T h e   T r i p w i r e
    by D. van Oort & J.F.A. Davidson
    From The Resister 
    (see statement at bottom of article)

    "How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would 
things have 
    been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to 
make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?"
    Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Gulag Archipelago



    What would be the tripwire resulting in open rebellion?  Examining 
the Bill of Rights, and considering EXISTING laws only, and not failed 
attempts,  you will find that every clause has been violated to one 
degree or another.

    Documenting those violations would fill volumes, and it is 
important to remember that only government can violate the exercise of 
unalienable individual rights and claim immunity from retribution. We omit 
martial law or public suspension of the Constitution as a tripwire. The 
overnight installation of dictatorship obviously would qualify as "the 
tripwire,"  but is not likely to occur. What has occurred, what is 
occurring, is the
    implementation of every aspect of such dictatorship without an 
overt declaration. The Constitution is being killed by attrition. The 
Communist Manifesto is being installed by accretion. Any suggestion that 
martial law is the tripwire leads us to the question: what aspect of 
martial law justifies the first shot?

    For much the same reason, we will leave out mass executions of the 
Waco variety. For one thing, they are composite abuses of numerous 
individual rights. Yet, among those abuses, the real tripwire may exist. 
For another, those events are shrouded in a fog of obfuscation and 
outright lies. Any rebellion must be based on extremely hard and known facts. 
Similarly, no rebellion will succeed if its fundamental reasons for 
occurring are not explicitly identified. Those reasons cannot be 
explicitly identified if, in place of their identification, we simply point to a 
composite such as Waco and say, "See, that's why; figure it out." Any 
suggestion that more Wacos, in and of themselves, would be the tripwire, 
simply leads us back again to the question: what aspect of them 
justifies rebellion?

    For the same reasons, we leave out a detailed account of Ayn Rand's 
identification of the four essential characteristics of tyranny. She 
identified them quite correctly, but together they are just another 
composite from which we must choose precipitating causes. These 
characteristics are: one-party rule, executions without trial for political 
offenses, expropriation or nationalization of private property, and "above 
all," censorship.

    With regard to the first characteristic of tyranny, what is the 
real difference between the Fabian socialist Republican Party and the 
overtly [Bolshevik] socialist Democratic Party? Nothing but time. Regarding 
the second we have the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team and the ATF's 
enforcement branch. In action they simply avoid the embarrassment of a trial.   

    Regarding the third, we have asset forfeiture "laws," the IRS, the 
EPA, the FCC, the
    FDA, the Federal Reserve, the Justice Department's Antitrust 
Division, and  a myriad of other executive branch agencies, departments, and 
commissions whose sole function is to regulate business and the 
economy. Regulating business for the common good (fascism) is no different in 
principle than outright nationalization (communism).

    However, the fourth characteristic of tyranny, censorship, is the 
obvious primary tripwire. When ideology and the reporting of facts and 
how-to instructions are forbidden, there is nothing remaining but to 
fight.  Freedom of speech and persuasion -- the freedom to attempt to 
rationally convince willing listeners -- is so fundamental an individual 
right that without it no other rights, not even the existence of rights, 
can be enforced,  claimed, debated, or even queried.

    Does this censorship include the regulation of the "public" 
airwaves by  the FCC, as in the censorship which prohibits tobacco companies 
from advertising -- in their own defense -- on the same medium which is 
commanded by government decree to carry "public service" propaganda 
against them?  Does it include federal compulsion of broadcasters to air 
politically-correct twaddle for "The Children"? Does it include the 
Orwellian "Communications Decency Act"? Does it include any irrationalism 
"sexual harassment" or tribalist "hate speech" laws which prohibit 
certain spoken words among
    co-workers? The answer: unequivocally yes.

    Although the above do not pertain to ideological or political 
speech, yet they are censorship and are designed to intimidate people into 
the acceptance of de facto censorship. We say that any abrogation of 
free speech, and any form of censorship, which cannot be rectified by the 
soap box, the ballot box, or the jury box, must be rectified by the 
cartridge box -- or lost forever.

    Americans have been stumbling over tripwires justifying overt 
resistance for well over 130 years. On one hand, we submit that gun 
confiscation is a secondary tripwire only. It is second to censorship because 
if speech is illegal we cannot even discuss the repeal of gun control, 
or any other population controls. If only guns are illegal, we may still 
convince people to repeal those laws. On the other hand, gun 
confiscation may be a
    sufficient tripwire because the primary one, censorship, can be 
fully implemented only after the citizenry has been disarmed.

