Telling the truth to ourselves, no matter how unpleasant it is. Speech in Big Spring, Howard County TX, 21 June 2014

Not too bad for a speech I wrote on about two and a half hours sleep.

I'd like to open my speech today with two shout outs, one to my most devoted sponsors, the One Hundred Heads Life and Casualty Company and the other to the twice-elected President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, on the singular milestone in his career, or indeed of anyone who has ever sat in the Oval Office. Sometime later this month, if my estimate is correct, Mr. Obama will have presided over the ONE HUNDRED MILLIONTH FBI FIREARM SALES BACKGROUND CHECK. Now, for a guy who's only been in office for a term and a half, that's quite an accomplishment as a firearm salesman representing the Unintended Consequences Armaments Corporation, he has managed to put even Bill Clinton in the deep shade.

Barack, you're the biggest and best firearm salesman in world history and THAT'S some kind of legacy, so I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart on behalf of the armed citizenry of the United States. And we won't even mention what you've done for ammunition sales. But thanks for everything, Barack. You may go down in history as this country's worst President ever, but you are ONE HELL OF AN ARMAMENTS SALESMAN.

You know, in doing my research before coming here today, I noted with interest that one of the major employers in Big Spring these days is the Federal Correctional Institution. This interested me because I have so many people recently who are interested in putting me inside of one those places for what they imagine is my sedition or even incitement to insurrection, not to mention their irritation at my violation of some newly oppressive citizen disarmament state laws. To those who have been worried in the past about the present administration closing Guantanamo Bay, I always reassure them, "Don't worry. The Obama administration will cease trying to close Guantanamo the moment they figure out that they can imprison US there." So, for those of you who work at the Big Spring FCI, maybe I'll see you through the bars one day. Or not.

Folks, I am honored to be here today to speak on the subject of "Restoring the Constitution," if for no other reason than that task is what I have devoted the past two decades of my life trying to accomplish. This is a subject that consumes the attention of many Americans these days all over the country. Yesterday I stood outside town in the dust of the Old Comanche Trail. Last weekend I gave a speech on the same subject in Massachusetts almost literally in the shadow of the famous Springfield Armory where the men of Shay's Rebellion contended for their vision of what they believed they had fought the Revolution for. On Patriots Day, I was out in the Nevada desert, speaking on the same subject on the Bundy Ranch. In the last year I have given speeches and talks at the Alamo, the steps of the Connecticut state house in Hartford and other places from Alabama to New York state to Temple Texas. Next month I'm going to Colorado and the month after that I'll be smuggling myself and some thirty round magazines into New York just to twist Governor Cuomo's tail a bit. In each place comes the question, "How can we restore the Constitution?" How can we return to the Founders' vision of a government of limited powers, which preserves liberty and property while upholding the rule of law and most importantly operating within it? For this administration, this regime, seems to operate ever more increasingly as a lawless gang bent not on the rule of law, but rather the rule of man, which is to say the law of the jungle enforced by the iron fist of government power.

But how DO we restore the Constitution? I think first and foremost we must tell the truth, not only to those who we are trying to convince to join us but, as well, to those who are trying to defeat us However, and most importantly, we must first tell the truth to ourselves, no matter how unpleasant it is.

As Patrick Henry said in his immortal speech to the Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775:

"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth -- to know the worst and to provide for it. I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past."

And what, I ask you, have been our experiences of the recent past? I will be bluntly honest for I know of no other way to say what is on my heart. We are at present two peoples, two countries really, living within a common border and sharing (mostly) a common language but divided upon the answer to this question: does the government serve the people or do the people serve the government? This is not a question that the answer can be finessed, negotiated or ignored. It is one or the other, That of individual liberty as the Founders intended or of collectivist power in service to a few. Every smaller question we struggle wit is merely a subset of this larger question, every answer a component, for good or ill, of the ultimate answer upon which hinges the fates of our liberty, our property, our lives and those of our children and their children. Many of you will admit that, in your heart of hearts, you know this to be true. Yet we shrink from the honest conclusion.

And that conclusion is that such mutually exclusive worldviews cannot long coexist without one or the other winning out. History tells us -- the Founders would tell us themselves were they here -- that neither side of such a divide will surrender without a fight, which means there WILL be a fight. To think otherwise is to whistle past the graveyard of our own history and that of republics dead, gone and turned to blood-stained dust when they could not overcome similar corruption and collectivist rot from within combined with barbaric attack from without.

