By Doug Newman – email me here.
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Me. Ricky Recruit. 1983.
On the Friday just before Memorial Day in 1983, I graduated from Navy boot camp at the now-defunct Recruit Training Command in Orlando, Florida. I was going to be “keeping America free”. Or at least that is what everyone told me.
Herewith is a partial list of freedoms that Americans have willingly relinquished since I joined the Navy.
- The debt has grown from $1 trillion to $22 trillion.
- The federal budget has grown from $800 billion to over $4 trillion.
- The prison population has grown from 300,000 to over 2 million. (“The land of the free” has the highest incarceration rate on earth.)
- The number of people on food stamps has grown from 1 in 50 to 1 in 7.
- The police have gone from being from a minor annoyance to being an occupying army. The number of SWAT raids has grown from 3000 to over 50,000 annually.
- A national healthcare mandate has gone from being Ted Kennedy’s pipedream to a grotesque, totalitarian reality.
- Just since 2003, the number of offenses carrying federal criminal penalties has grown by 21 percent.
- Not a single federal program or agency – let alone department – has been eliminated. Indeed, all of them have grown bigger and uglier and many new ones have been created.
- Since 9/11, the majority of the American people have accepted – in the name of “safety” and “security”: putting entire cities on lock down, warrantless searches and spying, the suspension of habeas corpus, sexual assault as a condition of travel, indefinite detention without any semblance of due process, severe restrictions on peaceful protest and surveillance drones in our skies watching our every move. And don’t dare think for a minute that we won’t accept internal passports as well as predator drones in domestic law enforcement, as there are already precedents.
- Take 10 minutes and read this wonderful article on “9 Liberties Lost Since 9/11“.
For a much more in-depth treatment of this issue, read this article!
And if you think that by “terrorists”, the powers that be are only talking about scary looking brown guys with names like Mahmoud and Omar, think again. Various federal documents identify 72 types of people as “potential terrorists”.
In every election, 98 percent of people vote to perpetuate this madness.
America’s freedom is not being “taken from us”. Instead, we are giving it away. Gladly!
2016 was no different! Nor was 2018!
Liberals are at least honest about their belief in big government.
Conservatives talk like Patrick Henry and then vote for people who govern like Bernie Sanders. They support wars for empire, wars on drugs, spying, torture, trade sanctions and embargoes, rogue cops and guilt without trial. They also support corporate bailouts, massive debts and deficits and look the other way when their presidents raise taxes and give us things like gun-free schools, No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D. In other words, they have no objection at all to big, fat, ugly, four-dimensionally obese government when it advances their agenda.
They are bigger liars than liberals. And THAT is saying something.
The most popular Republicans have no problem with a full frontal police-state approach to the immigration issue. Donald Trump, a Republican, supports universal healthcare, border walls, travel bans, very aggressive protective tariffs, tax increases by executive order, “red flag” gun confiscation, printing money to pay off the debt and doing things that were “unthinkable a year ago” to fight terrorism.
If this is “conservatism”, it makes absolutely perfect sense that so many radical in-your-face socialists are on the march from the Left.
Please don’t thank me for my service. Instead, look in the mirror and acknowledge your part in enabling tyranny in America. I did this in late 1991 and I walked off the two-party plantation in early 1992.
It has been said that when someone realizes they are honestly mistaken, they either stop being mistaken or they stop being honest. I am not morally superior to you or to anyone, but I stopped being mistaken. What are you, reader, going to do?
Pro-freedom alternatives to the duopoly exist. There is the Libertarian Party. There is the Constitution Party. Check out their national, state and local candidates. If you continue to do what you have always done, you will continue to get what you have always gotten. Be the change you want to see!
Start by thanking this guy.
I consider my true service to America to be my liberty activism over the last 25 years. And I haven’t done jack squat compared to a lot of people I can think of. Thank them before you thank me.
Wake up! Get a clue! Start realizing that the true threat to your freedom does not come from any terrorist group or foreign government. And, truth to tell, it does not come from Washington, D.C.
Rather, it comes from “we the people” and our insistence on electing the same people again and again. And it comes from our abject ignorance of our God-given rights.
If you insist on voting for the “lesser evil” – no matter how evil that may be – because of “electability”, don’t be surprised when God lets so much evil run amok. To quote the old Toyota jingle, you asked for it and you got it. If you like the “lesser evil”, why don’t you love the greater evil? In 2016, 96 percent of voters chose either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, i.e. chose perpetual war as well as MASSIVE additional intrusions on our personal and economic liberty.
It IS happening here. Free-DUMB!
We know everything about the latest bit of election gossip and nothing about how the Bill of Rights applies to us at a traffic stop or when we are called to serve on a jury. We think that tyranny “can’t happen here.”
It CAN happen here. It IS happening here. It was happening long before anyone ever heard of the current president. And it is all happening with our blessing. Every last contemptible bit of it. If there ever was a people who got EXACTLY the government they deserve it is the American people in 2018.
Liberty is a gift from God, not the military. The duty of the military is to defend the borders, shores and airspace. It cannot defend our liberty. That is our job.
There is no more vile form of disrespect to our sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines than to send them all over the world “to fight for our freedom”, where no threat exists, while at the same time giving away that freedom here at home.
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