If you own or rent a home, you likely feel a need to have insurance on it. Even though the probability of needing it is extremely slim. I have lived in “homes” (including tents and vehicles) for going on 60 years, and have yet to experience a fire. It is prudent to prepare for things that can happen or are likley to happen. I wish I could say as much for the preparations of the American public for what it looks like is about to befall them.
If you have been paying attention to what is going on in the world, you know that the deep state (2) is in a panic. They have lost political power, and if they do nothing people like Hillary Clinton are going to jail for the rest of their lives. They are desperate, they pulled the false flag of 911 to get you into a panic, and allow them to take your God given rights. Since 911 there have been a least a dozen other false flags. They are desperate, and know no bounds in their efforts to regain control to enslave, control and subjugate us.
This is the reason that they brought in a fifth column of illegal immigrants in the US that is poised to reign terror down upon all of us. That is the reason that they have allowed tens of thousands of terrorists into this country. That is the reason that we have FEMA prison camps in every state. That is the reason that our churches, and Christianity have been infiltrated, and adopted Satanic principles. (2, 3MFP article ) That is the reason that the Deep State is openly threatening to kill President Trump.
That is the reason that we have CIA operatives in all of the mainstream press newsrooms. That is the reason that the bio-weapons labs that are all over this country have pathogens that are contained under ridiculously inadequate security. That is the reason that we allow North Korea to orbit two satellites (2) over us in the perfect orbit to kill 90% of us with an EMP strike. That is the reason that treasonous factions in the government allowed Communist Chinese troops to participate in the US military’s electrical grid down drills. That is the reason that we are forced to have centralized water that can be cut off. That is the reason the cell network was not allowed to be free market, and use spread spectrum technology. That is the reason the government has mandated kill switches so that they control on all of our media and news sources. That is the reason why your gasoline is designed so that you can not store it long term. That is the reason that we have out of control militarized police. That is the reason that we have brainwashing government schools. That is the reason that the NSA knows what you order from Amazon, (2) and from your cell phone every person you have called, what you have said, and where you have been. That is the reason that small farmers hands are often tied and must sell to big agriculture rather than to you the consumer. That is the reason that fluoride is put in the water and the dosage can be increased at any time. That is the reason why they have purposely destroyed our economy. All of the above are not examples of your government doing it’s legitimate job but rather it working to enslave the population.
And finally there are literally thousands of other “regulations” that are designed not to protect us, but rather to control us.
They have left behind a thousand dead man switches to take us down in the eventuality that they lost political power, and now they have lost power.
With many of them facing long jail terms, and possible execution, what do you think the probability is of them throwing one or more of these dead-man switches? Clearly hundreds of times higher than the risk of your home burning down, yet no one seems to be willing to do anything at all to either prepare for what is very likely coming, nor to speak out in order to either stop this or to mitigate the death toll and violence that is coming.
What does scripture say about criminals, time and time and time again? It says to act. It says to demand that they be forced to make things right by paying restitution. Not to sit in your churches with your thumb up your ass doing nothing. Modern day US Christians are doing exactly what the Christians in Nazi Germany did. Nothing to stop the evil! Even though scripture is replete with directives for us to demand justice. The greatest Commandment says to love one another. Is allowing Satanic forces to make this world a living, unjust hell, “loving one another?” You be the judge….he is watching, and I don’t think he is too happy with the human race’s apathy and walk with evil.
Considering all of the above , I like Albert Einstein have a very low opinion of the human race:
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
~Albert Einstein
Considering all of the above, I like Gandhi have a very low opinion of modern day Christians:
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
~Mahatma Gandhi
No one but God knows that is going to pass. But I do know with absolute certainly that the Satanic Deep State is going to try to hold onto power and use the tools that they have embedded into our sytem. Anyone with the slightest bit of discernment, would have to recognize that the probabilities are high enough, that to not act is a decision of incredible stupidity. You had better act soon, logic and reason say that the next false flag is going to be a big one, and a lot of us are going to die if we do not act.
It is the preponderance of christian support for this evil, as it gets, system that blows my mind. I really believe that Satanic forces have co opted modern christianity because of it’s decidedly anti christian views on so many things.
How does the state kidnapping children, with no due process, or even a real crime being committed, or an individual being charged with any crime — how does that square with scriptural justice? Scriptural justice which is largely based upon actual crime, where there is restitution made.
In a way “christians” are a driving force behind this kidnapping and abuse of children, because of their blind insistence of adopting these children in mass, rather than actually understanding what is going on. i.e Learning that this is largely a plan to destroy the family, and not to help children at all.
They should be demanding that heads roll, rather than driving the demand for more children being kidnapped into this satanic system.
