Over the course of human history there is a category of criminals that have gone by many names. They are often referred to as shysters, grifters, flim-flam men, but in the end, they are all one form of con artist or another. The goal of these people is simple; to convince others to part with their money, or their property by promising them huge rewards, or unbelievable benefits, for doing so. The old snake oil salesmen, like the one in the film Josey Wales, is an example of one form of con artistry; albeit a not a very efficient one.

Con artists do not utilize knives, guns, nor do they pick your pocket; they convince you that it is in your own best interest to willingly give them what they want. Their tools of the trade are a mastery of the English language, and a delivery so smooth they can convince people to betray their country; which is why the good ones make such good spies.

One of the most famous, or should I say infamous, American con artists of all time is probably Bernie Madoff; who swindled millions of people out of billions of dollars with his investment schemes. Yet, despite all that, Madoff did not attain the same notoriety as did the Italian con artist Charles Ponzi; whose scheme became the catchall phrase for most pyramid schemes; like the one known as Social Security. But, I get ahead of myself…

Perhaps it may be due to the fact that they don’t use violence to rob you – that America has such a fascination with con men – until one falls victim to one of their schemes. Hollywood certainly has capitalized on our fascination with them, with films like The Sting, Catch Me If You Can, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Now You See Me, and the entire string of wildly popular Ocean’s 11 movies, all being about elaborate cons. Some of those are purely fictional, while others are based upon true events; but the point is that we sure have a fascination with them, their lifestyles, and how they operate. Although I have never watched the show myself, I hear that the TV show Leverage was about a group of con artists who used their skills to provide justice for the desperate and destitute. Even the TV series Westworld wrote a short part about a robot con man into Season 1 of their series; the host (robot) who promises to give William a map leading to buried treasure.

Con artists are so abundant that I often wonder if there aren’t more of them than there are potential victims to their schemes; you’ve probably run across one or two of them yourself; possibly without even realizing it. I remember as a kid hearing the adults say, ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.’ I would add to that, ‘It is probably some kind of a con.’ While that may not always be the case, fortune may smile upon occasionally, I would say that 9 times out of 10, if it sounds too good to be true, it is probably some kind of a con; kind of like the promises those seeking your votes make to ensure you vote for them.

I have been contacted by con artists so many times that I’ve given up counting. There was a time in my life, after I first decided to venture into the wild open spaces of the internet, that I would get 2 to 3 e-mails a week from people telling me that I’d inherited a vast fortune, and that all I needed to do to collect it was to send them my bank account number. Thankfully, my parents didn’t raise no dummy; so I never fell for their cons. The number of e mails I got like that began to dwindle down though when I started responding with, ‘I do not need the money, so could you possibly send it to the FBI’s Fraud Investigation Unit instead?’

I have also gotten, and still get from time to time, phone calls saying that my credit card information has been hacked; that to prevent any further fraudulent charges being made against it I needed to provide them with the card number and 3-digit security code on the back. When I would ask them why they weren’t already in possession of that information they typically hung up on me. BUSTED!!!

Nevertheless, even though it seems that con men have moved on to greener pastures (people more easily fooled by their ruses) there are still a great many of them out there; otherwise they would have given up trying to con people and become honest criminals; if there is such a thing. All this leaves me wondering – Do con men exist because they are that effective at their game, or do they exist in such numbers because people have become so damned gullible?

In any case, of all the cons that have ever been perpetuated on mankind, none rival the con that led so many people to believe that the Constitution of the united States established a limited form of government; that if we could just return to its principles everything would be okay in America. Never in my life have I heard such a load of bovine manure! The funny thing was, I used to be among those who had fallen for that nonsense – a condition I remained in – until I began seeking out the truth on my own.

While I have very little use, or respect, for the field of psychiatry in general, I do have a fascination with psychology; the study of how the human mind works. I don’t claim to know anything at all about the electrical and chemical goings on inside the human brain, but the way people think, or the fact that some people flat out refuse to think (at least think critically) is something I find myself thinking about quite often.