We like to think that all our fellow Americans -- even those who plainly state that they are committed to stealing our liberty and our property and attempting to control our very lives -- are merely suffering from differences of opinion that can be overcome by the right mix of persuasion or electoral politics. Yet how many of us have tried such methods with every fiber of our being and fallen short, not because we were wrong, but because those of the other side were impervious to such arguments, such tactics, for they believe completely in their right to their appetites for our liberty, our property and our lives with all the religious fervor of a pagan worship of naked power wrapped in a catechism of lies. They believe that the people serve the government, their vision of government, and you'd better do what they say or else.

The Founders had a name for people with such appetites, and it is honest to call them by it. If as the Bible says that by their fruits ye shall know them then let us call them what they are -- domestic enemies of the Constitution. The fact that many of them took an oath to defend the same Founders' Republic that they daily attack should be proof enough for an honest observer to admit that the term fits such people. And if no oath, no law, no court restrains such appetites then what will? The Founders had an answer, and you know it too, today, in your hearts, if you are honest enough to admit it.

Let us be honest enough to admit first to ourselves, and then to proclaim to those domestic enemies of liberty and thence to the world, that failing all other appeals to peaceful means that the Founders' solution to such tyranny is still available, still potent, still waiting. FOR WHEN DEMOCRACY TURNS TO TYRANNY THE ARMED CITIZENRY STILL GETS TO VOTE. This is the promise, the warning, the threat embodied by the Gadsden flag of our Founders -- "Don't tread on me." Don't tread on us.

This does not mean that the time for politics, for moral suasion is over. It is not. In many ways and many places we are winning those battles, which is why those domestic enemies of the Constitution continue to seek to disarm us with arguments less and less cloaked in their alleged good intentions and more and more in plain naked power. Such cries are in fact maneuvers of, and evidence of, increasing desperation. I told you that last weekend I was in the Northeast, speaking to firearm owners who in a very real sense now live behind enemy lines. In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, their states passed laws -- Intolerable Acts, the Founders would have called them -- demanding firearm registration and confiscation and making resistance to those "common sense gun laws" a felony. And do you know what happened? Fully eighty five percent of Connecticut citizens, threatened with arrest by their new law, have not complied but resisted. Eighty five percent. In New York the number likely approaches NINETY FIVE percent. Yet the politicians, having declared their appetites, their desires to work their tyrannical will upon their own fellow citizens, are hesitating to take a bite. In fact, they don't know whether to defecate or go blind. They are scared spitless -- and yes, I said sPit less -- by the thought that enforcing such laws on an uncowed, armed people might have personal consequences for them. They are beginning to realize too late that the rule of law as crafted by the Founders protects THEM from us far more than it protects US from them.

These men and women -- these practitioners of a godless secular religion which worships government so that they may increase their own power -- these tyrant wannabes who know of no argument of law, or history, or logic, or even common sense that could blunt their appetites, are now sitting at the feast table that they so carefully made AND THEY DARE NOT TAKE A BITE FOR FEAR OF THEIR INTENDED MEAL BITING THEM BACK.

THAT is the Founders' argument. That is what we must be honest enough to admit to ourselves, and then to proclaim to those domestic enemies of the Constitution and to the world. Forget all the arguments, all the emotion, all the wasted effort we have spent trying to convince people who will not, cannot, be convinced contrary to their own tyrant's religion and the rumbling of their own appetites for other people's liberty and property and lives. Forget that, but remember this, in all honesty, that in the end, our liberty is defended by the cold calculation that every criminal, whether of the common class or the Constitutional class, makes when he sizes up a victim, whether that victim be a person walking down the street or a nation at a crossroads -- will my victim resist? Do they have the means to resist? Do they have the WILL to resist? Can I con my victim into putting down what weapons he possesses? If you convince the criminal that he will personally lose more than he gains from such a transaction, he will resign himself to finding another victim, or, in the case of the wannabe tyrant, to retiring to play golf in Hawaii. And that's the honest truth about how to defend and restore the Constitution.

So if you wish to stay free, prepare to resist, defy, evade and smuggle. The Founders did. The enemies of liberty will certainly never be convinced by anything less.

Thank you.