Though we long hoped it would never come this time, it has, in fact, come. The reasonable and respectable avenues of normal polity have been cut-off from us. We face an illegitimate, revolutionary and detestable democracy where our constitutional republic belongs. The task of reformation now falls to the only office in the land capable of carrying it forward: the President.
Text Version:
“We come now to the heart of the matter. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are not one document, but two distinct blueprints befitting their individual moments: one as the oppressed underdog, the other as the victor and founder; distinct, yet both inexorably rooted in the same transcendent ethic.
One is for the ordinary conduct of civil government in times of relative peace – that normal polity for which managers, not revolutionaries, ought to claim the right to govern. The other is for those times when the body politic is under threat, from within or from without, and it draws on the ethics of Appealing to Heaven for deliverance from worldly tyrants. It is a “break glass in emergency” function of legitimate authority being withdrawn by the people for the reestablishment or reformation of good civil order and peace. Note, here, that no “peace” exists under tyranny – it is not the people breaking the glass that ended the peace, but the actions of the tyrant to void your defenses toward overturning your right to live according to God’s design. The founders designed them this way on purpose. They knew that normal politics would not always be enough. They found themselves in this very position – a faraway tyrant overthrew the established self-government they enjoyed for generations on a whim and sought to bring them under a form of slavery.
The founders knew that there would be moments when the entire system would fracture, and something stronger would be required than words on paper.
The Declaration of Independence is the revolutionary blueprint. It is the warrant for rupture. It begins with an appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It declares that men are “endowed by their Creator” with certain unalienable rights. It subordinates every human magistrate to a higher, transcendent law. No king, no parliament, no court, no president stands above this law. When government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. This is not mere rhetoric. The founders meant it literally. They spilled barrels of blood into this earth – not just for themselves, but that their posterity might not be unduly imposed upon from abroad. They pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to it.
The Constitution, by contrast, is the blueprint for ordinary polity. It sets up the mechanisms for day-to-day governance: elections, legislation, courts, checks and balances. It includes explicit tools for maintaining order. The Tenth Amendment reserves powers to the states and the people. Article IV, Section 4 guarantees every state a republican form of government and protection against invasion and domestic violence. The Insurrection Act, passed in eighteen oh seven and rooted in Article II, gives the president authority to use military force to suppress rebellion or enforce federal law.
But the founders also built in implicit and explicit warrants for fracture and reformation. The preamble speaks of securing the blessings of liberty for “ourselves and our posterity.” The suspension clause in Article I, Section 9 allows habeas corpus to be suspended in cases of rebellion or invasion. The Second Amendment ensures that the people themselves remain armed, capable, and, prior to the Progressive Era, it ensured each State retain its own sovereign military power. Article four contains a perpetual guarantee that the Federal Government will ensure a “republican form of government” in every state of the union. The Constitution of the State of New Hampshire, Article 10, explicitly frames the “Right of Revolution” to which every founder alluded, and the Declaration of Independence justified, in “whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” The founders understood that there would be times when ordinary processes would fail. They provided for those times. They tied these “extra-constitutional” mechanisms into the Constitution itself, and the form of government it established.
They subordinated every magistrate, even the highest, to transcendent law. The Second Amendment is, in its fullness, about the decentralization of the means of warfare such that another revolution could occur if justly deserved. It is the people’s final check against tyranny from any quarter, including from the executive itself. The right to revolution, restated in the Declaration, remains perpetual. It is the covenantal reset when the chain breaks completely between the citizen and the ordered liberty ordained by God. The founders baked this ethic into the system. They knew that no written constitution could bind a magistrate who had already abandoned God’s law.