Instead they act like the Christians of Nazi Germany did. They do nothing….
They are not heeding the warnings of German Pastors like Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Hosea 4:6 “my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge” seems to fit here.
~MFP
by Terri LaPoint
Health Impact News
The theoretical function of Child Protective Services is to “protect” children from harm, removing them from their homes when they are being hurt. A deep-seated value of Western culture is that we need to protect children from abuse, and the public has overwhelmingly supported the use of tax dollars going to help the children who are being abused.
But what happens when the very agency charged with protecting children is, in reality, leading to or ignoring the physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, and even deaths of the children in their care? Is anyone held accountable?
Where do their victims turn when social workers assigned to protect them turn a deaf ear and a blind eye?
Hundreds of parents who have spoken with Health Impact News about their child or children being taken from them have asked how they can lose their child though they have done nothing wrong, while at the same time the social workers routinely ignore the abuse of their children in foster care.
On December 7, 2017, Massachusetts State Auditor Suzanne Bump released an appalling audit of her state’s Child Protective Services, the Department of Children and Families (DCF). (See text of audit here.)
The audit, which covered 2014 and 2015, found that there were many instances where children in state care, whether in foster homes or group homes or other facilities under DCF care, were abused physically or sexually, but DCF failed to report the incidents to the proper authorities.
In the week following the release of the audit, many news outlets, both mainstream and alternative, have carried the story, and the ensuing political battle between Bump’s office and Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker……
People are so sick in large part because they do not cook, healthy food from scratch any longer (look into the Weston A Price society https://www.westonaprice.org/)
It is close to impossible to buy healthy foods, or to find them at a restaurant. You have to take real foods as your starting point and spend an hour or two a day cooking.
That is unless you have the money to hire a cook. 🙂
My Garmin Vivosmart HR+ says that I burn quite a few calories dancing around the kitchen for that hour. It’s good exercise and I often listen to podcasts or audio books while in the kitchen. I have also been know to stretch or practice martial arts forms while waiting on something to finish up.
Today was a “cook day”, with 4-5 hours in the kitchen.
This was dinner.
Everything homemade:
Right bowl: Asparagus soup with a dollop of homemade sour creme
Left bowel: Italian Sausage and kale soup (no Cathy I did not raise nor butcher this hog, I’ll leave that to you)
Plate: Almond bread and butter. Hand crafted crackers, topped with avocado and kale pesto. Kimchi. Roasted buttered pecans
There was more later, but I don’t want to write a tome here.
Two more lessons learned from the school of hard knocks:
1.) Get on a good nutritional supplement program, and that includes taking care of your gut. This is as important or more than all of the above. Our soil is depleted and you can not get everything you need from your food.
2.) Lastly put your body into nutritional ketosis (keep your insulin levels very low by diet) You are likely to remain overweight if you don’t do this.
If Americans did this. this country would look like a different planet the change would be so noticeable
Spread the word. Eat like your great grandfather and great grandmother ate, and you will be a heck of a lot healthier! That prepackaged food is adulterated folks. If food is in a box, you should throw it in the trash.
You might have heard it before, but every American needs to either read or listen to this book (get if for free by joining and then quitting Audible) This book is not opinion. It is fact and history.
~MFP
The American approach to law enforcement was forged by the experience of revolution. Emerging as they did from the shadow of British rule, the country’s founders would likely have viewed police as they exist today as a standing army and therefore a threat to liberty. Even so, excessive force and disregard for the Bill of Rights have become epidemic in America today.
According to civil liberties reporter Radley Balko, these are all symptoms of a generation-long shift to increasingly aggressive, militaristic, and arguably unconstitutional policing – one that would have shocked the conscience ofAmerica’s founders.
Rise of the Warrior Cop traces the arc of US law enforcement from the constables and private justice of colonial times to present-day SWAT teams and riot cops. Today relentless “war on drugs” and “war on terror” pronouncements from politicians, along with battle-clad police forces with tanks and machine guns, have dangerously blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. Balko’s fascinating, frightening narrative shows how martial rhetoric and reactionary policies have put modern law enforcement on a collision course with the values of a free society…. Read more
This book should come with a warning label. It is surely one of the most bracing books on politics in the history of the English language. There is more truth in these pages than most Americans are willing to face. What Mencken delivers here is probably the most scathing attack on the idea of mass rule that has ever been written.
Mencken is known as the chief heretic of the American civic religion, and this book shows why. Your eyes will pop out at not only his dazzling prose but, and most especially, at the thoughts that he dares put in print, almost as a revolutionary act.