    Resistance, in the context of this article, means those legitimate 
acts by individuals which compel government to restrict its activities 
and authority to those powers delegated to the Congress by the people 
in the Constitution.

    The distinction to be drawn here is that the objective of patriotic 
resistance is to restore original Constitutional government, not change  
the form of government. To this end we believe:

    The enforcement of any laws -- local, state, or federal -- that 
through  the action or inaction of the courts makes nugatory the 
individual means of resisting tyranny, justifies resistance.

    The operative terms of the above statement are the parameters that 
must be defined and understood if resistance to tyranny and despotism 
is to be honorable, and for the cause of individual liberty, rather than 
anarchy resulting from a new gang of tyrants. Rebellion can never be 
justified so long as objective means of redress are available, which are 
themselves not subverted or rendered impotent by further or parallel 
subjective legislation.

    The goal of patriots throughout the country must be the restoration 
of objective constitutional law and order. The failure to enforce a 
subjective law (i.e. the Communications Decency Act) does not justify that 
law existing, but it also does not justify resistance. This is because 
non-enforcement leaves avenues of redress, including the forbidden 
activity itself, still available. Should a lower court uphold or ignore a 
case that challenges subjective law, peaceable means of redress are 
still open by higher or lateral courts in another jurisdiction.

    However, should the U.S. Supreme Court uphold subjective laws, or 
refuse to hear the cases challenging them, then the legislative, 
executive, and judicial branches have all failed to guarantee individual 
liberty, from  the widest principles to the smallest details. A single 
refusal by the highest court in the land to overturn a whim-based subjective 
law, or to refuse to hear the case, is sufficient to justify resistance 
to that law because there is simply nowhere left to turn for further 
attempts at redress. At such time nobody is morally bound by that law. 
Tyranny gets one chance per branch.

    America is either a constitutional republic or it is not. If we can 
restore our republic it will ultimately occur through reason, and 
reason will then lead our representatives to make unconstitutional those 
laws which, by any objective standard of justice, should have never been 
considered in the first place. However, we cannot assert our claim to 
restore our liberty if we but accede to a single socialist construct. 
Freedom and serfdom cannot coexist. We cannot have it both ways.

    Life, and the means to preserve it, cannot coexist with 
disarmament. Liberty, and its rational exercise, cannot coexist with subjective 
constraints. Property, and its acquisition, use, and disposal cannot 
coexist with expropriation. The federal government's first task is to obey 
the Constitution. It has refused. Our first task as free men is to 
force the government to obey it again. The Constitution of the United 
States of America is a constraint on the federal government, not on the 
individual.

    Likewise, the constitutions of the various states are constraints 
on the state governments, not on the individual. The Constitution 
contains many provisions allowing the violation of our natural rights as free 
men by immoral and unethical men in government. The true heroes of the 
ratification debates were the Antifederalists, who secured Federalist 
guarantees that  the Bill of Rights would amend the Constitution.

    To their undying credit, the Federalists lived up to their promise. 
Nevertheless, only after constitutional limitations on government have 
been restored in their original form can we consider amending the 
Constitution  to redress its very few remaining defects (for example, the 
absence of a separation of state and the economy clause).

    Laws that make nugatory the means of resisting tyranny and 
despotism determine the tripwire. The creeping legislative erosion of the 2nd 
Amendment is not the only tripwire that justifies resistance. We submit  
that any gun control is a secondary tripwire. Not only because it can 
be effortlessly evaded, but also because it strengthens our cause. It is 
second only to censorship. If speech is illegal we can discuss neither 
repeal of gun control, or the repeal of any other unconstitutional 
"law."   Censorship is not a tripwire, it is THE tripwire. Thus, by 
default, censorship morally justifies rebellion.

    Under censorship, no other rights, including the right to be free 
from censorship, can be advocated, discussed, or queried. It is 
incorrect to say that after censorship comes utter subjugation.   Censorship is 
utter subjugation. There is no greater usurpation of liberty while 
remaining alive. 

    After censorship come the death camps, and they are not a 
prerequisite of censorship, they are merely a symptom of it. Censorship qua 
censorship is sufficient in itself to justify open rebellion against any 
government that legislates, enforces, or upholds it.