In normal times, we might use the polity tools to correct our circumstances. States might interpose through nullification. Congress might legislates. Courts might review and create a Constitutional crisis on behalf of the citizen, for once, instead of for their own power. Impeachment checks corruption. But in times of rupture—times like late two thousand twenty-five—these tools fail. Judicial rebellion exceeds mere error – it is sufficiently captured to be cutoff as a pathway. Legislative malaise trades away power for short-term gain, and there is substantial reason to believe the higher echelons are themselves captured by some combination of foreign enemy action, domestic intelligence agencies, and/or unknown oaths and allegiances overriding the oaths to their office. Militia capacity has collapsed – the Dick Act neutered the militia of the several states, and no upstart movement from the Right could possibly evade infiltration and subversion by the FBI and others. The military itself is a massive wildcard in any future reformation scenario, and the probable best-case scenario for the Right is to see them simply stay on the sidelines, as their direct intervention could easily spillover into a sustained low-intensity conflict like the Irish Troubles, but likely far worse, which is something we must seek to avoid. Secession invites immediate federal crushing, nationalization of the guard, and, even if somehow successful in the initial stages, devastation under international sanctions (see Rhodesia). Nullification loses in court after court, and no Legislature seems even remotely interested in holding the judiciary accountable via checks and balances – something that likely wont change until, at least, the managerial class of the Baby Boomer generation is gone from this earth, and a revolutionary sort from the younger cohorts takes their place.
When ordinary polity fails, the failsafe mechanisms remain. Article IV’s guarantee is not passive. It is an active duty, vested primarily in the executive as the unitary authority capable of swift action. The so-called “Unitary Executive Theory” is nothing more than a plain reading of Article 4, uncorrupted by Progressive bureaucratic dogma. The Insurrection Act is not a relic. It is a loaded weapon for domestic enforcement. The president’s oath is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution—not a corrupted system, and not a damned “democracy,” which we all know is not “ours,” but “theirs.”
The founders’ transcendent ethic governs both modes, and legitimizes what must be done to reform the republic in the image of the Constitution. The executive, as highest magistrate, remains subordinate to God’s law. But when lower tiers are captured and the republic faces existential threats on multiple fronts, the duty falls to him. He must act with whatever means are necessary for efficacy and justice. Old constraints, eroded by two centuries of revolutionary subversion, become mere foils. They cannot bind a magistrate fulfilling his oath against those who have already broken theirs. It is not better, somehow, that this duty fall to the average gun-owning Rightist in America to accomplish this – Heaven forbid, no, this is an exercise of the principle of the lesser magistrate, if a bit awkwardly exercised by the “greater magistrate,” to save his country and his people, not to start a shooting war and enact vengeance. As ever, the objective is peace, but not “peace at all costs.” Peace only under the ordered liberty prescribed by the Lord God.
This is the dual arsenal in practice. Polity for maintenance. “Break glass” emergency mechanisms for restoration. The Second Amendment and the right to revolution stand as perpetual reminders that no magistrate is above transcendent law, yet we would be remarkably unwise to appeal to our armaments in these circumstances, both ethically an practically, as ethically a path may yet remain before us to affect counter-revolution nonviolently and, practically, it’s very, very hard to see any probable outcome of rising up in arms as good or desirable. When all else fails, and it has, the chain points to one office capable of wielding the sword decisively.
The judgment of the previous episode stands. Nearly every ordinary path is closed. The crisis is not hypothetical. It is here. The threats are not distant. They are at the gates. The time for half-measures has passed. Most people through most of history have understood just how badly they should desire to not be on the losing side of a war. That seems to be something we need a reminder of, as the recent history of the way America has waged war is not, in fact, the general history of the world, and we, should we lose, cannot expect to be treated by a Communist government any better than the Spaniards, or the Ukrainians, or any of the one-hundred-million corpses they left behind.
Yes, this also stands in stark contrast to a similar essay of years passed wherein we expressed deep concern with the idea of an “unbound executive.” However, while our view of the chances of success for that pathway has not substantially changed, our view of every other pathway has substantially changed – there is no hope in other mechanisms, in decentralization, or in normal polity to defeat the myriad existential threats we face. That doesn’t mean they should not be pursued, as they could be very effective in the future as coupled with an Executive willing to reform the republic, but they will not succeed on their own without that willing Executive and the top cover he might provide.
Next, we will examine the chief’s charge. We will lay out plainly what the office of the presidency, as the last functioning link in the chain, is now called to do.
As the founders appealed to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions, so must we recognize the gravity of this moment. The dual arsenal is loaded. The question is whether anyone on team good-guy will fire it, or if it will be handed off to the enemy locked and cocked.”