Here is a slight sample, passages sampled nearly randomly:
What does the mob think? It thinks, obviously, what its individual members think. And what is that? It is, in brief, what somewhat sharp-nose and unpleasant childrern think. The mob, being composed, in the overwhelming main, of men and women who have not got beyond the ideas and emotions of childhood, hovers, in mental age, around the time of puberty, and chiefly below it. If we would get at its thoughts and feelings we must look for light to the thoughts and feelings of adolescents.
When the city mob fights it is not for liberty, but for ham and cabbage. When it wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to that end. And its second is to butcher all professional libertarians. If Thomas Jefferson had been living in Paris in 1793 he would have made an even narrower escape from the guillotine than Thomas Paine made.
What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace: the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take—his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact.
A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him ( a ) from his superiors, ( b ) from his equals, and ( c ) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y. M. C. A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls…Here, though the common man is deceived, he starts from a sound premise: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for his hands—or, as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine.
Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase, and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!” It has been so in the United States since the earliest days. The whole history of the country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, the hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler, Pancho Villa, German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism. The list might be lengthened indefinitely; a complete chronicle of the Republic could be written in terms of it, and without omitting a single important episode.
It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something. The fact explains in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favour of colorless mediocrities. The former are shining marks, and so it is easy for demagogues to bring them down; the latter are preferred because it is impossible to fear them.
There is much more. Much more. Murray Rothbard didn’t share Mencken’s pessimism but he sure liked his mode of thinking, his writing style, and his love of liberty.
Even if you think you have read it all, this book will rattle you to the very core, for it causes a rethinking of the whole structure of the political system. But Mencken also shows that he is more than a cynic, contrary to his reputation. What shines through this treatise is a deep attachment to liberty and a search for some way to protect it from the attack of the mob, which he regards as liberty’s greatest enemy.
If there really were a banned book list in the annals of American statescraft, this would surely be on it. It is not for the faint of heart. Read it, and pass it around, as a revolutionary act.
The new edition includes an introduction and extensive annotations by noted Mencken scholar Marion Elizabeth Rodgers and an afterword by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis.
Published in 1926, with only 235 copies printed. Another printing appeared later that year, and it vanished until 1977, when it was published by Octagon before vanishing yet again..
It features an introduction and annotations by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, the great Mencken authority, as well as an afterword by Anthony Lewis.
Weston A Price society nails it with this article. Take the time to get the big picture of how your food supply is controlled, to make the small farmer poor and adulterated to make people sick.
MFP Commentary: This hits close to home. A few months back I experienced one of the most terrifying events in my life when a road pirate from the Seymour MO police department stopped me for an expired tag. (An offficer Mullins) Most of the physical injuries took a week to heal, but I will be dealing with the psychological damages for a long time to come. Rape victims often experience depression, and need counseling. Do not think for a moment that this was not a rape of my rights, my humanity, and my person. That was exactly what it was. Some day I will be able to write about it.
If you have been reading this paper then you also know that I was assaulted by a business owner in Seymour a month back and the predictably incompetent police department has not even contacted me concerning their so called investigation. IMHO if they can’t steal someone’s money, or get an illegitimate felony bust, they are not interested. Protecting your rights is the very last things that police departments are interested in. I have had conversations with the past 2 mayors of Seymour, and suggested that they either get rid of the police department or at the very least replace it with a contracted private police department. ( and here) As it stands all police departments stand behind the principle of “Sovereign Immunity” which is clearly a form of moral relativism, one of the major platforms of the Church of Satan. That is a fact, not a wild unsubstantiated claim. If we are to take the Declarations claim that “all men are created equal” , a cornerstone that this country was founded upon, we need to recognize that having a class of men with more rights than others is both immoral and evil on it’s face.
It was VERY telling that Mullins like a sexual predator that has just finished raping a victim, asked me with the leading question: “Why don’t you like cops?” Isn’t that almost the same thing that rapists ask their victims? i.e. “Did you enjoy it?”
It’s not that I don’t like cops like Rapist-Mullins. It’s that I don’t like criminals that violate my rights. Just like at Auschwitz, a Legislator putting words on paper do not excuse your committing crimes.
~MFP
By John W. Whitehead November 27, 2017
“Quit resisting.”—Cops yell at compliant young man who was thrown to the ground, beaten, arrested and hospitalized for severe injuries to his face and arm, allegedly in retaliation for “resisting arrest” by driving to a safe, well-lit area before submitting to a traffic stop for a broken tail light
We’ve all been there before.
You’re driving along and you see a pair of flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach.
You’ve read enough news stories, seen enough headlines, and lived in the American police state long enough to be anxious about any encounter with a cop that takes place on the side of the road.
