“How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!” — Samuel Adams, 1776
Fascist. Racist. Rebel. Insurrectionist. Traitor.
These words are misused so frequently today that they’ve lost all meaning. The regime and those who do its bidding know that, despite their true meaning having been trampled into an indistinguishable semantical sludge, these words retain enough power to bring many people to heel.
It has always been so.
Demosthenes called Philip of Macedon a “barbarian.”
Cicero called Mark Antony a “heretic.”
The high priest called Jesus a “blasphemer.”
The truth of those accusations is immaterial. In fact, whether the accusers believe the accusations to be true is likewise irrelevant, so long as those whom the accusers are seeking to persuade believe they are true.
And the poisoning of the well continues today.
Recently, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused television host Tucker Carlson of “inciting violence” on January 6. She called Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene a “racist.” Both of the charges were made against her targets without so much as a syllable of evidence. Ocasio-Cortez, as with other servants of the tyrant, knows that no proof is necessary.
Type “fascism” into the Google search bar and you get over 136 million results. Scan through the hits and you’ll see that almost everybody counted among the conservative band of the political spectrum has been dubbed a “fascist” by prominent pundits, the press, and political opponents.
I have always said that if there were a book Tyranny for Dummies, Chapter 1 would be “Get Control of the Language.” Typically, this is done through education. If a tyrant can control the curriculum of the country’s classrooms, then he can teach students from a very early age his preferred definition of words, regardless of how those words were once defined, or even how the dictionary defines them.
The truth of this claim is found in an infamous quotation attributed to Vladimir Lenin:
Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted.
The tyrants and their agents have exerted immense and irresistible influence over the education system in the United States for decades. Federal funds earmarked for state education budgets are made dependent on the compliance of the state with federal curricular — and now cultural — mandates.
It is through their management and manipulation of the country’s classrooms that the tyrants have created “woke” and “cancel” culture, and have been able to assure the perpetuation of that culture for years by indoctrinating our children to not only support those ideas, but to believe that anyone who opposes them is racist, fascist, transphobic, etc.
Next, having been sufficiently “educated” as to the racism and fascism of their parents, it is just a small step to besmirch the wisdom and virtue of the Founding Fathers. The “evil” perpetrated by these men having been “taught to the students, their statues are torn down, buildings are renamed, and our true and inspiring history is purged, shoved down the memory hole.
Moving on from there, generations of Americans have been “taught” that the U.S. Constitution requires states to obey any order or act of the federal government, because the federal government, they are “taught,” is supreme. Speaking of supreme, Americans are taught that the U.S. Supreme Court has the final word on all laws passed by the Congress and by the states, and that there is no appeal from the decisions of that tribunal.
Of course, if the people really were taught about the Constitution and about the men who helped draft and ratify it, they would know that every act of the federal government that exceeds its constitutional authority is, as Alexander Hamilton wrote, “an act of usurpation.” Or, as Thomas Jefferson said, “null and void.”
They would also know that, regarding the authority of the Supreme Court, James Madison wrote:
However true therefore it may be that the Judicial Department, is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial as well as the other departments hold their delegated trusts. On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power, would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers, might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very constitution, which all were instituted to preserve.
The limited and enumerated powers granted to the federal government in the Constitution have become unlimited and indefinable through the successful abuse of words by the tyrant. Just as “racist” and “fascist” and “insurrection” have lost all logical meaning and power, so have “general welfare,” “necessary and proper,” and all other key words in our Constitution.
Despite the tyrants’ progress, however, there is a remedy. It is the “rightful remedy” recommended by Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolutions: nullification.
States must reassert their sovereignty and their superiority by refusing to enact or enforce any and all unconstitutional acts of the federal government.
As part of this renaissance of sovereignty, states must reject federal funds and restore parents as the arbiters of what is taught in American classrooms.
Finally, I’ll leave the last word on the power of words to the eminent John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon:
Yet even in countries where the highest liberty is allowed, and the greatest light shines, you generally find certain men, and bodies of men, set apart to mislead the multitude; who are ever abused with words, ever fond of the worst of things recommended by good names, and ever abhor the best things, and the most virtuous actions, disfigured by ill names. One of the great arts, therefore, of cheating men, is, to study the application and misapplication of sounds — a few loud words rule the majority, I had almost said, the whole world.
