Opinion by Bill Collier- There are two opposing forces when it comes to Trump: those for whom he is the great Satan and those who have made him a totem for popular rage against the machine.
Both sides insist you join them or you are not a good person. If you don’t want to convict Trump, you are complicit in his crimes. If you criticize Trump and don’t see in him a banner for freedom or whatever, then you are part of the nevertrump establishment.
Trump has never been the leader of a spiritually moral freedom movement, he has not been an example of spirituality or moral virtue, not in his mannerisms or behavior or even his policies. Whether or not he is a great Satan and badnic doesn’t matter for two reasons: most of his accusers are no better than him and have no right to judge in others what they constantly do and Trump is no longer President.
Whether Trump can be or will be something of a force or benefit to some level of rage against the machine remains unknown. I have never, ever, felt he was our deliverer or champion, if be “we” I mean the righteous who love God and wish to be free to worship and serve Him in peace.
I have felt Trump was a means of throwing the machine off and maybe buying some time for building a spiritual and moral freedom movement based on mutual self-reliance and support. I discovered during the Trump reign that the people who supported him, to a large degree, were happy to make him their totem, “trust the plan”, and sit back while he did the dirty work. They weren’t interested in starting a local freedom cluster of some kind to become self-sufficient or to urge local officials to pledge allegiance to the Bill of Rights.
I know. I reached hundreds of thousands of people with such messages and the response was generally apathetic. Constantly being told to trust the plan and to “vote red” instead of seeing people act was the entire result for four whole years. Oh, it was all going to be better in 2020 when Trump and the GOP swept all branches of government and removed the old establishment types.
I did not believe that would be sufficient even if it did happen, and to be honest I thought it would. I also thought that if it did happen it would not really change the trajectory toward a decline of decency and freedom, with the former being the cause of the latter. I had hoped that we would see a delay and a reprieve, but, honestly, 2016 WAS that delay and reprieve and, for the most part, “conservatives” kept their focus on national elections and fritted away the breathing room.
In 2018, the feckless Republicans led by Paul Ryan and his merry band of outer party collaborators with the left lost the House after having thwarted the President and thumbed their nose at his supporters. Trump did his part by trying to bully these folks and burn bridges with them in stunning ways that I would never have conceived any professional would have ever done.
During those two years, we built The Trump Revolution page on Facebook to over 110,000 followers and every effort to urge these folks to not just sit around but to redeem the time and build local freedom efforts was ignored.
We wanted Trump to succeed but we also felt that he was no totem or substitute for local freedom-building efforts. Trump bought us some breathing room, that was the main thing.
Now that breathing room may be gone soon or substantially lessened. Our options for building freedom and insulating our lives from the freedom takers will shrink as each new law, regulation, or executive order are promulgated.
My focus and concern has moved past Donald Trump. He had all the power for 2 years and most for 4 years and he wasn’t able to make substantial and lasting changes. And now they want to cancel him thoroughly and for good then use his damaged brand as a weapon to silence or deplatform anyone caught having been a supporter. Whoever you are, if you suddenly feel the need to publicly flagellate yourself over your former support of Donald Trump, or even your unwillingness to pillory him every day since he announced his run, then you are not safe.
A political persecution has context that always go beyond the facts of the case.
In my upcoming book detailing a future civilization that emerges by 2147 AD, I describe a Crown Commonwealth of Upadaria as something like a more globally distributed empire of freedom that fulfills America’s promise, albeit in a novel form of sovereignty not limited to territorial sovereignty and statehood as we understand it today. Nonetheless, it has some superficial elements and uses some of the language we associate with states and governments.
This is relevant to point out that were Donald Trump to be a high official in this Crown Commonwealth, and instead of having one powerful head it has a plurality of top Officials, namely 37 High Regents, his conduct and rhetoric would have resulted in a veto, censure, and eventually removal. In our terms of understanding the right conduct of high officials, neither Trump nor his chief accusers and prosecution would pass muster.
Indeed, in this fictional Crown Commonwealth, many of today’s highest officials would not be able to be qualified through the nobility of merit in the first place.
When I am being asked whether I think Trump deserved conviction in his impeachment trials I find myself disinterested. Conviction or not, it matters little to me. It means nothing either way, it is neither a moral statement against Trump nor a moral defense. The context of the political prosecution and the people doing the prosecution actually do and must matter.
The ones throwing stones have themselves made a hash of the US Constitution, a filthy rag out of the Bill of Rights, and a mockery of our core ideals such as Unity in diversity, Popular sovereignty, Democratic equality, and Rule of law. None of these jackals crying out for Trump’s head are without equal or worse amounts of grotesque unrighteous sin.
This doesn’t mean Trump wouldn’t be convicted of using or misusing, even abusing and debasing, his office if he were the Chancellor of the civic government of the Crown Commonwealth in our fictional future. Oh, he wouldn’t have made it too far at all. But the people prosecuting and judging him wouldn’t have made it far either.
When a band of jackals argue over who the biggest jackal is, I choose to lose interest. It’s not my fight. I would have removed them all for many instances of abuse of their office and gross neglect of the people who elected them.
This is not a case of me saying, “Trump did bad, but…” This is me saying: a band of jackals are fighting over which of them is a jackal. I just don’t see how this is interesting or useful.
I recognize in this show trial and blatant hypocrisy that convicting Trump and somehow righting a wrong and protecting the Republic has nothing at all to do with this process. I recognize that the prosecution are playing dirty pool and have zero moral basis to judge others. I recognize that their true aim isn’t anything more than neutralizing their opponents and creating a de facto “democratic” one-party state where they have monopoly power.
