last week has. Lots of ranting around here lately, about everything from the smoking gestapo to the ATF massacre.

And fixing the problem will take a more profound shift than replacing Republicans with Democrats or vice versa, as Anthony Gregory notes in a must-read article at lewrockwell.com, "Waco and the Bipartisan Police State." Some excerpts that jumped out at me:

"The continuity between the Clinton and Bush presidencies on issues of civil liberties demonstrates something that many people don’t want to wrap their minds around. America’s police state is utterly bipartisan. It is designed to persist and indeed extend its reach with each administration, no matter the party in charge. In fact, the political party illusion serves to distract people from the real issues, the state’s trampling of our liberties, and instead devote their hopeful attention and energy to getting one dictatorial gang elected rather than the other." ...

"America’s had this bipartisan police state for a long time. It was Republican Abraham Lincoln who waged war on half the country and suspended the Bill of Rights in the other half. It was Democrat Woodrow Wilson who really honed the art of imprisoning dissenters. It was the Republicans in the 1920s who adamantly enforced alcohol prohibition. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt tossed the Japanese Americans in concentration camps. When Republicans turned the heat on leftists during the Cold War, they were only emulating their Democrat predecessors' surveillance and harassment of Old-Right and far-left dissenters in the 30s and 40s. The war on drugs has been advanced, expanded and internationalized by members of both parties. Both Republicans and Democrats are fervently pro-gun control. Neither party has ever done anything significant to rein in the IRS. And just as Clinton’s men helped to whitewash the massacre at Ruby Ridge, which occurred on the first Bush's watch, Republican fixers were eager to cover up the Clinton administration’s wrongdoing at Waco." ...

"If ever Americans are to have their rightful liberty, a political realignment must emerge that shatters the dishonest and distracting constructs of left and right, Democrat and Republican, and focuses instead on liberty versus the state."

This is an article about issues that need to be addressed. At this point I don't know where we find political leaders who will focus on liberty rather than the state. I think so many are so willing to defend the state's alleged right to tread on us, we need years and even decades of re-educating and writing and speaking about the basic truths about freedom and liberty before a majority begin to understand. But that might be overly pessimistic. So I'll spend the rest of my days doing my bit to remind people the default position in life is freedom, so refuse to be afraid and free yourself. My grandpas lived into their 80s, and my 80-something dad is still kicking, so that's potentially 30-plus years of agitating to go - maybe we'll see something in my lifetime yet.

P.S. What a difference an apostrophe makes - states' rights is an essential foundation of this republic; but the ruling class has been exercising the state's rights to oppress us. Theoretically and constitutionally the state has no such rights; when will folks understand?