The most remarkable aspect of the American Revolution is how ordinary — even mundane — the initial grievances were that drove our founders to rebel and form a new government.
The level of government control over our lives today, even in the freest parts of the country, is tyrannically officious compared with the reach King George III wielded over the colonists in the early 1770s. That solemn thought should infuse our celebrations with a fiery dedication to reconstitute what is rightfully ours.
We have failed to ‘keep’ the republic the founders bequeathed to us.
Yet even as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, most self-identified patriots will not contemplate pledging “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” — or even using the constitutional tools still available to rectify today’s “long train of abuses and usurpations.”
How hollow will this anniversary ring if we celebrate a document we ignore when its moral logic applies more urgently now than when Thomas Jefferson’s mighty pen etched the shot heard ’round the world?
Tragically, 250 years after declaring independence from a monarch, we have embraced the “elective despotism” Jefferson feared. We have allowed every sector of our economy to be distorted, manipulated, and monopolized by government and its allies. We have allowed them to surveil and track our lives. We have allowed them to transform our demographics and culture. We have even allowed unelected judges to hand out citizenship to invaders.
In short, we have failed to “keep” the republic the founders bequeathed to us.
All we have left is the flickering ember of the spirit of 1776 still burning within a significant minority. From that ember, we must rebuild, reconstitute, or chart a new path.
But the threat no longer resides across an ocean. It is embedded in our law, culture, government, body politic, and economy. So we are left with a critical question: Do we still possess the wherewithal — or even the desire — to “provide new Guards for [our] future security”?
Or will we continue to suffer while evils remain sufferable until the burden becomes impossible to bear and impossible to defeat?
Elective despotism replaced monarchy
How did we reach a point at which nearly every aspect of the Constitution has been abrogated, except for those clauses debased by courts and political elites to prevent the public from repairing the very holes they tore in our social compact?
George Washington foresaw the danger in the republic’s earliest days. In his farewell address, he warned that political parties would turn public policy into “the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction” rather than the “organ of consistent and wholesome plans.”
Instead of political branches and layers of federalism checking one another, we got unified divisions through political parties owned by special interests rather than by the common good.
Jefferson warned Madison that “factions get possession of the public councils,” that bribery corrupts them, and that personal interests lead them away from the general interests of their constituents.
The modern dysfunction crystallized in the decades after World War II. Fueled by the expansion of the administrative state, the growth of welfare dependency, and cultural balkanization, both parties reoriented themselves toward monied donors and specialized factions at the expense of the nation.
Despite the manufactured theater of division between liberals and conservatives, the true divide lies between the bipartisan donor class — allied on most critical issues — and the everyday citizens they govern.
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Ordinary citizens can rarely reach real governing power in meaningful numbers. Winning requires war chests of cash, which are readily available only to those willing to serve special interests.
Today, a single congressional district contains roughly 761,000 people, far more than any individual colony in 1776. Even state Senate races in large states routinely exceed $1 million in campaign expenditures. Running for governor, senator, or president requires astronomical resources. Candidates are forced into an insatiable quest for campaign funds, making them reliant on the forces undermining the common cause.
With rare exceptions, our political system is bought and paid for by narrow donor interests. We pride ourselves on holding free elections, but our actual choices are often scarcely more divergent than those found in openly totalitarian regimes.
Madison’s warning in Federalist No. 10 was prophetic: “Men of factious tempers … or of sinister designs” may “first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”
Our modern factions have effectively merged into a monopolistic cartel. We now suffer the disadvantages of a small, easily corrupted republic without the dilution and accommodation Madison hoped would temper faction in an extended republic.
The result is a breakdown of representative government.
Grievances worse than 1776
What has this half-century duopoly wrought?
We now have government-created monopolies in every major industry, from tech and medicine to food and banking. This tyranny largely operates on autopilot. It is decentralized and largely unaffected by elections. It is embedded in crony capitalism — a form of “private” venture socialism that evades our laws, corrupts public policy, and monopolizes the capital required to win office.
Meanwhile, we have a government surveillance state strong enough to monitor, deter, and punish those who organize against its tyranny but somehow too weak to confront violent crime, open borders, Antifa communists, and the threat of Islam.
Anarcho-tyranny at its finest.
Rather than the legislature predominating, as Madison envisioned, we are ruled by an unelected judiciary that has been wrongly accorded the status of final arbiter over every constitutional, political, and social question.
Even if citizens in deep-red states successfully navigate the political process, unelected federal judges claim final authority over every political question, including whether the children of illegal invaders are citizens. And while those judges are nowhere to be found when authentic constitutional rights are violated — remember COVID? — they swoop in whenever states try to interpose against federal tyranny or address illegal immigration.
