If there is a single principle upon which a Republic must remain moored to, it is virtue. For without virtue, corruption leverages the liberties endowed to the people, and tyranny cannot be far behind. A society that loses its mandate for the truth is on the path to losing its moral compass. A Constitutional Republic believes that while people are corruptible, and must be constrained by codified laws, that society will retain enough virtue to ensure that the law remains supreme to everyone.
Has America now lost that mooring? The reality is that if we have not, then clearly the nation is far too close to that sinister destination for anyone to feel comfortable. The individual evidence is mounting and egregious.
Large groups move freely and operate openly despite promoting, funding, and even organizing mass violent demonstrations, complete with orchestrated national movement of hired thugs paid to loot, vandalize, attack, and commit arson on large scale. Municipal leaders act like nothing but peaceful assembly is taking place even as square blocks of once valuable real estate is burned to the ground, business owners are attacked and often murdered for trying to defend their basic liberties, and where people even defending their private homes are indicted for fraudulent crimes even as the actual criminals go without arrest, much less indictment.
That is bad enough.
Compound that issue with politicians now feeling so emboldened by a corrupt media, that they believe it good election strategy to actually tell the people that they do not have a right to know where a candidate stands on an issue, an issue so vital that, once enacted, would fundamentally alter the basic structure of our three branches of government, established under our Constitution. Joe Biden brazenly said that the people have no right to know ahead of the election his intention to pack the Supreme Court should he be elected President.
Regardless of Biden's shockingly corrupt answer, the reality is the people have more than just a right to hear an honest answer to that question, they have a moral need to that answer. Recognizing the shocking corruption of those initial answers, he attempted to skirt the issue in a recent town hall, but one doesn't indicate a change of heart with a halfhearted reconsideration.
Moreover, it is lunacy when that same candidate then launches a deflection, trying to claim that it is court packing when a President executes his written Article II powers to appoint a nominee to fill a currently vacant Supreme Court seat. When the media refuses to condemn such subterfuge, it further reveals the sickness that afflicts it.
Another example emerged soon after, when the New York Post released a bombshell article, stating that it obtained email that tended to show a meeting had taken place between then Vice-President Joe Biden and the #2 executive of Burisma, the company that hired Biden's son to a coveted board position. A year prior, Biden claimed multiple times he knew nothing of his son's work on that board, nor interceded on that company's behalf. It was a clear denial of a troubling set of circumstances. Yet, the response of social media was to censor and restrict the publication to links to that newspaper article, including censoring the contribution of one of the New York Post's senior editors. ABC News and CNN both has totally ignored the story, adding to the already considerable evidence that American journalism is a moribund industry, bereft of its core duty to check on powerful people and keep the people accurately informed.
It doesn't matter what the goals and the interests of the media may be. It doesn't matter what the goals and the interests of the politicians may be. When seeking the truth no longer matters, self-destruction of a Republic is not far behind. The sign posts to destruction further dot the roadway.
We have a federal judge who has defied common sense, and moral adherence to the law, by refusing to dismiss a case where the federal prosecution has formally withdrawn its legal complaint against the plaintiff. Whatever the plaintiff, Michael Flynn, may have done, and even if he was, or was not, the victim of a terrible government injustice, the truth is that when the government withdraws the complaint, the court is not given latitude to prosecute the case by its lonesome. When a three-judge appeals court affirmed that obvious truth, the federal district judge ignored the ruling, and instead chose to challenge it to the entire appeals court. At that point, the case against Flynn ceased to be a pursuit of justice, and has now morphed into a witch hunt, devoid of reason or morality.
No matter how this election in a few weeks turns out, the reality is that slightly less than half, or slightly more than half, of the voting public will be fine with endorsing the sick tactics of the current Democrat party, and their media allies. They will vote for policies that look more like something Vladimir Lenin might write, than anything an American political party would have written.
We must restore truth to our society. It starts with taking back our education system from leftists who abuse their positions to indoctrinate vice educate. Then, we must restore truth to the media, replacing the partisan hacks with objectively minded and uncompromising journalists, who accepts first and foremost their sacred duty to hold all people in power to public accountability. Lying to protect a single individual without social power is amoral. Lying to protect someone with great public power is a moral outrage that threatens our nation.
The demand for changes, and also the demand for accountability for these public sins, must powerfully originate from the people. We obtain the government that the majority of the people deserve, and sadly even those who principally work against it might suffer the worst for having seen it come to power. Benjamin Franklin famously said, "That democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. Liberty is the sheep contesting the vote." His point is that Constitutional liberties are above a simple majority referendum.
Our system establishes that to amend the Constitution, in all its forms, requires a super majority vote in both chambers of Congress, a Presidential ratification, and an affirmative vote by three quarters of all the state legislatures. That is currently at least 38 states in approval. Alternatively, a states convention can vote by two-thirds margin an amendment, where it then goes directly to the state legislatures, requiring the necessary three-quarters endorsement. It's a very tall hurdle for a reason, and its no mere accident that ultimately the states decide whether the amendment passes, or is rejected. It's out of the hands ultimately of even the current federal government. Our liberties are not subject to a simple democratic vote, as such can be the pathway to tyranny. So, we cannot idly tolerate subterfuge to undermine those liberties, without even the decency to try to do it in accordance with Article V requirements.
Ultimately, if the institutions designed to protect the Constitution fail, and those sworn in office to uphold the Constitution utterly betray those oaths, then the people have to make the decision. When does defense of liberty require war? Such terrible decisions have been made by principled people in the past, all across the globe. Some efforts have worked to vanquish evil, and others have failed, and further entrenched the evil that was emerging. Such outcomes are never certain, nor should anyone feel comfortable with the path of such a decision.
Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty, or give me death." It doesn't get clearer than that. The sad truth is not since 1861 has America stood closer to the brink of civil war than it finds itself at today. Evil has taken more than a root. It has sunk itself deep and wide into our important social institutions, and sadly, ripping the roots out will leave deep scars, that may take generations to heal, if they ever do. Worse yet, evil may come to destroy this Constitutional Republic of ours, especially if we the people facilitate it through ignorance, apathy, or malice.
-- Ken Stallings
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