Government Overreach Quotes

I needed no convincing of the fatal possibilities of government overreach, of the way the fatalities told the story of who the nation considered expendable, but, even after the low points of the previous decade, I believed in government, or at least believed in it more than the alternative. That my country might always expect me to audition for my life I accepted as fact, but I trusted the public charter of national government more than I trusted average white citizens acting unchecked.

Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lost the courts and wait for a White House scandal. And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency and hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists these days goes like this: The Republican Party has been able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by vilifying Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, and disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get back into power, then they will have to take up the same approach. ...Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we're in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It's what keeps us locked in "either/or" thinking: the notion that we can have only big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace "socialized medicine". It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off of politics.

not a medical crisis, but a crisis of misinformation, censorship, and government overreach.

We are propping up a government that has overreached its bounds in the name of public safety,” FM said. “The people must speak up and rise against the upper class who holds them enslaved!

Work and family are both basic tenets of our society. Every government should celebrate and protect both for all of its citizens. That we have come to a place where women seeking work and family can be seen as overreaching, even selfish, is inane.

The split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced "free collective bargaining" between management and labor. REpublicans boasted of "extending the minimum wage to several million more workers" and "strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits." Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1968 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive invenstment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to "open carry" loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.

Massive tax cuts, which fundamentally reshaped the agendas of the nation’s two major political parties and resulted in the rise of private fortunes alongside public poverty, were not simply a response to government overreach. They were a response to white people being ordered to share public goods with Black people.[

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, intact for over 200 years, guaranteed that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath of affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. After September 11th, 2001, those were just words on an old piece of paper, no longer a restriction of the Government’s overreaching power to shake down its subjects.

When the thirst for wealth becomes general, it will be sought for as well dishonestly as honestly; by frauds and overreachings, by the knaveries of trade, the heartlessness of greedy speculation, by gambling in stocks and commodities that soon demoralizes a whole community. Men will speculate upon the needs of their neighbors and the distresses of their country. Bubbles that, bursting, impoverish multitudes, will be blown up by cunning knavery, with stupid credulity as its assistants and instrument. Huge bankruptcies, that startle a country like the earth-quakes, and are more fatal, fraudulent assignments, engulfment of the savings of the poor, expansions and collapses of the currency, the crash of banks, the depreciation of Government securities, prey on the savings of self-denial, and trouble with their depredations the first nourishment of infancy and the last sands of life, and fill with inmates the churchyards and lunatic asylums.

I needed no convincing of the fatal possibilities of government overreach, of the way the fatalities told the story of who the nation considered expendable, but, even after the low points of the previous decade, I believed in government, or at least believed in it more than the alternative. That my country might always expect me to audition for my life I accepted as fact, but I trusted the public charter of national government more than I trusted average white citizens acting unchecked. I believed in government, I had come to understand, the way that agnostics who hadn’t been to service in decades sometimes hedged their bets and brought their babies to be baptized or otherwise welcomed into the religions of their parents’ youth. I had abandoned the actual religion I was raised with as soon as I got to college, but when in moments of despair I needed the inspiration of a triumphant martyr figure who made me believe in impossible things, I thought not of saints or saviors but of my mother.

The First Congress of the United States passed the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—to put fences around the federal government, saying it could not establish any specific religion, silence the press, police speech, stop the people from assembling peacefully, take away the right of the people to bear arms, deny trials by jury, arbitrarily seize property, and so on. These rights were not rights given to individuals, as the modern Supreme Court has interpreted them, but rather were designed to hold back the government if it began to overreach.

Many erroneously suppose that when Christ's Millennial Kingdom is inaugurated every one will be pleased with its ruling. But not so. Its regulations will be far more exacting than those of any previous government, and the liberties of the people will be restricted to a degree that will be galling indeed to many now clamoring for an increase of liberty. Liberty to deceive, to misrepresent, to overreach and to defraud others, will be entirely cut off. Liberty to abuse themselves or others in food or in drink, or in any way to corrupt good manners, will be totally denied to all. Liberty or license to do wrong of any sort will not be granted to any. The only liberty that will be granted to any will be the true and glorious liberty of the sons of God -liberty to do good to themselves and others in any and in every way; but nothing will be allowed to injure or destroy in all that Holy Kingdom (Isa. 11:9; Rom. 8:21). That rule will consequently be felt by many to be a severe one, breaking up all their former habits and customs, as well as breaking up institutions founded upon these false habits and false ideas of liberty. Because of its firmness and vigor, it is symbolically called an iron rule -'He shall rule them with a rod of iron' (Compare Rev. 2:26, 27; Psa, 2:8-12 and 49:14).

