Tyranny, Ancient and Modern

Ancient Tyranny

Samuel Adams, widely remembered as the Father of the American Revolution, must have felt a cold chill in the Spring of 1768, when the fifty gun Romney sailed into Boston harbor.  In some ways, Adams had been preparing for this moment for well over two decades.  As a Harvard scholar he was drawn to debates about the limits of civil authority.  As a young man, he saw his father’s fortune put under seige by royal attacks on the land bank — a New England scheme to provide paper currency in the absence of British coin.  (Imagine trying to pay all of your debts by trading in corn, rum, and cider.  In ways eerily similar to today’s crypto-currency systems, the citizens of Massachusetts simply wanted a measure of value they could depend on.)   The King and his ministers would have nothing to do with an independent currency system in America, and they ruthlessly punished investors in the scheme.  Samuel Adams, in subsequent years, appeared at an estate auction and defied anyone to purchase any of the Adams family property offered up for sale  by way of punishment.  The force of his personality, and his argument, carried the day.

..As would be the case in dozens of confrontations over the next several years.  Adams successfully argued that if a government could defy Magna Carta, and take a man’s property and income without his consent, he was little more than a slave.  At first, the argument felt like something of a stretch, since the proposed taxes were very small, and many of them not even directly paid, since they were buried deep within a cycle of wholesale transactions, paid as duty by merchants long before the consumer ever saw the goods in question.  When a more direct tax was proposed, the Stamp Act, Benjamin Franklin assumed that opposing it would be something like “hindering the sun’s setting.”

In the face of this inertia, Adams didn’t blink, reminding his fellow colonials that they had already paid for the previous war in blood and fortune, that small taxes would lead to large ones, that “virtual representation” in parliament was an insult, and that the North American continent was beginning to look like a revival of feudal aristocracy.  Very few colonies actually had charters guaranteeing representation and those were always in danger of being revoked.  The King meant, clearly, to settle North America by giving it to privileged sycophants.

The rhetoric worked, as did Samuel’s measured strategy of making the British draw first blood.  Symbolic protests were abundant: In the summer of 1765, effigies of the stamp master were hanged, but the far more effective tool was economic.  Adams persuaded his fellow colonials to stop buying British goods.  This made London merchants panic and lobby parliament to withdraw the stamp act.  One Boston riot did get violent, but it wasn’t of Adams’ making, and he took steps to make sure future Boston demonstrations were loud but peaceful.

The climate that Adams created made it difficult for any stamp master or customs official to do his job, and the king’s party begged for military protection.  In Mark Puls’ compelling biography of Adams, the arrival of the Romney, along with her captain John Corner, was the first glimpse of a petulant authority reacting to defied authority.  “Corner,” writes Puls, “grim-faced and iron-willed, announced sternly to town leaders that sailors from merchant vessels could be pressed into service of the British navy to fill his crew.”

Take that, you impudent colonial.  Not only will we tax you without your consent.  We will take the bodies of your sailors by force and make you our slaves upon the waves.

Modern Tyranny

I have a friend who is scheduled to be sentenced on April 19 for participating in the January 6th demonstrations at the capitol.  I didn’t meet Derrick Kinnison until a few weeks after January 6th, when he told me of enduring an FBI SWAT raid at his home, where he was obliged to sit on a curb while his eleven year old daughter was left alone with FBI agents, who later abused Derrick with profanity and intimidation for not remembering a padlock combination.  To say that Derrick’s life, for the last three years, has been hell is simply to admit that the FBI has become a lawless, rogue tool of partisan politics.  You can read Derrick’s federal indictment here.  When you do, don’t fall for the fevered rhetoric.  (Apparently agreeing to take “point lead on Comms,” to federal prosecutors, is something like entering Ford’s theater with a loaded weapon.)   Derrick was simply an American who believed he had a right to protest an election that appeared to be compromised, just as Hillary Clinton had the undeniable right to question the legitimacy of the 2016 election.   The First Amendment actually does protect speech — even disagreeable speech, even speech you believe to be ridiculous.

Did some of Derrick’s friends use questionable rhetoric?  If so, by what standard would we question it?  By the “entertainer” Madonna’s standard when she confessed to a large crowd she had “thought about blowing up the White House?”  Would it be by the standard of Senator Charles Schumer who believes it was okay to threaten Supreme Court Justices?  In front of a cheering assembly, Schumer promised the justices: “you won’t know what hit you.”  The statement was so alarming that Chief Justice Roberts issued a specific rebuke to Schumer and called his behavior “dangerous.”  (By the way, if you were to ask my friend Derrick Kinnison whether he would prefer being scolded, verbally, by a Supreme Court justice or being put in prison for 15 years by a federal district judge, how do you think he would respond?  Where is the special judicial task force dedicated to prosecuting Madonna or Schumer or the June 2020 rioters who burned churches and forced President Trump to retreat to the White House bunker?)