For better or worse, from the moment you’re pulled over, you’re at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
This is what I call “blank check policing,” in which the police get to call all of the shots.
So if you’re nervous about traffic stops, you have every reason to be. — Read More
Please take the time to listen to this primer on diet. It is succinct, and accurate, and may very well save your life, or that of a loved one.
DIet is critical and there is a lot of bad info out there. (doctors and the press are the main sources of bad info) This is not bad info….it is some of the best that I have come across.
Basing one’s morality around legality is no way to live.
One of the greatest evils that I see Christians constantly doing is supporting any sort of evil that you can imagine “because it is the law”. Well I have news for you, writing words on paper can not turn evil into good. The biggest offenders that I see are the thugs in blue. They like the guards at Auschwitz are “order followers” that have not yet seen a “law” that they will not enforce.
~MFP
Sarah Skwire
One of my favorite sayings comes from the now defunct web-comic A Softer World. “It was a sweet day when I realized,” reads the comic, “legal and illegal had nothing to do with right and wrong.”
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I wish I could say it was because I had faced some grand moral dilemma that had brought me to a greater understanding of the crucial distinctions between when a thing is legal and when a thing is right, or when a thing is illegal and when it is wrong. There are certainly a lot of issues alive in our culture at the moment that seem to turn on those distinctions.
The Difference Between Legal and Right
But my recent thinking about right and wrong, legal and illegal, wasn’t inspired by any of that. Instead, it was inspired by a friend’s casual reference to the popular podcast, My Favorite Murder. I find true crime stuff intriguing, was about to get into the car for a three hour drive, and wanted something to listen to, so I downloaded a few episodes and listened to them in the car.
It’s a fine podcast and a funny one. I like it. The hosts–two comedians–discuss and theorize about a few different murders in every episode, covering everything from the details of the crime, to the investigation, to different theories about unsolved cases. The three-hour car trip flew.
But I felt increasingly uneasy.
For me, listening to this podcast in the way that I was doing it was wrong. So I stopped.
I wasn’t uneasy because I was suddenly worried about potential murderers lurking in every dark corner. I was uneasy because I wasn’t sure that listening to this podcast was right for me. I was driving along safely and happily listening to people talk about some of the worst things that humans have done to each other. I wasn’t doing it to learn anything, or in hopes of making the tragedies less. I wasn’t even doing it in order to practice my Smithian ability to sympathize with the sufferings of others.
I was being entertained. By murder. Real murder.
Somehow, the distinction between reality and the fictional murders in the Marvel Comics Universe that I enjoy so much, or in the mysteries I read so often, began to seem too much for me to treat the one as I treat the other. For me, listening to this podcast in the way that I was doing it was wrong. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who treats tragedy as entertainment.
So I stopped.
It is perfectly legal to listen to My Favorite Murder. It should be. And I can imagine all kinds of people with all kinds of good reasons for listening to it that would make me nod and agree that it’s the right thing for them to do. I’d object loudly if any Helen Lovejoys read this column as a reason to condemn the podcast and petition to have it taken off the air.
But unlike laws—which ought to be thin enough and general enough to apply to (as close as possible) all of us (as often as possible) all of the time–moral reasoning about what is right and wrong, should be thick and specific. It should be contextual—about the time and circumstance and the people involved—in a way that laws should not be.
Trolley Problem
That’s why, when I found myself in a real life enactment of the classic philosophical conundrum of the “trolley problem” recently, it was easy to decide what to do. I was headed pell mell down hill at top speed on my bike. A family—Mom, two elementary school kids, and Dad with a baby in a baby carrier—were headed down another hill, equally pell mell, right for me.
You can’t make a law for that kind of situation.
Of course I hit my brakes, ditched my bike, and crashed onto the asphalt. Because, for me, taking that damage myself was the right thing to do, rather than risk injuring the family headed towards me. It wasn’t a question of calculating the costs the family would experience if I hit them, and contrasting that with the benefit I would accumulate from avoiding a severe case of road rash and a spectacular set of bruises.
It wasn’t right to hit them. So I did my best not to.
You can’t make a law for that kind of situation. It’s too clunky. And it probably would have been legal for me to hit them, anyway. But it would not have been right.
Merely Legal
Right and wrong aren’t inflexible rules; they are responses to the world as we move through it.
Sometimes, maybe most times, all you can do is do the best that you can, in the given circumstances, to make the kind of decision that allows you to be the person you can live with being. That’s why I’m never impressed when a public figure—caught doing something shady—reminds us that he or she hasn’t done anything illegal. It may well be true, but mere legality is a lousy way to be a human being.
