We are at war and I don't mean in Ukraine Part 2: "Our Democracy"

“Every revolution starts in the minds of the people” says the tagline of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom. This was most directly inspired by a statement written by John Adams in 1818:

“The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.”

There are many other ways to say this. One is, “Ideas matter.” My 2015 book, Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? was about precisely this. Ideas.

As I wrote last week, we are at war. It is being fought in the political and media sphere, meaning it is, for the moment, a war of ideas.

That’s not to say our enemies are not willing to enforce their ideas with violence. To a certain extent, they are doing so already. If you are an employer in the healthcare industry, for example, you must require your employees to be vaccinated. It is the “law,” as written by an executive branch agency called the Department of Health and Human Services, which along with myriad other executive branch regulatory agencies make most of the laws U.S. citizens live under.

So much for the legislative power being delegated to Congress.

Many under the spell of progressive brainwashing might ask, “But how is this violence?” It is important to remember that every law, regulation, or other government edict is a threat of violence. That’s not “extremism;” it’s the truth. Anyone who doubts that should simply choose not to obey one.

Pick the most insignificant amongst them, like a traffic ticket. Sure, the first response to your disobedience might merely be a letter demanding some money. But ignore the letters long enough, fail to show up for the inevitable court date, and men with guns will eventually arrive at your door to take you away or kill you if you resist.

This is the nature of government. To deny it is to depart from reality.

Deep down, everyone knows this, and our enemies know we know this. That is why it is so important for them to obtain, at the very least, our tacit consent. Thus, the massive propaganda drive in the media, the deplatforming of dissidents, and the scapegoating of “extremists.”

They need to control the way people think because they cannot overcome the whole population by force. Neither can they completely brainwash the entire population. They only need to do what they have succeeded in doing so far, which is to recruit a significant minority of the population to actively propagandize for them and rely on another significant minority of the population to “go along to get along.”

That leaves the last significant minority of the population, those willing to actively resist, to battle the government, the media, corrupted business interests, and most of their fellow citizens.

Needless to say, with this monumental task in front of them, it is important that the resistors have the right ideas. At the very least, they must avoid the enemy’s false premises. Otherwise, like an army that has been lured into advancing in the center without protecting its flank, the resistance ends up right where its enemies want them.

Our enemies have succeeded in poisoning the resistance with many false premises which need to be rejected or we will find ourselves, like the Romans at Cannae or Washington at Brandywine, rushing headlong forward only to be surrounded and destroyed.

One false premise accepted by virtually everyone is that the United States is “a democracy.” Calling the American system of government “a democracy” is like looking at a birthday cake and calling it “an egg.”

Yes, democracy is one of the ingredients in the U.S. Constitution, but it is not the only or even the main ingredient. It is more accurate to say there are a few democratic elements in the Constitution and the rest is designed to protect us from democracy.