One thing that I’ve never understood is how a person can go to the movie theater, or rent a film on Netflix, and cheer for the anarchist hero, then do a complete reversal in real life; sneering at those who choose to live an anarchist lifestyle. That makes absolutely no sense to me; it is so contradictory that I find myself wondering if those who exhibit that kind of behavior are not in need of psychiatric help.

I could be wrong, but I think at a subconscious level people realize that the anarchist heroes in those films hold the moral high ground, and since the stories are (mostly) fictional, they can justify supporting the hero. However, in real life their conditioning (indoctrination) kicks in, and their minds reject anyone exhibiting anarchist tendencies. That is the only logical explanation I can come up for that type behavior; unless these people are actually closet anarchists who do not have the courage to come out of the closet and live their lives according to how their conscience tells them they should.

I truly believe that the longer a person is exposed to a lie, the more often the lie is repeated, the harder it becomes for people to accept the truth; even if they are presented with mountains of incontrovertible evidence which proves they have been lied to. If you’ve seen the original Matrix film, and I haven’t met anyone yet who hasn’t, you’ll recall the scene when Morpheus takes Neo into the Construct so that he can explain to him what the Matrix actually is. You’ll recall that Neo initially rejects what Morpheus has told him, yelling ‘I don’t believe you. Get me out of here.’ When Neo is un-plugged from the Construct, he vomits into a floor grate. That scene depicts Cognitive Dissonance; the mental stress one encounters when the mind tries to come to terms with conflicting beliefs.

Later, Morpheus tells Neo, “We have a rule: we never free a mind once it’s reached a certain age. It’s dangerous, the mind has trouble letting go.” Although the Matrix is purely fictional (or is it), what Morpheus said supports my belief that the longer one is exposed to a lie, (a program of indoctrination) the harder it becomes for the indoctrinated to let go of their indoctrination. In the film Neo finally embraces the truth and the rest is, as they say, movie history.

The question is; how many people could make that choice in real life, or how many would gladly take the blue pill and go back to their fictional world? How many people pass by the Constitution and Bill of Rights annually; where they are prominently displayed in glass cases at the National Archives. I wonder what passes through their heads for those few brief moments as they gaze down upon the document that established our system of government. I’m almost certain that, for some, it is simple curiosity; they want to see what the actual document looks like in person.

For others though I believe that it borders on idolatry; for they have been taught to worship the document, and the men who produced it. This belief has become their truth, and no amount of actual truth is going to convince them otherwise. In fact, this truth (even though it is a well-crafted lie) has become part of their identity; meaning that they take any attack upon the Constitution as an attack upon them; reacting with extreme hostility towards those who threaten their core beliefs.

In the TV series Westworld, Season 2 I believe, there is a scene when Maeve overloads the computing power of the system she is trapped in by asking it to tell her what the square root of negative 1 is. That is an unsolvable question, so the system overloads and freezes up; providing her with an opportunity to attempt to escape.

There is a real-life version of that unsolvable question which pertains to the Constitution. In 1870 Lysander Spooner wrote, “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it.”

One of those two statements must be true, but try to get people to tell you which of them is the truth and watch the confusion in their eyes. What you will witness is Cognitive Dissonance at work; the conflict that arises as their mind tries to cling to one set of beliefs while being presented with information that tears those beliefs to shreds. You should try it; it’s great fun watching the mental gymnastics people go through trying to justify their beliefs. I have watched the same phenomenon play out when I present people with factual evidence that proves that, not only was the Civil War not fought to end slavery, but that Lincoln was a white supremacist; yet he has a shrine erected in his honor in our nation’s capital while statues dedicated to Confederate Leaders have all but vanished off the landscape. What strange times we live in.

The point I’m trying to get at is that, after a certain period, people’s minds develop an aversion to the truth; especially when it comes to the document that established our system of government two centuries ago. People’s minds have been so thoroughly conditioned that all thought seems to shut down whenever they are presented with information that calls into question their blind loyalty to a document that many of them have never read in its entirety; let alone studied to discern its true purpose.

