When you say, “No” to a face mask, it is so much more.
When you say, “No” to the death jab, it is so much more.
When you say, “No” to your child for wanting something bad for him, it is so much more.
When you say, “No” to your neighbor when he starts talking about things that you do not want to be a part of, it is so much more.
When you say, “No” to a stranger misbehaving in public, it is so much more.
You are an adult.
You live in a free place.
Freedom is not free.
It costs.
Every society needs order.
Every society will have order.
It will have order through the civil ways that society can do that, or it will have order through the point of a gun. Those are our choices.
America has numerous founding documents, the most fundamental of those is the Bible. Appropriately, America’s second president, John Adams, wrote in 1798 in a letter to the Massachusetts Militia, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Freedom and morality are partners, freedom cannot exist absent morality.
When you say, “Yes” to a child who needs to be told no, it is so much more.
When you say, “Yes” to a stranger misbehaving, it is so much more.
Your bold presence and your calm authority is needed everywhere you go.
There may be penalties for that. In fact, that is what most people say to me when I say that. They bring up the penalties that come with upright behavior.
Well, the fact that you bring up penalties in response to my insistence that you do the right thing, is simply proof that you are among the problem. You are among the fearful Americans — those who live in what is arguably the most free culture that has ever existed, arguably the most well-developed civilization on the planet, and you do not promote that, but you cower in fear. You fear what someone will say to you. You fear what someone will do to you. You shirk from responsibility, “so you can live to fight another day.” You shirk from responsibility so there “can be peace in my day.”
The coward is a moral cheapskate. He is unwilling to spend the capital. He is unwilling to spend the capital that it takes to build an upright society. He is very much willing to live in one, but when he is called on to build that society, he all of a sudden has nothing to offer.
And you see, the year is not 1953 anymore, nor is it 1973, nor 1993. Behaving yourself does not cut it. Back in the day when you were a mooch, living off the upright moral courage of others, maybe that did the job, but not today. An upright society is not formed by simply behaving. And we have a society that is today not upright, and that needs very much to return to being upright — and without a totalitarian to bring it to that place.
Because then, freedom is lost. Freedom is lost if we turn it all over to the strongman and ask us to build it for us. We will have neither freedom nor security from that cowardice.
When tasked with that work, you say it is just too expensive for you to stop and correct every misbehaving person in your life, it is too expensive for you to only stay silent around upright behavior. You profess freedom, but you show an unwillingness to do what it takes to return to freedom. If all you can do is to yourself behave upright and to be silent whenever anyone misbehaves around you, again, you are very much part of the problem of this era we live in.
You are the one who has always been a problem in a free society, because without your willingness to pay a price, there will be no freedom in your midst in your life. I am not saying there needs to be 51% of the population that behaves a certain way or 33% or 3% or any other number. That is a fatally flawed collectivist way of seeing the world. The world simply does not work that way. The way you behave impacts how the world around you treats you. That is how the world works — whether there be a so-called “critical mass” of people doing the same thing or not.
You, on your own, can be a leader walking through the world as a responsible man and consequently as a free man, or you can be an unfree man in the world. The rest of the world will tend to give you back what you give to it. The world may not like how you treat it. The world may wince or react loudly or violently at how you treat it. But you will generally be treated just as well as you treat the world around you. You will generally receive the standard back that you allow around you.
When you say nothing to a face mask, absolutely nothing, to a face mask worn in your presence, it is so much more.
When you say nothing to a child who needs to be told, “No,” it is so much more.
When you say nothing to a stranger misbehaving, it is so much more.
Those are the moments where society is formed. Those are the moments when an upright people are shaped. Those little areas of cultural pushback are times when you are able to grow the increasingly stronger spine that you need to live an upright life and to lead others.
This is not about a face mask.
This is about so much more.