When I was growing up, we took Texas history twice—if I remember correctly, in the fourth and the seventh grades. I cannot say with certainty that slavery was never mentioned. Of course, I didn’t need school to tell me that Blacks had been enslaved in Texas. I heard references to slavery from my parents and grandparents. A common retort when another kid—often a sibling—insisted you do something for them you didn’t want to do was “Slavery time is over.” And we celebrated Juneteenth, which marked the end of the institution. But if slavery was mentioned in the early days of my education, it didn’t figure prominently enough in our lessons to give us a clear and complete picture of the role the institution played in the state’s early development, its days as a Republic, its entry into the Union, and its role in the Civil War and its aftermath. Instead, as with the claim “The American Civil War was not about slavery. It was about states’ rights,” the move when talking about Texas’s rebellion against Mexico was to take similar refuge in concerns about overreaching federal authorities. Anglo-Texans chafed at the centralizing tendencies of the Mexican government and longed to be free. As one could ask about the states’ rights argument—states’ rights to do what?—I don’t recall my teachers giving a complete explanation for why Anglo-Texans felt so threatened by the Mexican government.

It's intriguing to observe so many of the outrageous prophecies, made with such biting satire years ago in the first edition, come into being through the craft of so many self-entitled egomaniacs running a global 'corpornation' for personal interest and professional profit. I had no idea then, as I now know, that I was writing with so much understatement. Honest outrage and political satire are two of the most important weapons that we have to protect infringement against our personal freedoms through oligarchy and to maintain any semblance of humanity in our democracy as our government aggressively privatizes and over-reaches at the expense of those millions whom it has sworn so dishonestly to serve and has utterly abandoned.

Nonetheless, if you’re trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blindspot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. The reason I believe that liberalism – which is done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity – is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

Let me state clearly that moral capital is not always an unalloyed good. Moral capital leads automatically to the suppression of free riders, but it does not lead automatically to other forms of fairness such as equality of opportunity. And while high moral capital helps a community to function efficiently, the community can use that efficiency to inflict harm on other communities. High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix. Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states". A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives". These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office. Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In rather case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease. Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power. But even democracy ruins itself by excess – of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses. As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people” rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome). The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials – not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage. Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.

Stop this government overreach. They can't just come in here and tell us what to do." "Uhm, it's school," Tony said. "That's kind of the point.

A corrupt and dynastic political party is antithetical to the rule of law and to carefully crafted constitutional checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. A tendency towards autocracy and consequent institutional subversion is inevitable with a party thus configured. The result is a prime minister bereft of real power, subservient to the dynastic head and a mute spectator to the loot and plunder of the nation’s resources; a president who is a loyal camp follower and will faithfully rubber stamp the decisions ordained by the dynasty: witness how unhesitatingly President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signed the Proclamation of Emergency at Mrs. Gandhi’s bidding in 1975 and ponder whether Mrs. Pratibha Patil, (besieged as she was by her co-operative sugar factory in liquidation, her co-operative bank bankrupt, and her family embroiled in the murder case of a popular intra-party rival in Jalgaon at the time of her nomination by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi), would have done otherwise; or for that matter whether President Pranab Mukherjee, whose many acts of subversion of the Constitution during the Emergency have been documented by the Shah Commission, is so radically transformed that he would now protect it; a judiciary accused of judicial overreach when it censures the government or brings its ministers to book while its inconvenient judgments are subjected to review or Presidential Reference; a CAG whose findings against the government’s decisions are vilified as being patently erroneous, in excess of jurisdiction and even motivated, although that august body, the Constituent Assembly had opined that as the guardian of the nation’s finances, the CAG was as important a Constitutional functionary as the justices of the Supreme Court; a CVC appointed despite the taint of corruption and over the protest of the leader of the Opposition, whose appointment was finally quashed by the Supreme Court; and a CBI whose only role on empirical evidence is to falsely implicate political opponents and wrongly exonerate the regime’s members and cronies.

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change. A

The lockdowns and government overreach meant to “help” people has only harmed them.

Massive tax cuts, which fundamentally reshaped the agendas of the nation’s two major political parties and resulted in the rise of private fortunes alongside public poverty, were not simply a response to government overreach. They were a response to white people being ordered to share public goods with Black people.

