“Isn’t that the real question on our minds? How shall we live together and order our affairs?”
Every writer wants that finishing touch that turns the argument toward home. I had intended this column to connect the tidal wave of new documents, emails, and yesterday’s belated admission that Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” was indeed his. There is now a mountain of evidence of the breathtaking corruption at the Department of Justice, FBI, and the rouge intelligence community.
The evidence also confirms what we already guessed. The nation has a compromised foreign agent – the “big guy” – sitting in the Oval Office. It supercharges irony that everything the radical left threw at former President Trump was precisely what the radicals and Joe Biden were doing. You can’t make all of this up.
Since the Obama administration, I’ve written frequently on the creeping political weaponization across the DOJ and FBI, the intelligence community, banking regulators, IRS, NASA, NOAA, and other agencies.
In a 2019 column, I wrote, “It is a fearful thing that a great Republic that once celebrated the righteousness of law and justice as a product of a virtuous society would forget its own Founding, and how much God has to say about that justice in Scripture. There is an unbreakable relationship between truth and justice – one doesn’t exist without the other.”
Now we’re seeing the bitter fruit of that reality.
But looking through the immediate events, I can’t help but think about an even more important issue it brings to the front. It comes first in an ancient phrase first heard from the Prophet Ezekiel 2,500 years ago – its refrain cascading down the centuries’ corridors – from the pen of every subsequent philosopher and intellectual. “How then should we live?”
Isn’t that the real question of our times? How shall we live together and order our affairs? How will we raise our families in peace and safety, free from want? How do we pursue our personal dreams and tend to the needs of each other and our communities? And, most importantly, who sets the parameters of the moral order? An eternal God or mere men?
More than anything, isn’t this the sum and substance of what we want?
Until the last three hundred years, how we should live was primarily determined by the sword or the decree of a self-appointed Sovereign or despot.
The American experiment as a Constitutional Republic upended all of that. The Founding was a pivot in human history, the answer to the age-old struggle to realize the promise of liberty and freedom, captured in one dramatic sentence: “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.”
That world-shattering concept (refined mainly in the early colonial pulpits) originated in the Biblical covenants between God and His people, the Reformation, and the great thinkers of the eighteenth century.
The Founders were practical, sophisticated, and visionary men. They knew the nature and history of man left to his own devices was always, without fail, tyranny by one over another or mob rule – such as today’s parliamentary systems. Instead, they grasped the dynamics of the law of Righteousness and its promise of ‘showers of blessings,’ proclaiming that we lived in an ordered universe.
The Founding documents became the blueprint that prospered the people and changed the course of the world. It has brought unequaled freedom to Americans. And it inspired the world it has saved three times from marauding despots and tyrants. It has rebuilt nations that others have destroyed by war. And it has sent untold trillions of dollars of wealth and countless teachers, doctors, and missionaries across the globe seeking nothing in return.
Critically, the Founding challenged every citizen to live up to its creeds and provided the mechanics to do so – to right wrongs.
But tyranny never rests. Its driving imperative for absolute power, singular control, is like an ancient chant from Hell, reminding us that the story of America is never finished.
Perhaps more than any moment since the Civil War, we are living in a time with two contrasting visions that cannot co-exist.
The radical left’s vision demands the darkness of mob rule and the subjugation of individual thought and liberty. Its organizing premise is that personal freedom has proven too messy. The radicals claim that since there are flaws in the American story and free economies, no part of that story justifies its continuance.
The solution proposed is the same as offered by every tyranny. Each individual must prostrate themselves before secular power and dismiss God from public and personal life – even the family unit must bow to this paradigm. Success must be a collective expression. The rule of law must be subject to the emotional notions of victimhood. Meritocracy must stand aside for equivalency. No life is to go uninvaded.
Even the befuddled standard-bearer of the new socialists, the appointed President Joe Biden, has called for “revolutionary, institutional changes” to citizens’ concept of self-rule. He used an Independence Day to proclaim he would “rip the roots of systemic racism out of this country.” He’s also pledged an “end to the era of shareholder capitalism.”
The war to undo the Constitutional order has been joined publicly by a new danger. The tech and financial oligarchs and the international business class have begun an aggressive crusade in concert with the media-entertainment complex to tear apart the Bill of Rights. Already they are redefining and restricting free speech and what are permissible points of view. High tech will be the censor, and the financial community has already begun denying access to financial services to those who won’t live with the new ways and ideas. (Following the model of the Chinese communists and their “Social Credit” system.)
These tech and financial oligarchs have purchased access to the democratic process and gained ungoverned power by paying off Washington’s administrative and political operations, whose corruption – on both sides of the aisle – now rivals ancient Rome’s.
The two political parties, big business, and the media, not all that long ago, shared a responsibility to protect the nation’s best interests and the well-being of its citizens. There were differences in how to accomplish that, but the goal was the same.
However, now the Democrat Socialists and the international business class, joined by the oligarchs, have abandoned any allegiance to the American experiment. They are intent on marrying the United States off to the global order.
They are plainly and unambiguously at war with the very country that gave them the privilege of great wealth.
The Wuhan pandemic has already demonstrated how eager the political class is to seize unchallenged authority, even if it has to set aside the science that it proclaims to be the new God, to further its agenda for the new order. Again, the left’s befuddled spokesman, Joe Biden, called the virus “an incredible opportunity [to] transform the country.”
Notice the words that are no longer in the radical left’s lexicon; freedom and liberty, personal responsibility, civic virtue, freedom of speech, association, religious liberty, personal goodness, or public righteousness. Words that only a decade ago still peppered the public discourse have vanished. Even the national media, whom one would think have a vested interest in freedom of speech and thought, have fallen silent. The words are aliens in a political wilderness.
The venerated symbols of the Republic and its struggle to “form a more perfect Union” are now the focus of attack and ridicule by self-proclaimed socialists and Marxists. They scream obscenities, loot, and burn down the same nation that tolerates their insane rants and even encourages them.
It seems simple. Before us is a choice. How, then, should we live? Are we going to be free men and women, living under the protection of the rule of law and the Bill of Rights, or shall we succumb to the siren song of utopians – and abandon liberty forever? No one from either party will do this for us. We will do it, or it won’t be done.