“It is not my job!” you throw your hands up and say when a ghetto dweller acts ghetto in your presence, in a place that is not the ghetto. No, Sir, it is your job. It is your job to tell him to behave himself or to get out of there. Might you get shot when you do that. Maybe. But probably not. The more practice you get, the less likely you getting hurt becomes.
Again, the fact that you bring up penalties in response to my insistence that you do the right thing, is simple proof that you are among the problem. You are among the fearful Americans.
“It is not my job!” you throw your hands up and say when a child misbehaves in your presence and a parent does nothing. No, Sir, it is your job. It is your job to tell him to behave himself or to get out of there. It is your job to scold the parent for what takes place too. Might you get shot when you do that. Maybe. But probably not.
Again, the fact that you bring up penalties in response to my insistence that you do the right thing, is simple proof that you are among the problem. You are among the fearful Americans. When you stand up in such moments, you become better at standing up in such moments. When you speak bravely in such moments, you become better at speaking bravely in such moments. When you insist on a certain standard around you, you become better at insisting on a certain standard around you.
We are in a point in time where there are no standards.
People have the spurious debate about whether one should back the blue and have stricter policing or whether cops need to be more strictly watched for misfeasance. Both are true. The police need to be watched carefully and kept decent in their behavior, and there needs to be strict policing of crime. However, the police are not the answer. The totalitarian approach of stricter policing solving the problem of a morally lax people is a cat-and-mouse game that never works and that leads society down a bad path.
A more moral people is the real answer, a more moral people is the real answer that is needed from that distracting and spurious debate. If you are caught in that debate, you are missing the real answer. It can hardly be a surprise that such a debate is so often thrust in front of the public — because it never leads to the right answer.
The right answer is to work on yourself, and to lead everywhere you go, by example, but with more, with a much more important step — by not allowing nonsense in your presence.
The stop-gap answer is more policing. It’s not enough. It can help in an emergency. It’s not enough.
Having an upright man in a community is needed — a man who understands freedom, who understands morality, and who demands a modicum of each from all of those who wish to be around him. I am talking all day long. All day long, if there is another human being around you, it is your job to have a modicum of freedom and a modicum of decency from that person. And if there is not, it is your job to speak up.
The Karens are to be lauded, because they speak up.
The BLM protestors and cancel culture mob are laudable because they speak up.
The trannies who parade around the way they wish to are laudable because they speak up.
These people show the right behaviors required for shaping a society, only they tend to lack the moral underpinning in what they are doing.
That is where you come in.
“Live and let live,” may be a great saying when it comes to government regulation, but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about how to have a functioning society that does not need the government regulation. To have a day around other people that is “live and let live,” is a day in which you abrogate responsibility.
When you know that something is right or wrong, you need to speak that openly when aberrant behavior presents itself.
The time for coasting on the foundations built a century or more ago has passed.
I do not need to know who shot Charlie Kirk.
I do not care what lie I may or may not be told when the news starts to tell a story about who killed Charlie Kirk.
I know I live in a fearful America, a place that fears consequences too greatly to say, “No” to evil.
I know how significant that is.
That daily behavior, that daily unwillingness of upright man to communicate to his environment what is right and what is wrong, daily, all day long, leads to a decay that leads to the Charlie Kirk assassination and worse.
America is in a dark, dark place.
You do not realize the role you play in it when you abrogate responsibility.
You do not realize how hard it is to get back to what we had.
My Muslim friends, my Jewish friends, my atheist friends might not like this, but that will not stop me from pointing out a further detail of this dissolution of values and courage in America.
America does not need Trump, nor does it need any other man to save it.
America needs Jesus.
And America needs men who will stand up and stop letting everything around them fall apart. You can lead those in your midst, or you can watch those around you be led by the worst of influences. That choice is yours.
That choice is entirely yours.
Charlie Kirk’s lifeless body is in a casket because Americans lost the ability to identify evil and to denounce it in their midst.
What comes next in your life is up to you.
You can’t change the whole world.
But you can shape the part of the world that you interact with.
That choice is entirely yours.