I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

Everything around you is touched by oil. Plastics are petroleum products. Foodstuffs and transportation of the foodstuffs, and everything else, are dependent on oil, and, ridiculously, our nation is dependent on foreign oil. Many Americans don’t realize that our government, unlike other countries’ governments, prohibits the sale of our domestic oil on the open market. That outdated export ban needs to end. Also needing to end is the bureaucratic prohibition on drilling for our own safe, reliable energy sources. Alaskans have been fighting for the right to drill on our state’s northern shore for decades. The vast majority see the government’s refusal to permit exploration and drilling as a nonsensical federal overreach. Tapping a tiny portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)—two thousand acres out of nineteen million uninhabited, frozen acres—would give us access to billions of barrels of oil that can be safely extracted and give a huge boost to our economy and energy independence. Oil in the ground is useless. Oil in the hands of American entrepreneurs and job creators means new products, lower prices, and improved national security.

Furthermore, academic fads have been forced upon successive generations of elementary and secondary school students, including the “New Math,” the “Open Classroom,” “Values Clarification,” “Cooperative Learning,” “Outcome-Based Education,” “No Child Left Behind,” and more recently “Common Core” and “Race to the Top,” for which trillions of dollars have been and are being wasted on inferior educational outcomes. Even the once-heralded school lunch program is not safe from statist overreach, where billions of dollars are spent on federally mandated lunches that many students refuse to eat.23

We have the ability, at least theoretically, to find every single person in the world who believes in individual freedom and who has access to the Internet. We can connect with them, share ideas, books, and strategies. We can gather and coalesce, build a virtual division of labor, and generate a new accountability against the many instances of government overreach and tyranny happening every day, all over the world. Together, acting in voluntary cooperation, we can create a “greater social intelligence” and social awareness unlike anything possible before. Compare

PROTECT WHISTLEBLOWERS Columbia law professor David Pozen contends that democracies need to be leaky-leaks and whistleblowing are themselves security mechanisms against an overreaching government. In his view, leaks serve as a counterpoint to the trend of overclassification and, ultimately as a way for governments to win back the trust lost through excessive secrecy. Ethnographer danah boyd has called whistleblowing the civil disobedience of the information age; it enables individuals to fight back against abuse by the powerful. The NGO Human Rights Watch wrote that "those who disclose official wrongdoing...perform an important service in a democratic society...." In this way of thinking, whistleblowers provide another oversight mechanism. You can think of them as a random surprise inspection. Just as we have laws to protect corporate whistleblowers, we need laws to protect government whistleblowers. Once they are in place, we could create a framework and rules for whistleblowing legally.

if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

each is inherently expansive and evangelistic.” The abortion mandate firestorm isn’t dying down – and it shouldn’t. This is government overreach at its worst – and is a direct assault on the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom and conscience.

While the word “republic” derives etymologically from the Latin “res publica”—which literally means “the people’s thing,” what a republic or a “republican form of government” is today remains debatable; but what it is not is clear: No matter its political composition, a government that does not adhere to the rule of law, is ruled by a president who dictates, courts that legislate, and a legislature that is elected by a minority, led by the few, and administered by members who fail to embody the will of the people, represent party caucuses and factious special interests, overlook executive overreach, transfer legislative powers, and maintain monarchic lengths of time in office—and all of this to the detriment of justice, the Union, and the Constitution—is not a republic or republican form of government but something else.

Wyden was giving voice to the growing number of Americans on both the left and the right who had become concerned about government overreach after 9/11. Soon, Wyden told reporters, the Senate would vote on a provision he had authored that he intended to attach to a must-pass spending bill that would force the Defense Department to explain itself in a report to Congress and put a pause to funding for the Total Information Awareness program, all with the aim of giving the public time to understand what exactly the Pentagon was up to.

There is nothing more iconically American than resisting overreaching government. With great reservations we consent to be governed, not ruled, by our Constitution, not by imperial edict.

They did not waste their lives on social media, fighting over dumb things. They did not have to concern themselves with government overreach or lack of action.

The 2020 election revealed the traditional antigovernment militias as a partisan paramilitary consisting of hypocrites. A “good government” was expected to punish minorities using all of its power to further white domination, demographics be damned. Instead of being suspicious of overreach, militias now only oppose government power that they consider “liberal.