The grievances against the king cannot hold a candle to the 10-alarm fire we face today.
The grievances against the king cannot hold a candle to the 10-alarm fire we face today. Our modern tyranny is more encompassing and embedded within our own institutions, wielding more power than a distant monarch ever could.
John Adams warned us to “nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud.” Responding to the claim that he was stirring up rebellion over a threepence tax on tea, Adams insisted that “Obsta principiis” — resisting beginnings — was the only maxim that could preserve liberty.
He understood that tyranny grows like a cancer. When the people give way, he warned, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast” that later resistance becomes impossible. Corruption grows, dependents multiply, and “virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality” become objects of ridicule.
That is precisely the corruption that has consumed our demographics, government, legal system, and economy. Worse, it has hollowed out the people’s desire to resist.
Patrick Henry warned of the fatal consequences of acting too late. “It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope,” he said, but he wanted to know “the whole truth” and “the worst” so he could provide for it.
He pressed the urgency: “When shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year?” Would the people gain strength “by irresolution and inaction,” or by “hugging the delusive phantom of hope”?
God blessed the founders’ bold preemptive strike on tyranny while they still had power. With it, they built a prosperous and just civilization.
As late as the 150th anniversary, Calvin Coolidge could boast that despite “the welter of partisan politics,” Americans could still turn to the Declaration and Constitution with confidence that those “great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken.”
A century later, after at least 50 years of duplicitous leadership and feckless controlled opposition, we find ourselves inside Henry’s nightmare. We are rapidly losing both the resolve and the practical ability to resist.
So what do we do now, years too late and trillions of dollars short?
Nonresistance is slavish
The most vexing question of our time is this: How do we morally and practically apply the Declaration’s principle of the right to revolution in the modern era?
We extol the famous lines about inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We praise government by consent of the governed. But what happens when a citizenry suffers radical social transformation without representation — a transformation that inhibits life, liberty, and property in a way that would make King George blush?
We often gloss over the Declaration’s central justification for revolution: When faced with a “long train of abuses and usurpations,” the people have the right and duty “to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
To the founders, this was not metaphor. The Maryland Declaration of Rights stated plainly: “The doctrine of non-resistance, against arbitrary power and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive.”
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Yet this doctrine of nonresistance is precisely the posture the modern political right has adopted. Part of this stems from an ethos that venerates law and order and opposes political violence. Part is practical calculation in an age when even local governments possess coercive force beyond what entire armies wielded in the 1770s.
No rational citizen wants violent rebellion or hot civil war. But we cannot even muster a unified vision among Republican leaders for peaceful resistance to unconstitutional laws, policies, and court orders.
Where are the local officials with the spine to refuse enforcement? Where are the state leaders willing to interpose on behalf of their constituents? Need we be reminded of the COVID mandates? How does that overreach compare with the relatively ethereal touch of King George?
Voting Republican every two years, trapped in a perpetual political Groundhog Day while remaining passive in between, will not save the republic. Such complacency is a betrayal of the people and principles we claim to celebrate.
Madison’s final hope
Had the founders established a single consolidated national government, we would be out of time and options. At this late hour, after Adams’ “shoots” of arbitrary power have matured into thickets of tyranny, it is virtually impossible to abolish a centralized leviathan so powerful amid a deeply balkanized population.
Yet one bulwark remains: Madison’s federalist design.
The structural defenses are badly weakened. Nevertheless, we still have 50 state governments and thousands of layered county and local jurisdictions that retain sovereign authority. In a substantial portion of America — perhaps 40% — these jurisdictions are populated by strong majorities who still have the principles of 1776 pulsing through their veins.
If we consistently elected representatives in these regions who reflected the people’s will — treating leaders like Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis as the bare-minimum standard rather than as an anomaly — we could use the 10th Amendment and state institutions to interpose on behalf of the people.
Red-state America, or at least defiant pockets within it, can become the last “asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty,” as Samuel Adams envisioned after the signing of the Declaration.
Isolated citizens acting alone cannot topple systemic tyranny. But if the people reclaim control over one state government, and then a few more, those sovereign institutions can become the shield necessary to resist.
Party conventions can beat elective despotism
None of this will happen under our current electoral system.
No prominent Democrats share our values, and no more than 10% of Republicans share them and are willing to fight for them. That percentage shrinks the higher one climbs the political ladder.
This returns us to elective despotism. The only viable way to reach voters under the current system is through torrents of cash, supplied by the venture-socialist interests subverting our government, society, and economy.
That brings us to a pragmatic solution: the state party convention system.
Ironically, we can weaponize the party apparatus — one of the mechanisms that fueled this crisis — to dismantle it. Changing the general election system would require near-impossible constitutional reform. But the process for nominating candidates is governed by private party rules.
