A Critical Time for America
Justin O Smith

Nearly half of America is jubilant with thoughts that their political savior has arrived and nearly another half of America is gnawing, spitting and gnashing their teeth in violent, spasmodic angst in their certainty that a new Hitler has risen in the country to make their lives a living hell, while the rest of us are simply watching and waiting to see what the next shoe to drop will be and just how much of our liberty will be trashed and violated under President Trump, no matter how much the economy may or may not improve.

Americans should stop deluding themselves to believe that their Inalienable God-given Rights are safe, now that Trump is poised to enter the White House again.

Every American that’s still worth a damn should be done with being told they are racist, sexist or a fascist, and more than that, they should be done with politicians lying to them, forcing a hard accounting upon every offender. No real patriot will ever easily allow their own common sense to be scoffed and ridiculed as unsophisticated or dangerous, and they certainly will never be a pawn in someone else’s game, especially since this last election seems to suggest that we really are the majority in America.

Now it is up to us to hold the Trump administration to its promises and help every incoming Cabinet member to regain control of our captured institutions. There is a long, well-deserving list of people who acted as the enemy-from-within who must be brought to account and their day of reckoning, however it should arrive. And, at the end of the day, the American people must regain control of themselves, in order to become better informed on all matters and to rise above any fear to speak their minds immediately even though it would be easier to remain silent whenever they are surrounded by fierce, unpredictable opposition.

The American people need to learn to hold tightly to the mast, even as the maelstrom blows around us and…

Embrace the Value of the Individual

I am a free born American who has been made to endure one form of “training” and indoctrination from my first day on earth, in order to be compelled to conform, until the day I awakened to the fact, that no matter what the “pillars” of the society had to say, they were wrong on so much. My awakening probably had its first inklings during my high school years, but I have always held the view that I am free to speak as I wish and when I wish without fear, hold whatever religious view I wish, and do whatever I damned-well want so long as no harm is done to others. And as such, I have always disobeyed bad “law” and questioned and resisted authority where I knew those purporting to have a certain “authority”, in fact did not, as I’ve crossed my life’s journey simply trying to do what is right, in the face of a constant barrage of unending bits and pieces of tyrannical legislation and executive orders meant to take away our freedoms and liberties.

Yes. Like the song goes, I always ran against the wind, and although it’s caused be a good bit of trouble through the years, it has come with its rewards too, and in that, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

A man I knew and respected and called friend, when I was a younger man, Fire Chief A.C. “Ace” Wintermeyer [LaVergne, TN], would often rail against those Americans who were always saying “there ought to be a law”, as he noted, during our morning coffee meetings, this was largely the problem with America, even way back then in the 1970s. Many a problem came up for discussion there at the LaVergne Truckstop, with many solutions offered and put out into the ether, as we joked and laughed and complained, at a time that we were still infinitely more free than Americans are today.

Lee Greenwood sings a song that poignantly declares: “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free. And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.”

From many conversations with my Dad, a combat Veteran of WWII, Korea and Vietnam and men, such as Sergeant Barry Sadler, author of The Ballad of the Green Beret, and Lt. Colonel Ralph Fullerton, former aid to the U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, and many others, I full well know and understand that this Leviathan we live under today bears little to no semblance to that which they thought they were fighting to defend through the years.

Ask me if Americans are really free and I’ll respond with an unequivocal “NO”.

It angers me to no end that many states have “seatbelt laws” that force a grown adult to buckle their seatbelt, as Auntie Samantha presses her will on them. While I agree that the State has some authority to force a law to buckle-up children in seatbelts or child seats, it has zero authority to tell a full grown adult anything on anything in regard to their own health, safety or wellbeing; they may advise and suggest, but they have no right of enforcement, even though they’ve taken that position by force of arms and an overreach of the government and “the law”.

There are thousands upon thousands of such gross abuses of government in the name of their authority and “the law”, no matter how bad or how much in error their “law” is found to be by a majority of Americans. This also shows how so many times so-called leaders in our state legislatures and the Congress push through bad law, regardless of how it is received or perceived by the majority, simply because they believe they know even better than their constituents what is best for them.

