Right now, I am listening to Tom Woods at the first Campaign for Liberty regional conference in St Louis. They think we're terrorists here. A report recently released by the Missouri Information Analysis Center equates Ron Paul supporters, tax resistors, militia members, and flyers of the Gadsden flag as “terrorists.”
According to Merriam-Webster, terrorism is “ the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.” It also defines terror as “a state of intense fear.” The definition that I learned in school is even more specific: the threat or use of violence to incite fear by non-state actors to influence the actions or policies of governments.”
So terrorism can go two ways in directing its threat or use of violence, by either terrorizing a population or terrorizing the government directly. The moral choice is to attack the transgressors of individual rights, the violators of the peace, and the organized criminals that are always to be found within the government, and not in the general population. What more righteous cause could there be than to strike fear into the hearts of those who think and act like they can control by force the lives of others?
As a political movement, we are calling out the abusers of power, the tramplers of the Constitution, the servants and lackeys of the truly powerful, and we want them to be afraid! We want them to be afraid first because we are a political force. We are young, we are strong, we are calling for no less than a revolution, and we are not going anywhere until we get it!
The revolution that we speak of is a revolution of values, a paradigm shift, and a renewed commitment among the American people to patriotism, not loyalism. Our patriotism is resisting state power and being ever-ready to defend this country . . . from the government. This is in direct opposition to the current propaganda driven definition that has perverted patriotism into loyalism, the worship of power and authority and willingness to cede the rights of self-ownership to an external power that is the source of all unjust powers in the world. As a political force, they should fear us.
The core of our philosophy is non-aggression, but we do not cede the right to self-defense and collective self-defense. As Judge Napolitano said here just last night, “The dirty little secret about the second amendment, is that it was written that way so that you could shoot at the government!” The assertion of the human right, the natural right, or God-given right, to keep and bear arms is the utmost manifestation of that old rallying cry, “POWER TO THE PEOPLE!”
Thomas Jefferson said, “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” We live in an era of uncanny increases in tyranny in the United States and never has it been more important, despite the heightened difficulty, to assert the right to keep and bear arms. John F. Kennedy astutely observed, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
To go back to Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Make no mistake, the first blood of this era's revolution has already been spilled. The victims of a violent statism are all around us. We are far from ruling out the possibility of peaceful revolution, but we bring that same commitment that our founders did to today's cause of liberty, and if you would use the force of government to trample the rights of others, you should be very, very afraid!
If you want to be respected as an individual, if you want to respect the rights of others, you have nothing to fear. If you believe that our government is no longer serving the people, join us. As a member of this movement I am fighting for no less than the highest values of humanity that this country was founded on. That makes me a patriot. Some of us found out the hard way that the greatest enemies of the Constitution that I celebrate only as a means of restraining government power, are not to be found in the sands of some far off land, but rather right here at home. We know who our common enemies really are, and I want them to be scared. So I guess that makes me a terrorist. I am a domestic terrorist for freedom!