Derrick had no intention of taking over, by force, the operations of the United States government.  How would you even do that with nothing but a HAM radio?  Derrick never even entered the building, although we have found out since that several nice old grandmothers made the mistake of accepting the invitation of the capitol police to do that very thing.  The entire notion this was an “insurrection” is the fever dream of people who hate their political opponents so much they are willing to destroy them. 

I was there that day.  Like millions of others, we didn’t fight with the police.  We didn’t break windows.  We didn’t threaten public officials.  We were stupid enough, apparently, to believe in the First Amendment, and for that, some of our political opponents believe ALL OF US should be incarcerated.  Ponder this:  they are actually asking for political internment camps for millions of people.  You can’t explain this hostility any other way.

Enter Epstein and Friends..

Think this through with me.  If you have followed the nauseating story of Jeffrey Epstein, and if you have wondered why this story drags on for decades without any justice, ponder Sam Bankman-Fried or Anthony Fauci.   Ponder fugitive director Roman Polanski.  Ponder Ted Kennedy dumping a girl in a river and serving on the judiciary committee for decades.  Ponder the CIA considering itself so above the law it could lie to the Warren Commission.  Ponder an FBI willing to secret away Hunter Biden’s laptop long enough to get their man elected.  Ponder millions of people dying, world-wide, because some of our scientific elites thought it would be cool to fuse Human DNA with bat virus.

And then ponder what they’re doing to my friend Derrick Kinnison.

What are we being told here?

If you are not connected to the right elites, we will torture you with a double standard of justice.  The elites can do anything they want.  You can’t. The Biden family can use the justice department to slow-walk investigations into their wrongdoing.  Anthony Fauci can slip your tax dollars to a rogue, Communist lab and then the American media will actually ask you to praise him as “America’s doctor.”  Charges will be dropped against Sam Bankman-Fried because he was giving to the approved politicians.  Roman Polanski can sodomize a thirteen year old girl and go right on making movies.  Madonna can threaten to blow up the White House, but my friend Derrick Kinnison faces jail time for just being on the capitol grounds.

What is the prolonged effect of such a double standard?

It breaks our souls and our hearts and our minds.  We experience broad and extreme social despair, from Madison Avenue to Main Street.  We live in fear and confusion.  The Bible speaks of the land itself being “polluted” by murder that has not been judicially avenged, and, by extension, a grossly unfair standard of justice terrifies us so badly, we retreat into our own soul-ghetto, afraid to even share objections with friends, for fear the injustice monster will take the form of a friend pointing a finger at you.

The average man has to conclude he is something like a worker bee, or a petting zoo rooster. Not only is he caged, without rights, not only has he no hope for blind justice, he actually has to abide the smiling contempt of those who are above the system.  This dizzy lack of balance, this bald insistence that it is “different when we do it,” is something like a repeated group tackle.  Eventually, you are smothered so badly, you can’t stand up–and you’re considered wise if you don’t even try.  “If you thought that last injustice was bad,” we are told, “we’re going to put a gender-confused boy in your daughter’s locker room.  He’s going to walk around naked, with mascara and an erection, and you’re going to praise him for it.”

We’re enduring the demonic, social-psychology equivalent of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.  “Stop complaining about destruction, or you will get more of it.  Surrender now.”

What would Sam Adams Do?

A few things..

• Chronicle every single injustice and publish them widely.  Samuel Adams created America’s first “wire service” before the wires arrived.  He was particularly good at publicizing how badly British soldiers abused Boston’s women.  Chivalry really isn’t dead.  Look at how the entire world responded to Hamas savagery towards women on October 7.
• Don’t show all your cards.  Historians believe Samuel Adams was considering independence long before other American patriots, but he kept the idea mostly to himself.
• Trick the opposition into firing first.  Goad them in ways that can be defended.  The tea party, which none of the participants bragged about, or even talked about — was a crime against property, not people.  The British responded, eventually, by drawing real blood, and then sympathy fell to the sons of liberty.
• Never give up.  Never surrender.  Samuel Adams wouldn’t have had any use for John MacArthur’s “we lose down here” theology, or for a Jesus so dispensational He didn’t expect His will to be done “in heaven and on earth.”  Samuel believed in a God who lets His servants experience trials, yes, but also victories.

History may grind some of us to dust, but God wins.  When that pompous fool, British Captain John Corner promised naval slavery for Bostonians, Samuel Adams was smiling behind closed doors.  He knew his brethren.  They wouldn’t stand for it.

Will we?

Categorised in: Farm Journal

This post was written by Jim Riley