And don’t get me started on unconstitutional state “laws” that infringe on the Second Amendment and the Red Flag “law” passed by Congress with the help of RINOs that sets up a Minority Report type setting that suggests law enforcement and judges can predict who “might be capable of violence” as justification to disarm all law-abiding Americans across the country at their whim and leisure.

If anything should have awakened all Americans to the fact that they are no longer a free people, it should have been what we recently were forced to endure during the 2020 Covid “pandemic”, a manmade disease that was far overblown and not near the death sentence that the tyrants wanted us all to believe, with a 98.676 percent survival rate. This was the pretense used by a gullible President Trump and an evil, knowing and purposeful Marxist-Maoist globalist tyrant known as “doctor” Anthony Fauci, in order to roll out the first nationwide mandatory Lockdown and the suspension of the Constitution and individual liberty in response to any disease in U.S. history. And the lockdowns persisted in all 50 states, even after Trump tried to lift them, due to collusion between petty tyrants at all levels of government and the major corporations.

Needless to say, I rejected the lockdown and the mask mandate outright and refused to comply at every step of the way, as did all my patriot friends, while we fought for our rights and against unjust and unwarranted prosecutions of many Americans who supposedly violated some imaginary “law” as they stood up to keep their churches and businesses open in defiance of these illegal and illegitimate orders, no matter who ordered them.

Unjust authority of any kind, in any segment of society or, God forbid, our individual personal lives, is the greatest threat to individual liberty and the complete wellbeing of our society in general.

This doesn’t mean we should have any “anything goes” mentality, such as America witnessed in the 1960s, when the Hippy Counter Culture and Timothy Leary were promoting the “Drop Out and Turn On” drug influenced movement. Unlike Laurence Vance, author and Christian libertarian, I do not see the use of illicit drugs, gambling and prostitution as “victimless crimes”. Some drugs, like fentanyl and methamphetamine, are so dangerous and addictive that they debilitate people beyond being able to function and care for themselves, forcing society to care for them in one fashion or another. Gambling often takes money meant for rent and food and leaves mothers and children starving on the streets, while prostitution also often takes money from its original intended purpose and either breaks up homes or leaves a trail of abused women and johns too, who are sometimes robbed and killed by pimps. And for all of this, society and the American taxpayer pays the cost.

Thus, my early statement: I am free – you are free to do whatever you damned-well want so long as no harm is done to others.

Yes. I would wager that the largest portion of all Americans believe they live in a free country today, simply because that are kept, guided, prodded like fatted calves, and often subsidized too by an ever growing welfare state, by the Big Brother / Nanny State, able to work or not, channel surf through a thousand channels or Netflix and Prime or simply twiddle their thumbs and play Grand Theft Auto, after visiting their local liquor store and perusing a hundred different brands of wines and whiskey. They are often in denial and completely ignorant in regard to just how much of their individual liberty has been taken from them by the government, every day and with each passing year as the U.S. legal code and the Leviathan itself grow beyond mammoth proportions. They have little to no real knowledge of what it actually means to live free.

Our U.S. Constitution is supposed to be a tool in the defense of our freedom and liberties, but through the years, it has been so vastly bastardized as to have been turned into a tool and a weapon against the very Americans it purports to protect. One illegitimate law and/ or constitutional amendment has been passed after another, finding creative new meaning in the Constitution to justify the indefensible, such as abortion or even allowing illegal aliens to remain in the country while giving their babies U.S. citizenship. The very thing that is supposed to protect and defend all Americans has, in essence, become a juggernaut rolling over us all as it is wielded by Marxists and Maoists in Congress in a manner to destroy it and force Americans to relinquish their liberties in subservience to the government.

