On The Nominating Conventions

When I think back to Patrick Henry shouting "give me liberty or give me death"; to Benjamin Franklin observing that people who trade security for liberty deserve neither; to Thomas Jefferson telling the greatest empire on Earth to go screw itself; to those brilliant men who hunkered down in Philadelphia to outline a federal government of limited powers . . . and then I watch the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions, I want to throw up.

Neither assembly of trolls (these are not men) calls into doubt the illicit mega-state that is invading the world, regulating every move we make, drowning us under waves of debt, and refusing to police the borders against foreign invasion.  Running throughout both sides' proceedings is the mistaken and un-American presumption that government should curtail liberty to preserve security and prosperity.  The parties differ over details but stand united on their totalitarian premises.  Republicans are noxious because they tout themselves as the party of personal responsibility and limited government, while simultaneously championing military aggression abroad and the Panopticon police state at home.  Democrats are honest, I will grant them that, but I have never seen a bigger collection of losers and misfits except in a prison (and let us recall that Democrats staunchly favor allowing felons to vote, so the similarity is no coincidence).  To the modern Democrat victimhood is heroism; virtue is vice; vice is virtue; government handouts are "rights"; tax cuts that allow us to keep more of our own money are "giveaways"; and government is synonymous with America, echoing Mussolini's dictum "everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

If this sorry spectacle resonates with most Americans, then they are anything but.  Real Americans are turning away from it because we know this is not what made America great, and it's certainly not what will preserve America for the future.  A growing number of us refuse to vote and thus bestow legitimacy on unlawful and immoral activity, while many others will vote third party.  Dissent, disobedience, and resistance are healthy American traditions that have not died out just yet, and for that I am thankful.