During the HIV epidemic, newspapers had questioned public health pronouncements and warned against government overreach. As early as June 1983, the New York Times had published an opinion piece titled “AIDS and Civil Liberties,” citing the “danger that the judicial and political systems will fall prey to the irrational demands of a frightened public and impose groundless and onerous regulations that result in the widespread loss of freedom.”39

Once experience is admitted within the theological edifice, the latter begins to crumble – such portion of it, of course, as stands within the experimental domain, for the other wings are safe from any attack by experience. So years, centuries, go by; peoples, governments, manners and systems of living, pass away; and all along new theologies, new systems of metaphysics, keep replacing the old, and each new one is reputed more “true” or much “better” that its predecessors. And in certain cases they may really be better, if by “better” we means more helpful to society; but more “true”, no, if by the term we mean accord with experimental reality. One faith cannot be more scientific than another, and experimental reality is equally overreached by polytheism, Islamism, and Christianity (whether Catholic, Protestant, Liberal, Modernist, or of any other variety); by the innumerable metaphysical sects, including the Kantian, the Hegelian, the Bergsonian, and not excluding the positivistic sects of Comte, Spencer, and other eminent writers too numerous to mention; by the faiths of solidaristes, humanitarians, anti-clericals, and worshippers of Progress; and by as many other faiths as have existed, exist, or can be imagined.

government buildings of various kinds. But other targets could very well include religious centers, such as mosques, madrassas, Islamic schools and universities, and other facilities where hatred against Jews and Christians is preached and where calls for the destruction of Israel are sounded. We don’t know for certain because the text does not say. So we need to be very careful not to overreach in our interpretation. But I think however it plays out, it’s fair to say we would have to expect extensive material damage during these supernatural attacks, and it’s possible—not definite, but very possible—that many civilians will be at severe risk.” Ali and Ibrahim were taking notes as fast as they could. But Birjandi was not finished. “Now, look at Ezekiel 39:12,” he continued. “It tells us that the devastation will be so immense that it will take seven full months for Israel to bury all the bodies of the enemies in her midst, to say nothing of the dead and wounded back in the coalition countries. What’s worse, verses 17 and 18 indicate that the process of burial would actually take much longer except that scores of bodies will be devoured by carnivorous birds and beasts that will be drawn to the carnage like moths to a flame. This is going to be a horrible, gruesome time. But this is what is coming. A terrible judgment is coming against Russia, against Iran, and against our allies. And perhaps what is most sobering of all is that some of Ezekiel’s prophecies have already come true.

Government surveillance is a surreptitious infringement on our basic human rights, an affront to the principles of autonomy and individuality that form the bedrock of a just society. Its literal ramifications extend far beyond the boundaries of legality, seeping into the emotional and psychological well-being of individuals who find themselves under constant scrutiny. Trust, once eroded by the overreach of surveillance, becomes a casualty, fragmenting the delicate bond between citizens and their government. Instances of surveillance overreach, both historical and contemporary, reveal the potential for grave abuse, reinforcing the imperative to resist such infringements in the name of preserving our liberties and maintaining the emotional health of our collective consciousness.

Government surveillance is a direct assault on the essence of democracy, a betrayal of the trust citizens place in their elected representatives. The emotional toll inflicted by the knowledge that every move is monitored is a corrosive force that eats away at the psychological well-being of individuals, fostering an environment of paranoia and self-censorship. The damage is not just personal but extends to societal trust, creating a chasm between the governed and those in power. Examples of surveillance overreach, from the dystopian pages of history to contemporary revelations, underscore the urgent need to confront and dismantle the machinery of unlawful surveillance that poses a clear and present danger to the very fabric of our free society.

Government surveillance is a violation of our intrinsic right to privacy, a breach that extends beyond legal boundaries into the emotional terrain of fear and mistrust. The toll on individuals subjected to constant monitoring is profound, casting a shadow over the very notion of personal freedom. Trust, a cornerstone of any democratic society, crumbles in the face of surveillance overreach, fostering an environment where citizens feel hesitant to express themselves openly. Historical examples, such as the COINTELPRO program, illuminate the dark potential of unchecked government surveillance, highlighting the imperative to acknowledge its unlawfulness and safeguard the emotional well-being and trust that are essential for a thriving society.

The more a nation’s citizenry complies, the more authoritarian its government becomes, which leads to tyranny. The problem is that as long as we are distracted, occasionally outraged, or politically polarized, we the people will never be able to stand united against government overreach or tyranny in any form.

During the war, the government could commit U.S. strength almost at will; anything could be justified as a war measure. The problem was how to get the same kind of acceptance for government interventionist policy when the shooting stopped.