Call that authoritarianism or totalitarianism or dictatorship, or whatever. The end result is less freedom for me. Convicting Trump wouldn’t make my life better or more free or do one thing to protect us from unscrupulous jackals abusing their office to our collective disadvantage.
You cannot separate a political act from its potential effect, be it harm or benefit, or from those who are engaged. This isn’t about any kind of justice or morality. If it were, my interest would be higher and I would have studied all the claims and counter claims more thoroughly.
Trump has, for me, not been a champion as I would prefer, nor a disappointment. I was not surprised that elections at the national levels were insufficient to move the needle toward America becoming that which we have yet to achieve: an empire of freedom with liberty and justice for all. I was not surprised that Trump could neither fully achieve lasting results for his own revolution nor that, even if he had, it would be sufficient or entirely beneficial. Some of his aims and goals were contrary to a freedom agenda that would benefit all.
The disappointment I had and have and that I hope people can prove to be without merit is that many who love freedom predicated on righteous standards and virtue did not redeem the time when they had less opposition and more opportunities. They did not build deeper and broader connections beyond mere national elections, they focused almost solely on this and nothing else and, in the end, now face a wilderness experience.
I have already heard: 2022 is coming, we have to take back the House!
And so it continues. What little time we may have before the options for building freedom locally and independently will shrink to a minimum is being wasted. As we focus on “winning the House” we essentially concede the next two years. And when that fails, they will start talking about 2024. Two more years, as more and more gaps for freedom shrink and close and your options become more scarce and expensive and as your risk of being punished for speaking truth to power also grow.
I can predict people will not like this article. They will say: vote red in 2022, trust the Plan, Trump’s got this! They will say all we have the Supreme Court and we will win back the House and the Senate. The Democrats will back off knowing they will lose if they keep this up.
What they won’t do is change their routine and actually connect with local freedom builders. They won’t attend town meeting and city council meetings and join in demanding they sign off on a Bill of Rights Sanctuary Resolution. They won’t build victory gardens or their own emergency energy facilities or even form clubs to prepare for disasters (we are NOT talking “militias”).
Trump could have behaved more like a leader than a reality TV star and he could have urged a return to the basics of personal moral virtue and local self-reliance. He could have echoed the kinds of things we have been saying, and I am certain he saw some of them. Instead, Trump let himself become a totem and promised that, as long as people donated to him and attended his rallies and then protests in his name, that he would defeat the swamp and Make America Great Again.
This didn’t happen. It doesn’t matter if he tried or if for a time he had things moving in the right direction. Like Josiah, Trump thought if only he could get rid of the “high places” and those who built them that all would be well.
All wasn’t well because the deeper spiritual renewal wasn’t sought and the more practical local freedom movement wasn’t nurtured: people weren’t paid to professionally broadcast a vision and organize people and then mobilize them for action.
Our inability and unwillingness to at least FUND a local-to-national effort with professionals being paid to SERVE the movement, instead of the other way around, is what will be the end of freedom in this land and the end of our Union unless things change.
This has always been my focus and my prize and it has eluded me. Guys like Trump have always managed to suck all the air out of the room and garner all the support and energy for things that cannot last.
The left has built a solid local to national infrastructure and even its own culture-bearing institutions and has patiently done so do for almost 100 years. When they lose they look for 100 ways to pay 100 professionals to try different avenues and approaches to move the needle even just a little.
We look for big sensational wins and when that doesn’t happen we sulk away and take our marbles home with us. The PEOPLE we need to actually administrate a “revolution”, as the left has, are left to starve on the vine while the “well fed” right, the ones now screeching about Trump, live off the fat of the land and our donations and patronage.
After the loss, regardless of how you think it was orchestrated, we should have redoubled our financial support for efforts like The Freedomist. We had enough support to reach over 15 million people and begin to get a positive “America Is Good” message to counter the Cancel America crowd. But after the election when we could have kept the momentum going, support did not come from other sources and momentum was lost.
There is no digital to local movement to start to win back the land from the freedom takers one municipality and county at a time. We have no patience or wisdom in this. We, collectively, looked to Trump to save us when we should have been saving ourselves. We should have redeemed the time.
Is it too late?
First, I don’t think the current trajectory is straight down. I do think electoral victories are possible if we are vigilant against election and voter fraud in the places where we have control, e.g. where we have majorities. I do think the freedom takers will have setbacks and face real obstacles.
Second, the process of consolidation is not overnight and not all institutions, I’m looking at you Counties and States, are totally controlled by the freedom takers.
Third, technology is still a decentralization factor that it will be more and more difficult to contain and block. People will find ways to opt-out and to remove themselves from the jurisdiction or awareness of the freedom takers.
It isn’t over yet. But it will be, eventually. If we persist in our present trajectory as a dissenting movement that acts like the Washington Generals to the Haarlem Globetrotters, then within a few years, maybe less, most of the gaps for freedom will be blocked or closed. We will witness the final curtain for freedom and perhaps because of this the dissolving of our Union.
As for Trump, he is neither the greatest Satan nor the great deliverer. He is a deeply flawed man who fritted away his own own legacy because, having made himself a totem, he could only focus on that.
But Trump benefited from the short-sighted hero worship of his supporters, he didn’t create it. And his supporters genuinely believed and wanted a better world that they thought one man elected to the Presidency could deliver if only they gave him money and went to his rallies.
Trump is not the issue here, one way or another, and that has always been my stance on Trump. We are the issue. Our own laziness and desire to see others do our work for us and our own failures to take personal moral responsibility for freedom in our own backyard are the problem.
If anyone should have faced impeachment in a classic sense of the term, perhaps it is us.