Ask the average plebe (voter) where in the Constitution does it authorize the person they intend to vote for to do the things they are promising to do if they are elected. Watch as their eyes go dull and they look at you as if you had asked them to explain particle physics in one sentence. I have done that on many occasions; going so far as to pull out a pocket copy of the Constitution so that they can point the Article and Clause where it says government is authorized to do these things. Not once has anyone even made an effort to locate where the Constitution authorizes government to do the things they expect it to; yet I’m the lunatic for expecting them to be able to prove that government has the authority to do these things!

The thing is, if the Constitution does not authorize government to do these things, which it actually does (you just have to know how to read the document) then aren’t those things unconstitutional? And if they are unconstitutional, then why are people voting for candidates who are promising to violate the very document they take an oath to support and defend?

People TALK about their love of freedom, yet by their very support of this system, and their belief that we must all comply with its edicts, they prove themselves to be hypocrites; if not flat-out liars. Freedom means the right to say No. If I cannot say, ‘No, I do not wish to be governed, to pay taxes to support things I disagree with’ then I am not free, am I? Yet that is what people impose upon those whom they say must comply with government. Even with the two-party system, where you have a 50-50 chance that your party is going to be in control of things; for the 4 years that your party is in control of government it is doing things the other 50% do not consent to. Have they too lost their freedom; have you when the ‘other’ party gains control of the system?

We are taught (conditioned) to believe that government exists by the consent of the people, right? The Preamble tells us so; Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address tells us so; even though he delivered it on a battlefield where thousands of those who did not consent to being governed had just given up their lives.

Talk about irony! What about those of us today who do not consent to being governed? What about those who did not consent to being governed by this particular system when it was first presented to the people in 1787?

The population of the United States at the time the Constitution was written was roughly 3.9 million people; yet only 55 men wrote the Constitution; most of them from the upper crust of society; merchants, bankers, businessmen, and speculators. The common folk who would find themselves governed by this system of government had no say in what went into the document. These same common folk were not given the opportunity to voice a yay or nay vote when the Constitution was presented; with it being submitted to ratifying assemblies consisting mostly of the same elite class of people who had written the bloody thing. Even so, it faced stiff opposition from some; so much so that it barely squeaked by in some states, and its supporters had to promise that a bill of rights would be added to it if the people would just ratify it first so that the system of government could get started governing on behalf of the people. The question you should be asking by now is, which people? Certainly not those who were left out of the entire process of drafting and ratifying it!

Even if the Constitution was lawfully written and ratified, it expired as a contract that bound anyone to this system of government the moment the last delegate to the state ratifying conventions was laid to rest.

In his book, The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine said something that people need to think about; and by think about I mean read it as many times as it takes for it to make sense to them. Paine stated, “There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the “end of time,” or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.”

It is upon that principle that Lysander Spooner begins his treatise, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, “The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago.”

I have no problems if you believe that I should become a subject under the authority of a government I do not consent to; just be honest about it and say that you think I should be a tax paying slave whose sole function is to provide the revenue to your system of government so that it can do the things you want it to; things I disagree with. But you don’t even have the integrity to do that, do you?

It is my fervent belief that if you want to see the true face of government, look to the Democrats. Forget about the Republicans; they exist only to provide people with an alternative to the policies that form the platform of the Democratic Party. I keep hearing from constitutional conservatives that if we could just return to the principles enshrined in the Constitution we could turn things around in this country. Yet when I refer them to the Spooner Theorem they do the political two-step and quickly shift the blame away from their sacred document and place it upon the shoulders of the voting public. Yet the truth remains; either the Constitution has authorized such a government as we have had, or it has been powerless to prevent it.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot avoid the absolute truth contained in those few short words. If the Constitution authorizes the government we have today – it is net fit to exist as a system of government for free men. If it has been powerless to prevent government from becoming what it has become it is unfit to exist. There is no safe ground here; it is one or the other, and they both lead to the inevitable conclusion that the Constitution is unfit as a document outlining a system of government based upon the principles of individual rights and liberty. End of discussion! Sure, it may be a brilliantly designed system…if you want to live under the authority of tyrants and despots; but it sucks as a system designed to secure the freedom of the governed.

