The trajectory of a republic's fall into tyranny - or at very least degenerate kleptocracy - is a well-trodden path, and the Founders knew that sooner or later ours would walk it. The point of all these laws, all these checks and balances was not to serve as a perpetual motion machine that would make our society eternally invulnerable to the horrors of history, but rather an incubator to produce strong citizens who can protect freedom for themselves even when every tool they inherit fails them.

The infant republic survived many illnesses, endured divisions and catastrophes, and learned from self-inflicted disgraces. It grew and prospered, matured and shone upon the world in ways that would have brought joy to every luminary of liberty going back to Solon. America's achievements will be remembered even after its name is corrupted beyond recognition, when bizarre peoples of incomprehensible civilizations in places far from this badly mangle our history in ludicrous popular entertainments. But now comes the Graduation Exam.

Our national childhood is at an end. We have everything we need within ourselves to not merely survive as a free republic, but become something amazing beyond even our own dreams. Past generations of Americans have given us all the wisdom we need, sacrificed to stop ancient rivalries in the Old World from smothering the future of the New, and gave of themselves in civil protest - sometimes giving their lives - that we would become a more unified, higher people.

But that only happens if we recognize when the question is called - if we see when history is presenting us with a fork in the road, and understand that the choice is ours alone, not of any institution or illusory power. WHEN, not if, the regime of Donald J. Trumpler - an unelected tyrant with zero loyalty to or concern for this country - acts in direct violation of the law, and the cowards, collaborators, and authoritarian martinets blind to everything that underpins liberty tell you that it is regrettable but you must obey...do you?

Do you make yourself an accomplice to crimes against your own innate rights - against the very concept of rights - rather than acknowledge what it is you face, and stand tall? If you obey, then you are conceding a legitimacy that is not there, making lawful what violates the very foundation of law, and confirming once and for all the failure of the American Experiment in yourself. You do not recognize that you have a choice; do not recognize what the choice is; do not understand what freedom is, or what you are called upon to do in its defense. To you, power is authority, and fear is wisdom.

Or perhaps you do recognize the choice, and wish to resist, but you hedge: I will not obey, but will submit. I will protest, but allow myself to be beaten and rounded up, misunderstanding that pacifism only works if the power it defies can be shamed or overruled by one who can. The malevolent nihilist tyrant and its sycophant slave-hordes does not hear your moral arguments, and is not impressed or appeased by your willingness to be their victim - in fact, they find it all quite funny. They would sneer at your weakness and do as they please without consequence until someone stronger than you is forced to act in your defense, rescuing you (or the umpteen millionth victim after you are long dead) from your cowardly Pontius Pilate moral buck-passing.

The other way is why you have liberty in the first place: To recognize what is self-evident about the rights of human beings, and insist - not request, not argue, but demand with full determination - that they be respected. Chief among them, and guarantor of all others, is this: That people have the absolute, unalterable, inalienable right to choose the people who govern them. There is no authority outside of this, and power is not authority. All deviations from and corruptions of this self-evident fact in our existing politics are precisely that: Deviations and corruptions, all of which have added up to bring matters to this head.

So now an unelected, treasonous, nihilistic tyrant will be wielding the power of the Executive branch of the United States. He will ignore every law he dislikes and act to the full limit of his power in the full knowledge that he has no authority to leverage. When that happens, each and every citizen will be confronted by an opportunity to choose: An institution under tyrannical occupation will try to tax them, command them to do something - perhaps something innocuous at first - or in any other way that seems normal, require their cooperation. And that is the test.

The test is not whether you hypothetically inform on Mexican teenage diarist "Ana Franco" hiding in an attic while the Gestapo tries to find her - if matters get that far, then the test was a long time ago and you already failed. The test is when an illegal regime with no right - NO RIGHT - to do anything whatsoever with the Executive powers of the United States government tells you (or even just politely requests) that you do something acknowledging their right to wield those powers. Do you file income tax returns to such a regime? Do you obey illegitimate judges appointed by it? Do you file paperwork with institutions that are no longer operating under the Constitution from which their sole authority derived?

Granting even that level of obedience is inviting a vampire into your house: You are powerless. The slope after that is not slippery, it is vertical. If you obey people with no right to demand in the first place, then you concede their right to do anything. If being unelected and completely ignoring the Constitution is irrelevant, then you must obey them no matter what their commands are - and you will, because you've already demonstrated that your idea of law and governance is nihilistic, rooted only in whoever holds power.

But power without authority has only one tool at its disposal to deal with defiance: Violence. So you defy, and you know that passive submission to their violence will have no effect because they are fascists who believe that ends justify means without caveat or exception. You reject the demands of a regime that has no right to make them, and they send people in uniforms to enforce their commands - maybe people you know; maybe your neighbors; maybe people related to you.

And then you face the same choice that the Founders and the Union soldiers faced, because their friends, neighbors, and relatives wore uniforms of tyranny too: Does freedom perish right then and there so that you can avoid choosing, or is it your turn to give back so that future generations are free?

Donald Trumpler craves power with all the wretched darkness of his being, and his master in the Kremlin craves it even more and has even less concern for the consequences to Americans. So it is inevitable that they will demand obedience. It is inevitable that if you refuse, they will attempt to force you. It is inevitable that if you passively submit, their power will not be affected in any way, because fascism is an absolute break from all rules of civilization.

So the Test approaches, quickly or slowly. The people confronting you with it probably will not themselves be fascists - they will consider themselves "reasonable" folk just trying to do what they consider their job to be. It's "regrettable," but "I'm just following orders." Some may indeed be fascists, but most are just blind or cowardly, and we must do everything in our power to reason with them; to awaken their humanity and awareness; to make them aware that THEY too have a choice in what they do. But realistically, in most cases, they will obey illegal orders as people like them almost always do throughout history - they will fail their own version of the test.

And then it once again falls to you. Sooner or later, it is your turn. If people who are not legitimate parts of your government command you to do something, do you obey simply because they threaten? If you refuse and they act in force to compel your obedience, do you surrender and in so doing reinforce their power? Or do you make the choice that past generations made, so that future ones can even know what freedom is, let alone have a chance at it?

The price is terrible no matter what, so the question is "Who are you?" What do you believe? Will you defend the physical, tangible fact of freedom rather than just idly praising it in words on its epitaph? Are you content for the world to have no future but a downward spiral into entropy and degradation, or are you more than that?

You voted with ballots, and these manics ignored the outcome and will now try to impose their will with guns. So choose: Is there anything behind your ballot but an idle opinion, for any lawless animal to trample while you weep for a shattered illusion? Or is there something fundamental behind it - something that goes to the core of who and what you are?

Fight for freedom and you have already won, because freedom is in the choice. Fight for the future, so that there is one. Fight for right, because it is right.

That's all the best in this country has ever been - behind all the flags and the eagles and the other crap, there was just that: The choice.

Recognize when you are confronted by it, and make it with a full heart.

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Freedom Forever

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This has been a communiqué from the Allied democratic resistance at This Is Not A Game.