I was a few minutes into my talk at FreedomFest when former President Trump was almost assassinated. It was ironic because my talk was about the U.S. national-security establishment’s assassination of President Kennedy. While my talk specifically focused on the CIA’s production of a fraudulent copy of the famous film of the assassination by Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder (the subject of my book An Encounter with Evil), I ended it by emphasizing why the JFK assassination is so relevant today — we still have the national-security state form of governmental structure that existed in November 1963, which succeeded in taking out Kennedy and replacing him with Lyndon Johnson. The national-security state is a great big problem that America still faces.
It’s tempting for someone to think that if only Trump weren’t running for president again, everything would be fine. Of course, the same sentiment applies to President Biden. But even if Biden and Trump were to drop out of the race for illness or some other reason, it wouldn’t solve anything. That’s because America’s problems are not rooted in the “wrong people” being in public office. Instead, America’s problems are systemic — that is, they are rooted in the welfare-state, regulated-society, national-security-state system that Americans adopted in the 20th century and that today’s Americans, unfortunately, choose to continue, hoping that they can just elect “better” people to public office to manage it.
Decade after decade, this statist way of life has gradually destroyed the liberty, privacy, and well-being of the American people. It is as though Americans are enveloped by a great big statist device that is incessantly being tightened by a gigantic screw. With each turn of the screw, Americans lose more of their liberty, privacy, and well-being.
Moreover, with each turn of the screw, America turns more dysfunctional, especially given that so many Americans are convinced that they live in a genuinely free society. “Thank God I’m an American because at least I know I’m free” is a common mindset among the American populace, a mindset that is ingrained in every child who is subjected to the state’s educational system. As any psychiatrist will tell you, denial of reality can produce very serious psychoses.
With each turn of the screw, aberrant things happen, especially among the “off-kilter” people in society. Most notable are the periodic mass killings. Somehow the tightening of the screw causes some people to go haywire and drives them to commit copycat killings that mirror mass killings committed against foreigners by the U.S. national-security state.
Assuming that the attempted assassination of Trump was not an effort by the deep state to get rid of him, as with JFK, and instead was the act of what will be called a “lone nut,” the lone nut’s mindset is really no different from that of the average anti-Trump person — that is, the need to prevent Trump from being reelected because he will be a grave danger to our nation.
But what these people fail to understand is that even if it isn’t Trump who is president — or even if it isn’t Biden — it will still be someone who will wield the omnipotent power to continue tightening the gigantic statist screw that destroys our liberty, privacy, and well-being.
A loosening of the screw would no doubt alleviate the problem but that’s not the ultimate solution to America’s woes. The ultimate solution is a complete dismantling of the welfare-state, regulated-society, national-security-state system under which we live — one that comes with that gigantic screw that produces highly aberrant and destructive behavior. The ultimate solution to our nation’s woes is the restoration of our founding system of a free-market, voluntary-charity, limited-government way of life, one in which there is no screw at all.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