Yes, I was born here in America – right over yonder a ways, in Ft. Riley, Kansas near Hays, Kansas, nearly 68 years ago, but that happenstance situation surrounding my birth does not constitute a willing and enforceable contract for me, not in my way of thinking, even if my parents spoke for me as a minor child. However, after I reached my majority in February of 1975, my life was mine alone to do with as I saw fit and without interference from anyone else, including the U.S. government or the local mayors of LaVergne and Smyrna, TN, my “hometowns” that sat only five miles apart. An accident of birth doesn’t mean one must automatically go along with any society’s laws, when they are terrible “laws” and stand in direct contravention of one’s liberty and Inalienable God-given Rights or demands one joins in any national act of suicide by any means, be it an unwise and unnecessary war or allowing an invasion of “progressive” and communist-minded illegal aliens to take the nation by storm.

Over the past forty-six years, surveillance by our Big Brother-style government has expanded to an unfathomable degree, even to the point of spying on a sitting U.S. president. We have forever war, forever bust and boom criminal schemes and collusion between the Federal Reserve Bank and Wall Street, continuous backdoor taxation by way of inflation, an Income Tax agency that recently added 85,000 armed agents, mass censorship of our people at the hands of our government colluding with social media sites and the mainstream media, restrictions on our individual liberty. We continuously face existential threats from our weaponized law enforcement and intelligence agencies, whether we speak of the FBI, CIA, DOJ or the NSA, as every right one cares to mention is regularly violated with impunity, nary a fare-thee-well or a polite “eff you“, and they simply plow through any personal boundaries of individual liberty, on the flimsiest of excuses, in ways that can only be described as immoral, abusive and illegal.

No matter how hard the illiberal petty tyrants try to convince anyone that the aforementioned government actions are for the general wellbeing of all Americans, they are still unacceptable restrictions on freedom of speech and property, and they represent a direct affront to our personal sovereignty and security.

How much of this will be corrected in a short four-year term under the new Trump administration is a guess at best, but no one should get their hopes too high, since it was after all Trump who implemented the tyrannical Lockdown in 2020 and set in motion Congress’s passage of Red Flag Gun Control with his early praise of such methods, including his 2018 declaration – “Take the guns first, go through due process second”…

But we will see…

In this modern era, this post-Constitutional time when even Republicans violate the “supreme law of the land”, we routinely witness the vast array of federal agencies [FEMA, IRS, FBI, FAA and more] infringe on our individual liberty and economic freedom every single day without fail. I’m certain the residents of North Carolina will have much to say on government interference and the unconscionable manner in which FEMA actually stopped and turned away private groups that arrived with manpower and supplies to aid the survivors of Hurricane Helene. “We’re the government, and we’re here to help” – the worst eight words one hopes to never hear, as President Ronald Reagan once suggested.

I’ve always thought that if people could and would simply live by the same early Christian and Western principles that founded America, they really would have little to no need for such a voluminous and enormous legal code. I tend to believe that the best government mankind can have is one that is extremely small in size and limited in scope and one seeking only to do that which is most important to the ensuring a society’s daily life and operations run peacefully, smoothly and efficiently. Essentially, if people could really just live and let live, they would find there isn’t any need for a mammoth Leviathan overseeing their every move; they would learn that true freedom of association and cooperation and cooperatives in a domestic free market, not collectives as in communism, would actually ensure more freedom and individual liberty and economic prosperity than America has seen in well over 150 years.

I don’t particularly like labels to define people, but more than a simple “conservative”, for the better part of my life, I have been a bit of a liberty-minded anarchist, which isn’t to say I reject any or all government, since it really is necessary due to mankind’s avarice and hatred for others. But I do see the need to build stronger mechanisms around our individual liberty and our Inalienable God-given Rights, before we are all reduced to serfs under the common denominator of poverty imposed by an all-controlling, overreaching, psychotic Leviathan, void of love for the human race, loving only its own self and its ravenous continual pursuit over raw power and everything within its sight and reach.

No one is better suited to look out for my own best interests than myself, so it never has made a great deal of sense to me to hand such authority to strangers, which is pretty much always a guarantee of trouble on down the line. Our society and order within it depend a whole lot more on individuals interacting together by way of freedom of association, infinitely more than on arrogant, narcissistic, psychopathic jackbooted assholes who claim they have mandates to act on behalf of millions of people, based solely on being the lesser of two evils.

