Securing Your Freedom
Which one of your human and civil rights are you willing to cash in for the promise of enhanced security?

If thinking about human rights from the American perspective isn’t too radical for you, consider Mr. Jefferson’s approach in the Declaration.  He said government is a social institution created to preserve natural rights.  Government’s whole reason to exist is to make sure you and I are able to live freely.

Not to implement social justice (whatever that means right now).  Not to manage economic outcomes.  Not to perform grand social experiments with people’s lives.  Not to superintend healthcare, manufacturing, shipping, coal processing, light bulbs, soft drinks, or school lunches.  But simply to preserve everyone’s rights as human beings.

If government came with instructions, they’d read something like: “Apply equally to all citizens to preserve their rights and freedoms.  Any misuse may cause severe hardship or death.”

That misuse we recognize as oppression, abuse of power, and dictatorship. Or – it’s only a “necessary trade-off between privacy and security” when you’re a bureaucrat exercising unelected authority over other people.

Rights Versus Rights
What happens when two rights, or two freedoms, appear to be at odds?

Yelling “fire” in a crowded room is illegal because it could cause people to get injured in the rush to escape.  To protect the right to Life, the right to Free Speech is constrained. But – where does this restraining of rights for safety ever end?  Is the right to Life so overwhelming that all other rights are ultimately doomed?

Allowing the government to determine, without recourse, which of our rights they will set aside for our security, is self-evidently dangerous.  The government could simply outlaw civil liberties altogether, which is what happens under totalitarian fascism such as North Korea.

The burden of proof for reducing any human or civil right must be completely on the government.  The default position in America is supposed to be maximum freedom applied equally to all.  The government would have to prove beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt that the need to curtail a single liberty is genuine, urgent, and imminent – and only so as to preserve another human right.

Otherwise – it’s not rights versus rights.  It’s freedom versus tyranny.

A Policeman On Every Corner
In California, it’s a misdemeanor offense punishable by a $1000 fine to throw a football or Frisbee on the beach.  The rationale: public safety.

The EPA has become synonymous with federal over-regulation.  From usurping states’ rights at a record pace, to regulating rainwater as a pollutant, the EPA seeks unlimited authority to micro-manage the entire natural world, affecting all aspects of production, farming, and commerce, as well as consumer purchases, travel, and residential property rights.  The rationale: public safety.

Police cameras on stoplights.  Traffic cameras tracking your movements across multiple jurisdictions. Police wearing hidden cameras. Surveillance cameras flying on drones. The rationale for eviscerating the 4th Amendment: public safety.

The NSA capturing and storing all internet activity worldwide, including: the subject, to/from addresses, contents, and attachments of all emails sent and received; internet keyword searches; websites viewed; passwords; and all other data transmissions.  The rationale: public safety.

How far into your life, your freedom, your private property, your information, your computer, your family, the car you drive, the water you drink, and the air you breathe, should a social institution go to provide you with protection?

At what point since Jefferson declared his independence from “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States” in 1776, did it cost us our very lives and our souls for the government to protect us from such omnipresent, omnipotent dangers – whether real or invented?

This is not a nation preserving its rights and freedoms.  This is a nation strangled by overprotection.

The President From Hell
As the political pendulum swings on its own weight – left to right, right to left – what would stop a future Republican President from using and abusing the same tools of power, coercion, and cronyism that President Obama has used for political advantage … against liberals?

NOTHING!

Say someone campaigns as a post-partisan reformer – but secretly plans on putting Democrats in re-education camps.  Or…it’s the President’s first day in the Oval Office, when an excitable intern slips a mega-dose of mind-altering hallucinogens into the President’s coffee.  For eight years he thinks he’s the reincarnation of Genghis Khan trying to wipe liberals off the planet.  He changes his name to President Khan, and grows a burly Fu Manchu moustache.

This psychotic – but charismatic and remarkably photogenic – warlord picks up some moves from President Obama’s playbook, and begins to systematically annihilate the Left…

The Wrath of Khan
Democrat Businesses Raided By FBI
August 1

In another instance of President Khan’s “social justice campaign,” armed agents from the FBI and EPA jointly conducted a military-style raid of a solar panel manufacturer in California this morning.  The factory located in Loma Linda was shut down for 5 hours while federal agents removed two tons of inventory, though no warrant was presented during the raid.

An FBI spokesman described the raid as “routine regulatory oversight,” but Democrat Senators are calling it an “outrage” and “partisan intimidation during an election year.”  Profit losses to the company, owned by a prominent Democrat campaign bundler, are estimated at over $6 million.  This is the third federal raid of an environmental company this month.

We Saw What You Did
NSA Spying on Colleges
March 13

Federal agents in the National Security Administration (NSA) have admitted to remotely activating tens of thousands of college students’ web cameras without their knowledge, in addition to reading the contents of their emails, resulting in over 3,500 arrests of liberal students and professors due to “anti-American, Communist, or disloyal statements.”  Cited as a continuation of the Bush Patriot Act and the Obama PRISM program, the Attorney General stated, “Americans have come to expect a necessary trade-off between privacy and security in the digital age.  If people truly objected to federal agents reading their emails, they would have said something years ago when Obama launched his internet surveillance.  They didn’t, and so here we are.”

War of Ideas
‘Fast and Delirious’ Sold Arsenal to Conservatives, Denied Liberals
Oct. 15

The federal gun tracking operation Fast and Delirious has been selling military weapons to conservatives for the last two years.  An anonymous White House aide stated today, “We’re talking upwards of five hundred thousand people.  My thinking is – and this is just me – What the hell is anybody gonna do about it?  That’s a TON of people!  And he’s the Commander-in-Chief.”

Federal law prohibits the sale of military weapons to civilians.  The contraband sold under Fast and Delirious includes fully automatic machine guns, Kevlar body armor, tear gas, rocket launchers, grenades, night vision goggles, as well as tanks, armor-plated Humvees, and a Blackhawk helicopter.

The White House Press Secretary responded to some fast and furious questioning, “The President thoughtfully determined that because President Obama had given billions of hollow-point rounds to non-military agencies, such as the IRS and Social Security, it was time to spread the wealth around.”

Meanwhile, every liberal who submitted a background check for firearms during the last two years has been denied.

Worst Case Scenario
So what?  Everybody votes.  One side wins, and gets to be in charge.  The government is targeting those nutjobs?  Why care about them?

Because there are no “conservative rights” or “liberal rights.”  There are only human rights.

When government uses its resources to target people, politics mean absolutely nothing; the REAL target is you!  The victim is your human rights.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said as much – “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  Those are your rights they’re trampling, just as much as mine.

Defending any target of government abuse is defending yourself.  Power trippers won’t care who you voted for when you get in their way.  Until eventually, there is no policy debate.

Worst case.