Rights to die for--or not

Our Curmudgeonly Host uses a post of mine from CF yesterday as a springboard for his own always-worthy thoughts, and then gently chides me for having been a bit scarce around these parts of late. To my shame, he's right about that, so allow me to make some sort of amends by cross-posting this here, and adding a little to it to boot. First, this, from TL Davis' most worthy newsletter:

We are rapidly progressing toward the moment when each person will have to look deep into their heart and ask themselves whether they believe that there are principles worth giving their lives for, or not. Time will not stop and let us catch up or peek into the future to see if what we sacrifice will be worth it, or not. If we will stop anything or not.

I suggest that there are certain, key principles embedded in the Bill of Rights which are worth the ultimate sacrifice, not for us, but for our posterity. There are some hard lines that need to be drawn and I say this knowing that those lines are already being tested and that the time to act is bearing down on us. It could be tomorrow.

We are going to witness their attempts to do two things: take our guns and take our property. It is at this point that we either prove once and for all that those things are worth defending, or we will become willing victims of communism, globalism and enslavement. If that is a condition of existence that is better than death, it will be the condition upon which we live out our meager lives.

If we do accept it, we will destroy the world. Lost in the narrative that America is the source of all evil and injustice, is the fact that its economic power is derived directly from these concepts of individual rights defended by individuals with weapons equal to those of standing armies. Once removed, so is the economic engine that the whole world depends on. China would be nowhere near the economic power that it has become without being able to hijack the innovation and creativity of individuals seeking to gain individual wealth. Without the idea of making a better life, when that possibility has been made impossible, so is the energy to innovate and create. All of those entrepreneurs become mere workers, broken by the system, struggling to survive, denied the freedom to think, without the inspiration to innovate.

It truly is a choice between fighting to defend these fundamental rights as a part of America, but more importantly, as an ingredient of prosperity or the acceptance of a dark and dismal world of drudgery and enslavement, slowly grinding through the diminishing reserves of a capitalist past. If we choose that dark future, we will endure five or maybe ten years, before the whole world is Venezuela.

For them, that's a feature and not a bug.

You can subscribe to TL's newsletters thusly, and you should:

The newsletter is available by sending an email to tld@tldavis.com and placing in the subject line newsletter or subscribe. The books and film are available at https://12roundproductions.com or http://tldavis.com

Now, a quote from Francis' earlier post:

If Mike is correct, then a Democrat victory come Election Day 2020 would guarantee the decline of the U.S. into just another elite-managed oligarchy. The Roberts Supreme Court could not be relied upon to impede it. (Besides, it lacks an enforcement arm with which to impose its judgment on the rest of the federal government.) The Indian summer of our Republic would have begun. Its descent into winter would be swift, for once disarmed, our populace would have no means of resisting the tyranny to come.

There's nothing in the world I'd more fervently wish to be wrong about than my grim speculation last night--not because I long for blood in the streets and a nightmarish Civil War v2.0, but because Francis is perfectly correct. In fact, I'm afraid we're already well into the Indian Summer he mentions, with a long, dark winter closing in on us all too quickly. Francis proposes a possible remedy:

Tell the legislators who represent your district and state that should they vote to infringe your Second Amendment rights, you will hold them personally responsible.

Is it guaranteed to prevent the grim scenarios presented above? No. There are no guarantees in politics. Legislators have often chosen to believe what they preferred over the evidence before them. But it has a chance of turning them aside from their disarmament schemes...perhaps the only chance.

Remind them that the armed men who surround them can’t keep them from being targeted. They can only provide a measure of deterrence. In the event of an assassination attempt, they can counter-target the assassin. But they can’t keep their man alive if enough Americans are determined enough to kill him. If we can get enough Congressvermin – of both parties; none of them are trustworthy on this subject – to imagine themselves with crosshairs over their hearts, we have a chance of averting a tyrannical future.

A chance, yes, however slim. But any chance to avoid the catastrophe that looks more and more inevitable with every passing day should certainly be pursued. Remember the old saying: when the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty. Our would-be rulers have forgotten the hard nut of truth embedded therein--worse, they seem to assume that WE have forgotten it. They will have to be corrected, one way or another.