Freedoms at risk
Mark Greathouse
(4/2023) In 1775, Patrick Henry proclaimed to the Second Virginia Revolutionary Convention, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Our Declaration of Independence declares that we have certain "unalienable rights to…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Our nation’s patriotic songs tout liberty. But, are we truly free? Our lives are increasingly controlled; freedoms compromised. The breadth and depth of control is breathtaking. Fear, indoctrination, contagion, and misinformation are leading methods for control by government, academia, media, and industry. Following are but a handful of examples.
Money – Controlling money is crucial to controlling our nation. In this age of cryptocurrency, folks likely missed the Hamilton Project. The Boston Fed engaged with MIT on a 2-year pilot study of a fully digital currency (CBDC). While some major banks may yet flirt with it, the Fed has nixed it for now. Fears of lack of privacy, loss of the freedom associated with cash, lack of fungibility, and possible government intrusion into transactions will likely generate major pushback. Despite this, it could become reality. Oh, and there’s the issue of national debt whereby we are subservient to an unelected Federal Reserve and a Treasury that burdens us with the fiscal horror of debt exceeding gross domestic product (GDP).
Climate/Environment/Energy – Acolytes of the belief that our planet is sliding inexorably into climate-driven oblivion stoke panic to control transportation, agriculture, even the light bulb you use. Environmentalists are conflicted, as wind turbines kill birds, bats, and insects while manufactures of batteries, solar panels, and turbine blades destroy precious landscapes. Controlling the national power grid through regulatory promotion of EVs, wind turbines, solar panels, and rationing offers a scary proposition. Rolling blackouts will be ever more common.
Education – The unions exercise strong control over the education of our nation’s children. Teacher unions, leftist politicians, and the Department of Education threaten school choice, academic excellence, and career development as they turn children into minions of the state. Despite our nation’s having been built on merit, any form of exceptionalism is discouraged in competition and instruction. But K-12 isn’t enough as elitist left-leaning professors stifle debate and exercise control by turning out fully-indoctrinated robots that spend years genuflecting at the altar of big government control until they become old enough to realize that they were duped. Students are brainwashed with an unrelenting diet of racial and gender lies instead of reading, writing, and mathematics.
Media – Tiktok and Facebook among others hold subscribers addictively captive to their spells, controlling mind and body with often insidious messages of despair and self-loathing. Social media is like a mind virus. Fact checkers with distinctly liberal biases cancel, shadow ban, and censor, while gathering data to bend folks to their will. And the decidedly left-leaning news media holds huge sway, exercising control via misinformation, disinformation, and censorship.
Government – Self-centered politicians do whatever it takes to keep their elected offices. Ever-more-bloated government agencies composed of unelected bureaucrats create myriad regulations that control our lives from cradle to grave…and even in the hereafter. There’s little or no recourse. Our nation’s founders recognized that a government behemoth accumulating centralized power was a threat to individual liberty. Federal government is a woke agenda "lab leak."
Immigration – For decades, America has been subject to an uncontrolled flood of immigrants entering illegally with all sorts of associated illegal activities and pressure on our societal infrastructure. Distribution of these illegals around the nation is controlled by…you guessed it…the government.
Communication/Thought – Free speech, arguably our most treasured freedom, is under assault. Those seeking control have little trouble finding where you are, where you have been, and where you might head thanks to your beloved cell phone with its GPS tracking of your purchases, your "friends," and the various apps you use. Meanwhile, the woke crowd spews language controls from gender pronouns to determinations of offending sports team names to genderless bathrooms. Control of language translates to control of the state. Of course, open socio-political debate is a no-no. And don’t overlook AI, a new power being weaponized by government and industry. Some AI already has built-in socio-political bias.
Healthcare – Healthcare is a huge part of America’s economy, and big pharma and insurance companies are in full control. With the COVID pandemic, stoking fear became a key tool for government control to implement lockdowns, masking, and vaccinations despite science to the contrary. It was amazing how many folks knuckled under to unproven science.
Population/Gender/Race – False fears of over-population have led many to try to control its growth through eugenics for "racial perfection" and its cousin euthanasia for "racial hygiene" and for relieving the "burdens" of sick and elderly. Eugenicist Margaret Sanger notoriously established Planned Parenthood abortion clinics in black neighborhoods, and Hitler sought a master race. In a parallel universe, gender distinctions are being destroyed to exercise control through identity confusion, gender dysphoria, and breakdown of traditional family structures. Control freaks employ divide and conquer tactics to weaken traditional societal structures.
Justice/Law Enforcement – Control is imposed primarily through "social justice" proponents under the guise of achieving equity (confused with equality), environmental sustainability, population diversity, and criminal justice. DAs bought by wealthy leftists free criminals to threaten peace-loving citizens. As crime surges, misinformed and uninformed folks pressure government to take away guns, leaving innocent citizens vulnerable to ever-increasing crime.
Religion – Freedom of religion is morphing into freedom from religion. Separation of church and state has become so corrupted from the founders’ intent, that many in power seek to erase religious faith from our nation.
Many Americans today find themselves caught in a cycle of despair as freedoms are lost. They turn to the shallow satisfactions of self-preservation and self-gratification rather than accepting the hope and promise offered in religious faith. They duck ever deeper into metaphorical bomb shelters of denial, figuring to avoid the inevitable socialist onslaught and loss of freedoms. As author, philosopher, and Bolshevik escapee Ayn Rand notes, "There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism by suicide."
Many Christians today earnestly believe that we’re close to end times. While we’re not likely to see the rapture, antichrist, or other signs any time soon, it’s deeply concerning that the most exceptional nation in the world’s history has fallen to such dire circumstances that folks have been led to such belief.
Today’s followers of the wealthy and "educated" leftist elites have no idea that the breadth and depth of their ill-conceived controls will inevitably doom their freedoms. None want to hear of it, but we’re in grave danger of socialistic control. Ignorance of socialist and eventually authoritarian communist controls will turn our beloved United States into a third-world nation far faster than might be imagined. It’s death by a thousand cuts. The misinformed and uninformed are accessories to a slow-motion non-violent coups d’etat by liberal Democratic socialists bent on delivering their oxymoronic agenda. We are but a generation from disaster.
What do we do? I suggest that it’s never too late. Those who truly care for the United States and its freedoms must not remain passive. Hope in the righting of our ship of state must be restored. Y’all must get involved at as many levels as possible, whether it be in education, social media, politics, and more. Are you a sheep or a lion? I prefer to roar. Just sayin’.
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