Yet there will still be those who cling to the tired old belief that, if we could just get back to the limited powers outlined by the Constitution, things would get better. How, may I ask, are we to go about doing that when there is so much standing in the way of accomplishing that? As I’ve stated, most people don’t even know what the document says, and could care less as long as they get their fair share of the handouts and support for their causes.

Are people going to suddenly just give up all the benefits/services government provides them with in return for their freedom? Most people would rather be well fed and well entertained slaves than free; that’s the sad truth about America today. But the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, right; there must be a way to force those we elect to comply with what it says. That’s why voting is such an effective means of enslaving so many people; for they believe that voting the bad apples out of office and replacing them with fresh meat equates to punishment.

In Federalist 15, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.” Yet show me one clause, one sentence, in the Constitution where it gives the voting public the power to punish their representatives for violating the Constitution. I’ll not bother waiting while you research that; for I have already done it, and there is nothing at all in your sacred text about punishing those in power. Sure, they can punish themselves; but that’s akin to letting the criminals decide which rules they will abide by.

Yet they can punish us if we violate any of the laws they enact. Are you beginning to see how tilted the system is in favor of those who hold the power to make laws? Patrick Henry saw this fatal flaw in the system before it even went into effect, stating, “The Honorable Gentleman who presides, told us, that to prevent abuses in our Government, we will assemble in Convention, recall our delegated powers, and punish our servants for abusing the trust reposed in them. Oh, Sir, we should have fine times indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people. Your arms wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical; no longer democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all?”

Henry was right, and we are paying the consequences of our ancestors not listening to his warnings!!!

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not say anything about those who claim that the answer to our problems is found in the Bill of Rights; specifically the 10th Amendment. For those of you not familiar with what the 10th Amendment says, here is the text: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Are you aware that, when Congress finally got around to fulfilling the promise the Federalists had made to create a bill of rights, that Thomas Tudor Tucker sought to include the word ‘expressly’ into the text of the proposed 10th Amendment? He was shot down vehemently by James Madison. I don’t remember Madison’s words off the top of my head, but he said something like, ‘You cannot shackle government with that kind of restrictions upon its powers.’

Even if the spirit people believe the 10th Amendment implies is true, how are they going to use that to their benefit; how are they going to use it to limit the things government is allowed to do? Do you think you’ll just be able to dial 911 and tell the operator that your elected representative has violated the 10th Amendment, and they will dispatch officers to arrest them? It is more likely they will dispatch officers to your home to have you institutionalized!

There is no way to fix this system; for it is my belief that it is functioning exactly as it was designed to. Voting, therefore, is a trap; giving people the false hope that they can change the course government is on by swapping out a few random criminals; only to be replaced with a fresh batch of new criminals. Secession is not the answer; it was tried once and we all know how that turned out. The 10th Amendment is another false hope; something people can cling to and say, ‘But it says right here that they can’t do that.’

Who cares what it says when there is no enforcement mechanism attached to it?

Then there is the fact that you’d be lucky to find a judge to hear your case; for they work for the system, not against it. Even when the almighty Supreme Court gets it right, such as when they overturned Roe v Wade, half the public goes batshit crazy because the 10th Amendment is being applied.

As the Oracle told Neo in The Matrix, “I hate giving good people bad news, but…” – the truth is that the system is not our friend, it is our enemy. As long as the system exists, nothing is going to get any better; it will only get worse. That’s where people’s conditioning puts up an impenetrable wall; they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into believing that government is absolutely essential, and that ours is the best the world has ever seen, that they cannot fathom even considering revoking their consent to it; it is like a nuclear meltdown inside their minds to even think about something that radical.

That is why people fight to defend the system that enslaves them. That is why people keep voting; even though it never seems to make any difference. That is why government keeps growing bigger, while we lose more of our freedom. That is why the national debt has reached such an astronomical number that it will NEVER be repaid. And that, my friends, is why we’re screwed; because people are still victims of the Greatest Deception in American History!!!

June 11, 2024

~ The Author ~
Neal Ross, Student of history, politics, patriot and staunch supporter of the 2nd Amendment. Send all comments to: NealHRoss@outlook.com.

Life continues to expand for this prolific writer and guardian of TRUE American history.