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Jon Rappoport is a good guy and a smart guy. He rightly sounds the alarm in THIS PIECE about post-modern intrusions by the imperial government into and against civil liberty in seeming defiance of the old, faded parchment. However, he gets his core points backward.
THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF THE CONSTITUTION WAS TO UNDERMINE TRUST IN GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS.
That’s why separation of powers and checks and balances were created.
That’s why the new central government was limited.
That’s why the Bill of Rights was explicitly stated. Read the Rights; they all involve freedom from criminal impositions by government.
The Founders held a massive suspicion of top-down power. They knew the history of Europe.
The Constitution had nothing to do with unexamined trust in government institutions.
That’s simply incorrect. The whole purpose of the constitution was to CREATE the very same central government that conservatives, libertarians, and many liberals complain about today. Without the constitution, there would be no need to check or balance powers, and no institutions to trust, fear, benefit from, or die because of. While the founders certainly knew more history than the average Amerikant today, they were possessed of (or by) a massive desire for top-down power – so long as that power flowed from them.
Recall that those men were sent to the “Constitutional Convention” in order to only tweak a few issues with the vastly superior Articles of Confederation. The Articles created not so much of a government as an alliance of governments, and it was so happily weak that it was difficult for its officers to perform their ultra-limited duties under said weakness. The imposition of a completely new, centralized, and strong system was tantamount to treason; that the monster was approved by the several states, who were to be, in time, stripped of their powers under the thing, remains a dark mystery.
And, those rights enshrined in the great (worthless) Bill? Remember that they were added, years later, as an afterthought so as to appease the lingering fears of some anti-federalists. Jon’s article wouldn’t be necessary had those additions been in any way effective. The federal cult is not out of control in defiance of the amendments, but rather, because of the base document they weakly amended.
I realize this is difficult to accept, even as the proofs are, as they once wrote, “self-evident.” I too long labored under the wizard’s spell of a dead, useless, yellowed scrap of paper. (When one puts it that way, it makes the realization seem all the worse).
Something else that nobody wants to discuss is that whatever original authority we’re thinking of, it was all designed by and for a people who were White European Christians living in a predominantly English culture. It’s not 1787 anymore and a few things have changed. As such, as the identity of the nation has been lost, fretting over the laws of the lost nation is moot.
After the war and the general calamity, this now ancient episode of deception should be recalled. And condemned. And avoided when new governments are formed by the reformed American People.