There is a reciprocal relationship between politicians, government officials and intellectuals, whether in formal institutions or elsewhere. Politicians, especially on the left depend on intellectuals to give credibility to the ideologies that justify government overreach and leftwing policies. In return the intellectuals, including college professors are rewarded with taxpayer funded research grants, and other lucrative opportunities for personal gain.

The book of Revelation reveals to us that the way to counter the government’s overreach is to begin with worship of the One on the throne, the Lamb in the middle of the throne, and the Seven Spirits around the throne.

What came out of this meeting was a heightened awareness of how much common ground the Left and Right share when it comes to criminal justice reform. Libertarians see the overreach of the criminal justice system as yet one more example of government run amok, while progressives hate how these policies devastate communities of color and divert resources away from things like education. In early 2015, a new Left-Right group emerged—the Coalition for Public Safety—the likes of which had rarely been seen in Washington, backed with $5 million in Arnold Foundation funding. The Ford Foundation and Koch Industries also put in money, the first time these polar opposite funders had ever worked on the same side. The coalition sought to advance bipartisan legislation in Congress, as criminal justice increasingly became one of the few areas where lawmakers could work across the aisle.

In 1925, Gerardo Machado defeated the conservative Mario García Menocal by an overwhelming majority, becoming Cuba's 5th president. A colleague of Alfredo Zayas, he was also a popular Liberal Party member, and a General during the Cuban War of Independence. General Machado was best known for rustling cattle from the Spanish Imperial Army’s livestock herd, with the good intention of feeding the poor during the revolution. This brazen act of kindness won him a great deal of support among the people. As President, he undertook many popular public projects, including the construction of a highway running the entire length of Cuba. During the beginning of his career as president, he had the National Capitol, as well as other government buildings, constructed in Havana. At first, he did much to modernize and industrialize the mostly agrarian nation. Benito Mussolini and his march on Rome impressed Machado. He admired Mussolini for demanding that liberal King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy elevate the Fascists to power, instead of the Socialists. Although Mussolini originally started his political career as a Socialist, with power and wealth he became a staunch anti-communist. When he was elected as the 27th Prime Minister, he turned Italy into a Totalitarian State. Machado’s ambitions and admiration of Mussolini caused him to emulate the dictator and to misread the importance of his own office. Becoming a “legend in his own mind,” he overreached and started down a slope that led to his administration’s failure and earned him the hatred of the Cuban people. From the very beginning, he fought with the labor leaders and anarchists for control of the labor unions, which represented the workers in the sugar industry. This brought him into a serious conflict with the plantation owners who were mostly wealthy Cuban families and Americans. Keeping the cost of labor down became a priority for the Sugar Barons, and Machado used patriotism as a tool to keep the workers in line. His dictatorial, arrogant ways created unrest within the labor force, as well as with the politically active university students.

America’s founding philosophy and the principles described above are under attack in our country. The idea of a Creator, for example, is replaced with secularism and atheism. Equality before the law is replaced with forced equality of outcomes. Instead of celebrating our national achievements and progress, many demonize conservatives, whites, men, heterosexuals, Jews, Christians, and the rich, seeking to hold them accountable for evils and injustices of the past. The inherent value of the individual is attacked and replaced with value that is based upon group identity. Reason and the pursuit of objective truth are mocked, and postmodern subjectivity, ugliness, and criticism take their place. The liberties of many are trampled because of the insistence of a loud, angry, and sometimes violent minority. Self-defense is criminalized while destruction of others’ personal property is permitted in the name of freedom, justice, and equality. Government overreach is now the rule rather than the exception.

When they are in power, whether in statehouses, Congress, or the White House, Republicans are magnetically drawn to practice political overreach along with scorched-earth tactics, be it through vote suppression, the K Street Project to force lobbying firms to hire only Republicans, or outing a covert CIA agent in their own administration to settle political scores, as happened to Valerie Plame. When they are out of power they focus single-mindedly on seizing up the wheels of government to prove to the American people that government just doesn’t work—at least, when the GOP is out of power. These take-no-prisoners tactics flow naturally from an embittered, Manichaean mind-set. This mentality has grave implications for the health of our constitutional system.

Secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. This promise is now a hallmark of any democracy—the protections of civil liberties under the law, and a limiting of the power of the government so people are shielded from an overreaching and authoritarian regime—something Gouverneur Morris said Hamilton feared until the very end. The text of the Preamble imagined America at its finest: Just. Peaceful. Good. And free.

The Second Amendment was designed not only to protect individual self-defense but also to serve as a broader safeguard against the potential overreach of that very government, ensuring that the people retained the ability to resist tyranny and uphold their freedoms.