    However, that is not the half of it. Censorship is alone in being 
the only violation of individual rights that does not require actual 
enforcement or challenges in court, before rebellion is justified.   When 
the government forbids you to speak or write, or use your own or a 
supporter's property to address willing listeners or readers, that 
government has openly and forcibly declared that the art of peaceful persuasion 
is dead and will not be tolerated. Upon that very instant, all peaceful 
avenues of redress have
    been closed and the only possible method of regaining that liberty 
is  force.
    Whenever we give up that force, we are not only ruined, we deserve 
to be ruined.

    Censorship is already being "legally" imposed through accretion by 
compromisers, appeasers, and pragmatists within government at all 
levels.  Note the demands by "progressive" organizations and self-appointed 
"civil rights" groups to ban so-called "hate" speech (they mean thought 
and debate), or "extreme" language (they mean principled dissent), or 
"paramilitary" books (they mean the knowledge of how to resist). When 
our government imposes censorship, it will be because our ability to use 
force to resist censorship no longer exists. 

    Buying copies of The Resister is  not yet prohibited; buying 
machine guns already is. Unwarranted search for unlicensed books has not yet 
occurred; unwarranted search for unlicensed weapons has already begun. 
As your unalienable right of peaceable  discussion and dissent is being 
daily abridged, your right to peaceably assemble and
    associate in advocacy of your own self-defense, according to your 
own free will, has already been outlawed (courtesy of ADL's "model" 
anti-militia legislation).

    Unconstitutional federal agencies now arm themselves with weapons 
that you may not own, and train in tactics that you are prohibited from 
mastering.  Before a government is sure you won't resist, it will make 
sure you can't resist.

    The most irrational, contradictory, short-range, whimsical notion 
possible to men who claim the unalienable right to resist tyrannical 
government is the notion that they must first let their ability to resist 
be stripped  from them before they have the right to use it.  This is 
the argument of  so-called conservatives who pish-tosh the notion of 
legislative "slippery-slopes,"  and sycophantic adherents of a supreme 
Court that has no constitutionally delegated authority to interpret the 
Constitution in the first place. 

    We reject the notion of mindless compliance with subjective "laws."  
Subjective laws must be resisted on metaphysical and epistemological 
principles,  moral and ethical grounds, and on constitutional and 
historical precedence.

    No rational man desires ends without means. No rational man can be 
faced with his own imminent subjugation and truly believe that, once 
things are as bad as they can get, "sometime" "someone" will do 
"something" "somehow" to counteract that trend.  Any man who counsels another to 
appeal to those mystical equivalents of "divine intervention" for 
"deliverance" from  tyranny is our enemy by all principles conceivable 
within the scope of rational human intelligence.

    The time to organize resistance is not after censorship, but before 
it.   The time to prepare resistance is when our ability to resist is 
being threatened. The time to begin resistance is when that threat has 
been upheld or ignored by the courts. The unalienable rights that 
safeguard our ability to resist are limited to those which, if not violated, 
allow us to plan and use all materials necessary for resistance. We 
submit that only the following meet that criteria:

    * freedom of speech and of the press, and the right to peaceably 
assemble--so that we may advocate ideas, report and discuss news, and 
instruct others how to carry out resistance activities (1st Amendment);

    * the right to keep and bear arms -- so that we may have 
appropriate force in our hands should we need it, and be trained to use such 
force as necessary (2nd Amendment);

    * the right to be let alone -- so that we may be free of government 
intrusion in our lives, liberty, and property (3rd Amendment);

    >* the right to be secure in our persons, dwellings, papers, and 
property from unwarranted, unaffirmed searches and seizures -- so that 
our records, ideological materials, and weapons will remain in our hands 
(4th  Amendment).

    For the purpose of this discussion, we believe that no other rights 
are relevant because if every individual right other than those four 
were violated -- although it would be an unspeakably evil act on the part 
of the government, justifying immediate and unforgiving resistance -- 
their abridgement would not effect our ability to resist.  If any of the 
first four amendments are infringed by legislation, enforced by 
executive power, and their abrogation is upheld or ignored by the courts, 
unremitting, forcible resistance, and aid and comfort to its 
citizen-soldiers, is a moral imperative for every single person who believes that 
life, liberty, and property are unalienable and self-existing, and not 
grants of government privilege.