Much of human life, possibly most of human life, and almost certainly the most important parts of human life, are not usefully discussed in terms of what is legal and illegal. We know that. That’s why we write books like Les Miserables and make movies like Loving. Right and wrong have nothing to do with legal and illegal. They are complicated and personal. Right and wrong aren’t inflexible rules; they are responses to the world as we move through it and to people as we interact with them.
Sarah Skwire is the Literary Editor of FEE.org and a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis. She is a member of the FEE Faculty Network. Email
Our lack of Constitutional knowledge means that believing in protecting the rights of minorities does not actually protect them when they are outvoted.
This may be one of the most important ideas that you are presented with this year. Knowledge is the answer to the dilemma that the country finds itself. Americans are currently one of the most dumbed down populations on the face of the earth. In that vein I ask you to take a look this 8 hour Constitution Class presented by Michael Badnarik: Constitution Class taught by Michael Badnarik
The United Nations “war on drugs” exemplifies the tyranny of the majority better than anything else that I can think of at this time. We have also had a devastating and continueing war on firearms that was made possible by the tyranny of the majority. The criminals over at BATF have played not a small part in this continueing trampling of our rights by the majority.
~MFP
Gary M. Galles
Constitution Day—September 17—marks the anniversary of its 1787 signing. Students will be taught about it…but not because of its importance. It is now a mandatory topic for every educational institution receiving federal aid. However, what won’t be taught is the irony of that requirement, which originated from the man then-described as the Senate’s leading Constitutional scholar, while clearly conflicting with the Constitution.
In 2004, Senator Robert Byrd (D.-WV) added this requirement to a pork-filled spending bill that was blatantly inconsistent with Americans’ general welfare. It also clearly overstepped the 10th Amendment’s restriction of the federal government to only its enumerated powers.
His “solution” aside, Byrd was correct about Americans’ inadequate Constitutional knowledge. As one National Constitution Center poll concluded, only one in six of us claimed detailed knowledge of the Constitution—despite the fact that two-thirds said it was “absolutely essential” to have.
Lack of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing
In other words, Americans know too little about our Constitution to maintain the freedoms it was designed to protect. Instead, our ignorance leads us to sacrificing rights out of undue deference to majority rule.
Alexander Hamilton asserted that “Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy.”
America’s Constitution did not endorse majority rule. Our founders did believe in voting to select who should be entrusted with the power of government, but the more important and prior question they addressed was: “What powers do the people delegate to the federal government to exercise on their behalf?” That is why so much of the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, is devoted to what the government is not allowed to do, regardless of majority sentiment. As Jefferson said, our founders fought not for democracy, but for a government “tied down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
In fact, our founders had a great distrust of majority rule. Alexander Hamilton asserted that “Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy.” James Madison said “democracies…have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Thomas Jefferson warned that “an elective despotism was not the government we fought for,” and that “The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.”
That is why the Constitution contains multiple non-majority rules to protect Americans against federal abuses, such as presidential veto power and the super-majorities required to change the Constitution. Its defense is the rationale for the Supreme Court’s power to strike down unconstitutional laws, regardless of how many congressional votes they received.
“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote.”
Despite our founders’ antipathy toward pure majority rule, many today feel that our founders’ opposition to unlimited democracy can be squared with political determination of everything by adding the phrase, “also protecting the rights of the minority.” However, as Ayn Rand put it, “Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).” Consequently, our lack of Constitutional knowledge means that believing in protecting the rights of minorities does not actually protect them when they are outvoted.
The unwise habit of deference to political majorities results in those rights being steamrollered whenever more than 50% vote to do so.
Since Americans don’t clearly understand their Constitutional rights against government abuse, the unwise habit of deference to political majorities results in those rights being steamrollered whenever more than 50% vote to do so. Examples are plentiful because—despite the Constitution’s imposition of strictly limited, enumerated federal powers—there is no area it does not now reach, if not dominate. And with our protections eroding, majority voting controls more and more of what our founders thought they had made off-limits to political determination.
Sadly, as we can’t effectively defend what we are only vaguely aware of, American inattention to the highest law of the land puts our most essential rights and liberties at risk. We may think we have inalienable rights, as the Declaration of Independence asserts. But those rights are protected by the Constitution only if we know what they are and we remember that the federal government was not granted power to take them away based on any simple majority vote. Unless we once again take our rights as seriously as our founders and vigorously defend the Constitutional safeguards that maintain them—even against majority pressures—the system of self-government our founders left us will continue to erode. But when we don’t even recognize the irony of a federal mandate to promote understanding of the Constitution, especially when it is inconsistent with the Constitution, we are unprepared to do anything to effectively preserve its protections against government abuse.
Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.
