Enlightened insights taken from the past week’s reading:"Over the last several decades, the world has witnessed an explosion in the number of self-governing nation-states. At the end of the Second World War, there were 54 recognized countries across the globe. At the end of the 20th century, there were 192. In each of those cases, the people demanding their independence were subjected to unreasonable and irrational scrutiny of their desire to be politically, culturally, and economically independent. This scrutiny often came from their fellow countrymen whose opposition was rooted in and motivated by fear.
The unfortunate thing about fear is that it is paralyzing. Fear causes people, especially so in the case of major political questions, to make terrible decisions. It causes them to embrace a hated status quo rather than imagine the potential for a positive future. It can, if wielded by would-be tyrants, rob an entire people of their self-confidence and reduce them to a status of willful dependence. It is the political version of Stockholm Syndrome.
Thinking about independence in this way may help you and the people of your State reject fear and embrace self-government outside the context of the federal union. For a freedom-loving people who believe in individual liberty and limited government, fixing the federal government and supporting those who promise to do so, is no longer an option.
Having this discussion right now is a matter of survival. If history has taught us anything, it’s that there is no such thing as the status quo. Much like Newton’s Laws of Motion, tyranny in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. In this instance, it is the force of a people who are no longer content to be deprived of the right of self-government."
Daniel Miller
"Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?"
Patrick Henry
"You think everything is a conspiracy. Why, yes. Yes, I do. When only corrupt and/or incompetent people have any semblance of power, they will conspire. It’s what they do, and all they know. They are incapable of doing anything decent, much as a good person is incapable of anything really bad.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. We can only cling to that kind of hope, because at present, as throughout recorded history, the meek have been cheated and trampled upon by the aggressive cretins that have always run things. A kind, empathetic leader is even rarer than a faithful Christian; one who forgoes wealth and possessions, turns the other cheek, and doesn’t judge."
Donald Jeffries
"To call this right of self-determination the 'right of self-determination of nations' is to misunderstand it. It is not the right of self-determination of a delimited national unit, but the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong."
Ludwig von Mises
"One of the greatest perils to the private domain is the notion that Leviathan is more legitimate than liberty. Downplaying government coercion is the key to this propaganda coup. For most of the American media, compelling submission to political commands is a nonissue, equivalent of the sun rising in the east each morning."
James Bovard
"Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state’s depredations and therefore augments the public’s multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency — war and other crises comparable to war in the seriousness of the threats they pose."
Robert Higgs
"Modern politics is the art of pacifying the workers and producers of wealth so that stealing from them can be justified through party politics. Politics, therefore, and the political process, is a perpetual psychic system for creating a perpetual hallucinatory mentality for the mass mind.
It is psychic persuasion that coerces the people individually and collectively to imagine they have political and economic freedom despite not having it."
Bob Livingston
"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear."
Bertrand Russell
"So, the Demo-Nazi Party is reportedly working on a 'vaccine passport' for Americans that will be required for travel and most likely eventually, to enter a store, buy groceries, see a doctor, live your life. At the same time, the Demo-Nazis are pretending hysteria over a new Georgia law requiring everyone — not just black people — to produce some form of I.D. to vote. They are screaming 'racism' (ho hum) at anyone who supports voter I.D., the obvious assumption here being that they believe that black people — and only black people — are just too stupid to know how to get a drivers license or some other form of I.D. Makes sense to me: I never, ever see any black people driving cars, making it through security at an airport, buying alcohol at a grocery store or Target, etc.
Maybe I’m too much of a cynic, but my theory is that their policy of flooding the country with illegal alien peasants from the Third World, combined with vicious, hysterical opposition to voter I.D. is about getting more votes from undocumented 'Democrats'."
Tom DiLorenzo
"In the days preceding the first American Revolution, the militia drilled openly on village greens; spies carried word of the colonists’ determination to defend their liberty to the relevant British authorities.
What would it say to Our Rulers if militias began forming and marching on Main Street? I know, I know: it’s illegal. But what if millions of us suddenly took to such exercises at once? Or what if we carried only wooden replicas of weapons while practicing military maneuvers?"
Becky Akers
"This COVID initiation isn’t meant to be a CONSCIOUS occult ceremony. The person isn’t meant to know he is in a cult. He senses glimmers and rivulets of ritual. He swims among them. He knows very little, but he FEELS.
As with every occult process, reality is created for him. The whole purpose of the steps on the ladder to redemption is: the quelling of the person’s own creative fire, by which he can invent his own future, freely.
In effect, the cult artists say: "You don’t make your own painting; our painting makes you."
Through the pretended 'science' of virology (fake isolation, fake sequencing) and the pretended 'science' of vaccinology (fake immunity), the State—which is already an authoritarian entity—becomes a Cult.
Prior law (the Constitution) is ruled out; it is anathema. It didn’t account for the new great enemy: the virus. 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty' is replaced: 'The eternal virus demands the curtailment of liberty.'
'Science' is the cover story that conceals the occult hypnotic inducement."
John Rappoport
"How did any ever come to the conclusion that a life under rule was superior to a life of freedom? How does one answer such a contradictory question, without assuming that most all the American population must be either completely brainwashed beyond any recognition, or is too mentally and physically weak by nature to resist servitude? The result of allowing a ruling class to sit atop a throne of authority, while giving those same rulers the power to make all law, means that the entire populace other than that small upper class, have no option except to live as slaves. In other words, most all in this country whether they realize it or not, have voluntarily accepted slavery as their lot in life. This cannot be blamed on the evil despotic members of society that claim, hold, and abuse power, because the people gave them that power willingly. Therefore, all fault lies with the people themselves, and the only solution necessary in order to regain freedom is for the people to demand and take it."
Gary D. Barnett
"Anybody who has been following the pronouncements that have been issuing from the mouths and word processors of professors of history (and official government historians) in recent years ought to be disabused of trust in the competence and good faith of 'experts'—even if he has not seen firsthand the gutting of graduate education that has been taking place. There was a time when professors of history, whatever their viewpoints and degrees of talent, had to have proved themselves by the rigors of primary research and literate, balanced exposition. Increasingly they are just people who stayed in school a long time and learned the fashionable attitudes that entitle them to become spokespersons for the ruling party. The juror has been replaced by the commissar."
Clyde Wilson
"The concept of 'Manufacturing Consent,' posited by people like Noam Chomsky, plays a role here, but I think it goes far beyond that. Rather, Hollywood seeks to not only manufacture consent from the public but also to manufacture the public's relationship to reality. They don't just want us to keep our heads down and begrudgingly accept their ideological zealotry; they want us to believe that their way is and always was the only way.
What I see in the film industry today is complete and unfettered propaganda. We have moved beyond the phase of subversively hidden manipulations to a new stage in which the propaganda has become blatant and aggressive. Almost every new movie and television series is rife with leftist distortions."
Brandon Smith
"No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
Friedrich Nietzsche
