The Three Percent

 Today there are two intertwining articles at the American Thinker that speak to the Leftist takeover of our nation. The first, written by Eric Utter is entitled Government Is Forgetting That Our Rights Are Unalienable

I hate bullies.

And government is the biggest bully of them all. Always. Everywhere. Since governments were instituted. Kings. Tyrants. Dictators. Banana republics. The Soviet Union. The Third Reich. Chairman Mao. Pol Pot. Idi Amin Dada. Fidel Castro. Hugo Chávez. Etc., etc., etc. And now Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, the Iranian mullahs, the Biden administration, Justin Trudeau, and Scott Morrison.

Two hundred forty-five years ago, Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence proclaimed: "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."

Note that Jefferson invoked Providence in his formulation of our unalienable rights. But the Left wants to push God out of the public square, indeed, they want to get rid of God all together.

Leftists detest God because they are jealous of Him and wish to usurp His power...and be worshiped themselves. They believe they have unalienable rights, but no one else does. Consequently, these are the people who most fervently wish to be in government.

The Founders, now often reviled, believed in every individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let's make the obvious clear once again: government has no right to lock up — or down — innocent people. It has no right to issue mask or vaccine mandates, tell us our jobs aren't "essential," or prevent us from visiting our families and neighbors. It has no right to ban weddings or funerals of more than a certain number of celebrants or mourners. For that matter, it has no "right" to the fruits of our labor. As it has no right to indoctrinate our children or tell us how to raise them. Period.

The idea of "rights" and who gets to excercise them is important to our Founding. The Constitution does not recognize any "rights" as belonging to government. Rights are only recognized as belonging to the people, and the people as individuals. There are no collective "rights," only individual rights.

Utter's piece is generally pretty pesimistic, noting that the Left has generally taken the cultural high ground. On the other hand, J. B. Shurk has a more optimistic article entitled The Case For Optimism. I would liken his article to the military commander who, when informed that he is surrounded, replied that "We have them where we want them." Shurk lists a whole host of horribles that we have seen afflict this once free nation:

The whole thing is so absurd and so unfathomable to most Americans that it is causing them to lose faith in any future at all. We can't vote our way out if vote counts can't be trusted or if the Uniparty just continues seeding battleground states with tens of millions of illegal aliens who will either be granted immunity and voting privileges in short order or be encouraged to break our voting laws, just as they were encouraged to break our immigration laws. Big Tech and Big Media have strangled information so successfully that the need for samizdat has returned. Big Business and Big Government have worked together to transfer all the wealth of the middle class to the richest one percent of the one percent. Vaccine passports promise a future of completely controlled movement. Central bank digital currencies promise a future of completely controlled commerce. Quarantine camps provide a convenient excuse for housing all the troublesome skeptics immune to groupthink socialism. And Americans who are just itching for a chance to push back against the government's abuses are reminded daily that a few hundred unarmed January 6 Capitol "trespassers," whose technical crimes, if any, paled in comparison to those we've been forced to endure from the hands of the FBI-approved BLM and Antifa Marxists for several years, are still languishing in solitary confinement going on a full year now with laughably bereft American due process, proving that justice in the United States is, indeed, two-tiered.

Now, who could read through all that mess above and be optimistic about what is to come? Easy. Anybody who has been watching the Marxists' long march through history trampling over American freedoms one decade at a time, just hoping the day would arrive when enough people would wake up to the severity of the situation to do something about it.

...snip...

Imagine how many naysayers still existed in the American colonies after the Declaration of Independence was first published in 1776. Troubles with England had already existed for over a decade. War with England would engulf the next decade. The Articles of Confederation didn't last the decade after that. The U.S. Constitution and the whole American experiment in individual liberty almost evaporated when the British took a second bite at the apple during the War of 1812. Although Americans who have resisted the brainwashing of the Marxists rewriting American history are fond of thinking of those five decades of uncertainty as being guided by God and destiny, they were filled with moments that could have stopped America's birth. Only the unwavering fellowship of Americans clear in their purpose kept the nation on course. Only in hindsight did everything seem certain.

We, too, find ourselves in uncertain and explosive times. Enemies of freedom have hardened the battle lines. Protectors of freedom have awakened to what's at stake. And more and more people are seeing the light. If you doubt that we're gaining ground, then just consider how hostile government now is. The appeal of personal liberty — its resplendence, if you will — is far brighter and more attractive than the government would like, which is why, every day, its enforcers work so hard to keep us apart, lost, and in despair. When we find courage through each other, we make their mission impossible.

Keep in mind too, that only 3% of the population was involved in the fight for independence at any given time. Already more than that are among the awakened. Optimism indeed.