Free Citizens Do Not Kneel
In the last couple of weeks we have witnessed people, most of them white, kneeling before black protestors and activists as a supposed gesture of repentance for their crimes of “white privilege” and tolerating “systemic racism.”...
But the current manifestation is more significant and dangerous. It has taken place amidst violent widespread rioting and looting and assaults, and so these acts of kneeling are a form of tribute exacted by the sheer power of destruction wrought by the rioters and their “peaceful” abettors. As such, they undermine the very foundation of citizen self-rule and political freedom: Government by laws, offices, and free deliberation rather than by the whims and failings of one man; and by accountability to the sovereign people and their laws, instead of submission to violent coercion....
We have been witnessing for decades now the erosion of that foundational principle central to our own political order. Progressivism has relentlessly worked to create a technocracy that concentrates and centralizes power in an elite, weakening the checks on ambitious power provided by federalism and divided government.
Hence the diminishment of the states, civil society, churches, businesses, and individuals––their freedom circumscribed and lessened by a regulatory regime that, as Tocqueville foresaw, “covers the surface of a society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” This dismantling of the Constitutional order was accelerated by the Obama administration, but was slowed by the Democrats’ loss of the House and then the Senate. The election of Donald Trump has marked a vigorous pushback, which is why the bipartisan managerial elite is striving so mightily to prevent his reelection. The riots and protest mark the latest front in that war....
The riots, moreover, are another assault on the nexus of political equality and freedom. Identity grievance politics is predicated on inequality: selected victims of history and fantasies such as “systemic racism” are “more equal” than others. They have the right, bestowed by sympathetic state governors, mayors, denizens of federal agencies, media, academics, activists, and the Democrat Party, to vandalize and loot, obstruct police attempting to restore order and protect other citizens, and do so with minimum accountability at best...
What we are seeing here with these unequal applications of Constitutional rights is the expansion of tyranny, authority, and power not given by free citizens in elections, but seized by force with the help of state and federal office-holders desperate to keep Donald Trump from being reelected. Only then can they take up again their concentration and expansion of power that our Constitution was explicitly designed to prevent...