We are all soldiers in a cold war provoked by our own government. My speech at Canon City CO, 5 July 2014.

The German general and military theorist Clausewitz said that "war is politics by other means." I have been traveling our country for the past year or so, from the East Coast to Nevada and from Florida and Texas to the upper Midwest and I would like to advance a corollary to that-- politics is war by another means.

Now there's hot wars and there's cold wars -- the difference being whether or not there's shooting going on. Of course in the famous cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, shooting would flare up between them and client states from time to time but never did they shoot at each other directly -- the reason was a doctrine called "mutual assured destruction." With nuclear weapons available on both sides, neither wished to risk annihilation. But the deterrence represented by mutual assured destruction rested upon the understanding of both parties that it was possible, and had either party not comprehended that in 1962 when I was ten, large swaths of this country would still be uninhabitable radioactive wasteland.

Another way of putting that is George Washington's stolen quote from the Roman Republic that those who wish for peace should be prepared for war.

John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, written in 1690, said,

The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they chuse and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society: for since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society, that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure, by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making; whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence.

I have been a soldier of liberty in a cold war with my own government for twenty years now. This was not my choice. I would rather have been left alone to tend to the truly important things -- life, love, family, faith, opportunity -- those wonderful gifts of God that the Founders expected would be secured by a government of limited and counter-balanced powers, that would both secure the rule of law and live within it. But the last three administrations run by the elites of both corrupt political parties have NOT left me alone -- just as they did not leave YOU alone. They have smashed flat the rule of law in service to their own power -- in furtherance of their insatiable huger for other peoples liberty and property and lives. Pat Buchanan once said that these parties were two wings of the same bird of prey, and he was right.

From Ruby Ridge, to Waco, to the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban to the deliberate failure to secure our borders, to the PATRIOT Act, to Obamacare, to NSA spying, to the use of the IRS against political opponents, to the creation and sustenance of the Frankenstein monster of a vertically-integrated militarized police state -- the appetites of the elites of both parties have put themselves into a continual war with the people. It may have been a cold war up to now but it could turn hot at any moment. Just ask the Bundys.

I am a soldier in that war. And want to, or not -- like it, or not -- SO, TOO, ARE ALL OF YOU.

We did not declare war on the federal government -- but by their actions, by their continued depredations our liberty, our property and the looting of the public treasury to fund those depredations, THEY have declared war on US. John Locke would tell you so were he here. So, too, would the Founders.

It is not a shooting war. Not yet. Although from Nevada to Connecticut to New York to Colorado, armed civil disobedience to Intolerable Acts and intolerable actions is growing. At the Bundy Ranch and elsewhere we stand facing each other -- the people and the government -- like two sides of an incipient bar fight and it would take only a stupid move on the part of somebody -- anybody -- to knock the beer bottle off the bar and start the donnybrook.

And a very bloody donnybrook it would be.

But we are not there yet.

Not yet.

And I pray to God we never are.

But that's not the way to bet.

So until someone on a federal paycheck, someone wearing a state police uniform, or merely an out-of-control local cop knocks the beer bottle off the bar, we have a cold war and what we have available to us is politics -- politics and preparedness. Preparedness for the day when politics fails. Preparedness so effective and so obvious to the other side that even the most clueless among them will understand that resort to violence really does amount to the assured destruction of all their tyrannical plans -- of their hunger to control the rest of us -- indeed, assured destruction of their own lives. Perhaps if they internalize THAT and ease up out of the faces of people who merely wish to be left alone -- well, perhaps we can get out of this situation they've made without a cold war turning into a hot one.

But until that happens we should understand that we are all soldiers in a cold war being waged by our own government against the people. We should understand that and we should act like it.

For we are all in fact two countries now, sharing a common border and (mostly) a common language, but divided along the answer to this fundamental question -- Does the government serve the people or do the people serve the government?

This is not a question whose different answers can be compromised or finessed or even ignored. It is either one or the other and it cannot be both. So when Harry Reid promises us in the wake of the Bundy standoff that "this isn't over," he's right. It can never be over until one side or the other wins. It can never be over until we answer that question -- for good or evil -- and it will either be the Founders; answer or King George's. Or, I should say, King Barack's.

For when we see the actions of the federally empowered militarized police today, or understand the tyranny behind the IRS attacks on the Tea Parties, or any of hundreds of other abuses and usurpations of power, it is impossible not to see the wisdom of my friend Billy Beck's observation that "today all politics is dress rehearsal for civil war."

And over all it -- over all of us -- hangs the imminent threat of systemic economic collapse represented by $60 Trillion in debt that is the product of these evil elites of both corrupt political parties.

And when that anvil falls -- when their rotten system collapses -- it will smash flat the guilty and innocent alike.

So we must be there, we cold warriors of liberty and the Founders' Republic. We must be there, ready to save what can be saved. For there is no one else to do it.

By politics or force of arms -- and it is the tyrant's choice -- we must be there.

We must be ready.

For there is no one else.