In more than 40% of the country, the Republican nominee is virtually guaranteed to win the general election. The problem is that GOP nominees are often corrupted by the establishment. In direct primaries, the corrupted candidates with enough money win 95% of the time.
But who says we must hold primaries?
Red-state America, or at least defiant pockets within it, can become the last ‘asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.’
Unlike easily manipulated mass-primary voters, Utah’s convention delegates, while imperfect, are vastly more discerning. They frequently disregard establishment financial advantages and support underdogs over entrenched incumbents. Unfortunately, figures like Mitt Romney maneuvered to gut the convention as the final determinant of nominees in Utah.
Imagine if every red state selected candidates exclusively by convention. It would instantly neutralize the donor class. No amount of special-interest cash could force a thousand informed grassroots delegates to unsee a candidate’s weak record.
Even if a compromised candidate secured the nomination once, he would be kept on a short leash, knowing he would face those same delegates again.
Victory would require convincing 1,000 principled activists rather than raising $5 million — or $100 million in statewide Texas races — for mass television buys. That would spark grassroots candidate recruitment from the very leaders we have ignored: smart, godly men with the tenacity to understand the times but without the money to present themselves in a high-cost direct primary.
Critics may dismiss conventions as smoke-filled rooms. But each delegate is elected at a neighborhood precinct meeting of registered local Republicans. This is hyper-local, decentralized civic engagement — exactly the type of organizing our founders modeled through Committees of Correspondence.
In an era of financial and institutional monopolies, this remains the most viable path to electing a critical mass of patriots in red America within one or two cycles.
Interposition is your friend
Once we establish a mechanism to elect real patriots and reclaim state sovereignty, we must use the doctrine of the lesser magistrate to interpose against external tyranny.
The founders did not fail to imagine federal usurpation. They failed to imagine that all 50 states would genuflect to it like servile puppy dogs.
A rogue district judge ruling? An unconstitutional presidential order? Even a law of Congress? The founders never doubted that states, pressed by homogeneous populations united under a common cause, would refuse to comply.
Even Alexander Hamilton, the great champion of national power, recognized limits. In Federalist No. 33, he wrote that federal acts “NOT PURSUANT” to constitutional powers are “merely acts of usurpation” and “deserve to be treated as such.”
The founders fought a bloody war to create a federalist system so we would not have to. If we asserted the constitutional authority already vested in the states, we could neutralize many tyrannical policies without firing a shot.
That requires reforming nominations, electing leaders with clear marching orders, and finally translating rhetoric into action when faced with unconstitutional mandates.
Naturally, once patriots secure governing control in red regions, they should not rule capriciously, unmoored from constitutional restraint like the French Revolution. But patriot leaders must understand that the Constitution cannot become a one-way street or a suicide pact.
We want to preserve constitutional order. We have no obligation to preserve the usurpations of the other side. Nor must we “amend the Constitution” to reverse decades of unconstitutional laws, policies, and court opinions.
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Immigration offers the clearest example. The only reason we have so many illegal aliens is that the government has violated the immigration laws passed by Congress. Much third-world legal immigration also arose from visa-program abuses not pursuant to law.
The federal government does not get to violate state sovereignty and then insist that states cannot enforce their sovereignty. Strong red states should reclaim control over immigration, remove illegal aliens, and bar employment in visa categories that have been abused, including H-1B.
The same principle applies to the ravaging of red-state lands. Corporate takeovers of farms and ranches through wind, solar, and data centers exist because of government favors. Although conservatives generally oppose heavy-handed regulation, states have a right of self-defense and may use regulatory power to stop takeovers created by government distortion.
The Constitution cannot be treated as strong enough to prevent us from rectifying grievances but too weak to stop the violations that created them.
Where is our modern ‘Common Sense’?
How do we fortify elected officials with the composure and courage to interpose and protect red-state economies, cultures, and quality of life?
We cannot expect one or two courageous leaders to go out on a limb without support from the people. Contrary to the right’s obsession with celebrity saviors, Hillary Clinton was partly correct: It takes a village.
During the Revolution, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and the Boston Gazette helped galvanize colonists into a revolutionary mindset. They helped the people support local patriots over the British.
Where is our Thomas Paine?
The good news is that the internet allows almost anyone to become one. National politics is saturated with commentary, much of it empty calories. But an ordinary patriot can gain prominence locally by doggedly covering state and local issues and officials.
In less populous parts of the country, focused media attention on wayward local officials and praise for patriotic initiatives can build support for the institutional and party changes we need to party in 2026 like it’s 1776.
The public must be activated to treat every day like Election Day. We need a permanent activist class, akin to the Sons of Liberty, willing to create political kill zones for anti-American policies in red America.