Americans have lost that crucial anarchist insight exhibited to some large degree by our founders, who also sought to create a very limited government. They understood that the state and its authority was not needed or wanted in any but a few matters that were of importance to any successful society, which is why they were enumerated within the Constitution. For the most part, they knew every way imaginable that any centralized, mammoth State was both unnecessary and harmful to people and any society it ruled, which they explained in some great detail in both The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers. They understood that humans have an innate tendency to cooperate and provide one another mutual aid in order to survive.

All authority derived from anything other than voluntary consent is inherently illegitimate.

Americans have relinquished more of their freedoms and liberties than one would have ever thought possible, given how we were founded as a nation and a people and the independent strength of will that coursed through American society in its founding years. The people have simply reclined in front of their televisions as power and authority has been delegated to unelected, too often corrupt, fat-ass self-serving, greedy bureaucrats, and this must be reversed as quickly as possible, the sooner the better, as the people wake up and become serious about defending our Inalienable God-given Rights and our individual liberty, by eradicating entire agencies and cutting deep into the cancerous fat flesh of the Leviathan, slashing local, state and federal budgets to the core, ridding ourselves of all but the most important and necessary government entities.

Far more troubling than any of this also remains the fact that, as a people and a culture, Americans have become unstable and far removed and unmoored from the basic moral foundation, the virtues and the principles that the nation was founded upon, and we are seemingly set adrift from life framed by core values of Christianity and Western civilization – liberty, equality under the law, personal sovereignty and autonomy – the values set forth in the Bill of Rights, now either taken for granted or summarily dismissed out of hand. All of this leaves us standing at the edge of a dark bottomless pit and a thousand years of darkness, if we don’t soon get back on the path that defends our rights and this republic, a path of reason that rejects the flawed precepts of communism and the fundamental transformation of America and once more embraces the value of the individual and true freedom and liberty for all.

On October 18th 1787, Robert Yates, under the pseudonym Brutus, wrote:

“Perhaps this country never saw so critical a period in their political concerns. We have felt the feebleness of ties by which these United States are held together, and the want of sufficient energy in our present confederation, to manage, in some instances, our general concerns. Various expedients have been proposed to remedy these evils, but none have succeeded. At length a Convention of the states has been assembled, they have formed a constitution which will now, probably, be submitted to the people to ratify or reject, who are the fountain of all power, to whom alone it of right belongs to make or unmake constitutions, or forms of government, at their pleasure.”

Once again, America faces “so critical a period”, one of the most critical times in my lifetime, despite the recent election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the still not-so “united” States of America. The communists are rife throughout the ranks of all levels of government and society in every major city all across the country, and it is known they will without doubt persist in their treason, their criminal and violent acts and all the riots and chaos they are often wont to create, unwilling to allow America to withdraw from their fundamental transformation of America into a totalitarian communist state.

Hard as we may try to patiently educate those Marxist-Maoist Democrat communists and globalists to the value of the ideas and principles of true freedom and liberty under a righteous government, striving to improve upon what remains today, the hardline communists of America will never relent until they are gone or those who follow have eradicated our republic and vanquished our culture to the ashbin of history. The burning question then remains, as to just how long we attempt to coexist peacefully with these enemies-from-within, while they consistently resort to treason and violence, before finally saying “Enough” and pushing every last single red, radical communist into the ocean to depart to parts unknown or into their graves.

A day is coming in our country that will demand hard choices from America’s hard men. And it may require that they slit the throats of every last red, radical communist in the country.

Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith worked 8 years for the LaVergne Fire Department – two years as their clean-up boy – and became a working fireman at age 16, working his way through college and subsequently joining the U.S. Army. Since then he primarily have contracted construction and traveled – spending quite a bit of time up and down the Columbia River Gorge, in the Puget Sound on Whidby Island and down around Ft. Lauderdale and South Beach. Justin currently writes a weekly column for The Rutherford Reader in Murfreesboro, TN, which he calls home, in addition to being a frequent contributor to the Federal Observer – and spend as much time as possible with his two beautiful and intelligent daughters and five grandchildren. Justin Love God, Family and Our Majestic and Wonderful America, and am a Son of Liberty.

www.federalobserver.com