We have more guns than ever and fewer liberties than ever.
Day after day, pressure must champion social and economic policies aligned with our founding principles and root out leaders who betray them.
Benjamin Rush understood the power of media. A newspaper in the present crisis, he wrote, would be “equal to at least two regiments.”
Today, we need high-quality, hyper-focused patriot media to awaken red America. Our mission must be to evangelize those who already claim to be patriots but remain passive on the sidelines — and turn them into active reformers.
Preaching to the choir is exactly what we need, so long as it produces revolutionary-minded activism rather than the political fentanyl ravaging conservative media.
Declare independence from federal subsidies
True fortitude requires declaring independence from an abusive relationship. The greatest reason red-state politicians and policies fail to reflect their majority culture is that state governments are addicted to federal funds.
The most dangerous place in government is between a Republican politician and his federal grant.
Whether the issue is Medicaid, education, energy, or environmental grants, follow the money if you want to understand why liberal policies such as solar and wind land-grabs are pervasive across red America despite public opposition.
The people and their leaders must say no to federal funds as fiercely as they say no to unconstitutional mandates and rogue judicial rulings.
You cannot achieve political independence without severing the financial ties that bind you to the mother ship. You cannot enjoy independence from the queen bee’s stinger if you crave dependence on its honey.
Make militias great again
Many conservative Baby Boomers boast that their arsenals of expensive pistols and AR rifles will neutralize tyranny. Yet we have more guns than ever and fewer liberties than ever.
I am not disparaging the Second Amendment. But in its current individualized application, it no longer functions as “the true palladium of liberty,” as St. George Tucker described.
Even a small local law enforcement agency has more firepower, surveillance capacity, and legal authority than any individual citizen can realistically confront. Ask January 6 defendants who did little more than walk into a public building after barriers were removed. Despite whatever firearms they owned at home, they were dragged out by FBI SWAT teams. No one was there to help.
We should not ignore the Second Amendment. We must rediscover its forgotten clause.
Because we spent decades convincing the legal system that self-defense is an individual right — not solely the right of a state-sanctioned militia — we forgot the importance of the militia clause itself.
It is time to make militias great again.
Not ragtag armed hobbyists in the woods, easily infiltrated by federal agents. Rather, as part of red-state and county interposition, we must bring the militia under color of law.
Former Pinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Mark Lamb had the right idea with a pilot “citizens’ posse” to train local patriots as adjuncts to deputies. Ostensibly, the purpose was to protect the community against anarchy and natural disasters. But it also buttresses the doctrine of the lesser magistrate.
By syncing local officials, law enforcement, and the populace under a common cause, the community builds a legally sanctioned shield against tyranny.
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If federal or state government installs unconstitutional surveillance cameras, a local militia backed by law enforcement could protect citizens who dismantle them and enforce local laws against such intrusions.
If a future Democrat president deploys the FBI to arrest political opponents for speech or beliefs, a local militia operating under the sheriff and county officials could ensure that the FBI is not welcome.
Democrats effectively did this in Minneapolis against ICE, uniting citizen groups, local law enforcement, judges, and elected officials against a legitimate federal power. Why should we shy away from using the same unified prescription to protect fundamental American rights against illegitimate federal power?
Make Exodus 18:21 leadership great again
Leaders who cheat on spouses and families will not remain loyal to constituents. Nor will God bless a morally bankrupt movement with success.
Over the past decade, the alleged patriot right has become saturated with figures who espouse biblical virtue on camera while privately living lives often more debauched than those of the secular left. I have lost track of how many Republican officials, candidates, and influencers have engaged in rampant fornication — and even paid for concubines to get abortions.
Part of the reason we are losing ground on cultural issues is that centrist suburban voters look at the GOP, see through the artificial posturing, and recognize that the private behavior of these leaders contradicts the family and biblical values they preach.
The founders were not perfect men. Neither were their movements free from sin. But we must at least return to a standard that seeks virtuous leaders.
Exodus 18:21 tells us to choose “capable men … who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain.”
John Adams understood this. “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private [virtue].”
Consider our issues today: free and fair markets, sovereignty, ordered liberty, security from crime and Islam, medical freedom, techno-feudalism, life, marriage, privacy. All the special-interest money stands on the other side. Every political temptation will break conservative promises unless leaders have virtue.
Electing transactional fornicators is the surest path to enacting tyranny under the banner of patriotism.
The status quo is not an option. If we fail to innovate aggressively and reconstitute the spirit of the American Revolution in a way that morally and practically confronts today’s tyranny, the remaining options will be dark enough to make the French Revolution look mild.
Let’s choose light, and do it on our own terms, as the founders did.
Our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor must mean something again.
