When the Free Man Feels the Noose Tighten

The more I see the more I remain convinced this nation is on an accelerated path to another civil war. The events that one might say started in 1833 to set the stage for civil war in 1860, steadily intensified and increased in number over that 27 year span over the issue of slavery.

America has steadily been moving at a greatly accelerated trajectory to civil war, since 2008, and unless I miss my bet, we will be embroiled in a hot, full-blown bloody and violent civil war by 2035 or not too long afterward, due to the stark and deep differences between America’s two antithetical ideologies vying to gain and hold power, one legitimately and the other by any means necessary.

In giving the subject more thought I’ve reached the following conclusions that have long been floating around at the forefront of my mind, some previously stated on numerous occasions, if separately and never enjoined in a single paper until now.

I’ve been wondering: the American people have long defended the principles of freedom and individual liberty, both at home and abroad for centuries now. For the most part, no red-blooded true American would ever accept anything less than their full independence and a life lived truly free with their liberty fully intact.

But after the New Deal and the Great Society emanated from the politics between capitalists and communists of the nation, a massive number of people started welcoming the incredibly onerous intrusions of Big Government into people’s lives and giving up freedoms and liberties for cradle to grave care by the Super Nanny State, no matter that better than half the population reviled such a thing and rejected it out of hand. And the small tyrannies kept being handed down from upon high within the federal government until now – they think nothing of suspending individual liberties over an “emergency”, real or imagined, and a crisis, real or manufactured.

My question is this: So many so-called “American patriots” always say that any kind of violence cannot ever be tolerated and that we must always seek to make our changes by petitioning our Congress, voting, persuading our opponents to our side and otherwise put up with intolerable acts until we may effect the necessary changes for true freedom to exist and survive, but what is a free people to do when half of the country starts circumventing the law of the land, the U.S. Constitution, and refusing to follow U.S. code in all matters, from the Department of Justice to the Court and judiciary, and the institutions and mechanisms of government are in the hands of illiberal traitors who would be tyrants and despots – when the checks and balances have been neutralized forcing the entire country – every man, woman and child — to follow their edicts and fiats in a manner that violates our conscience and our Inalienable God-given Rights?

— when checks and balances have been manipulated by the forces of tyranny to trample on our Inalienable God-given Rights and the President, Congress and or the Judiciary either cannot or will not do anything about it or are complicit with the treason —

Are we simply to accept our subjugation and final suppression?

Are we to resign ourselves to forever being serfs made to bow at the altar of the Super State, the Leviathan – or should we not raise up off our hind legs to stop acting like sheep and act like free born Americans, picking up our rifles and fighting back to the death if necessary in order to win back our freedom and liberty once again. Whatever Your answer, you will never convince me that there isn’t ever any point in a people’s situation in which armed violence isn’t fully and totally justified to prevent themselves, their loved ones, their children from becoming slaves.

Today, America is torn between two completely antithetical ideologies with divides too deep and wide to ever be properly or full reconciled in any manner acceptable to people who wish to live free. We cannot vote our way out of our current chaotic and violent situation, and there are no peaceful solutions to be found in the coming days. ~ Justin O. Smith

Now gather ’round, friends – pull up a lawn chair, lean on the tailgate, or just plant your boots in the dirt – because I’ve got something to say, and it’s been rattling around in my chest like a loose bolt in a washtub. And I reckon if I don’t let it out, it’ll sour in me like milk left on the porch in July.

There comes a time in the life of a people when the wind feels wrong.

Not storm-wrong – not yet – but sour, like iron in the air. The old man on the porch feels it first. The farmer at dawn. The old Veteran awake at 3 a.m., staring at a ceiling he fought for once. Something’s off. Something sacred is being handled by unclean hands.

You know, folks talk about America like it’s some far-off idea, a marble statue in a museum or a chapter in a schoolbook. But to me – and to you, I suspect – America’s something you can smell and touch. It’s the woodsmoke curling from a chimney on a cold Murfreesboro morning. It’s the hum of cicadas in the summer dusk. It’s the courthouse square on a Saturday, where old men argue politics with the same gusto they argue SEC football. It’s the feeling you get when you stand on your own patch of ground and know, deep in your bones, that no king or commissar has the right to tell you how to live your life.

Freedom isn’t a slogan. It isn’t a bumper sticker, and it sure as sin isn’t something you get just because you were born on the right side of a line on a map. Freedom is a living thing, like a stubborn old hound – you feed it, you train it, you keep it from running off, and every once in a while it bites you just to remind you it’s not tame.

That’s the part folks forget.

But lately – and I know you feel it too – something’s gone sideways.

The air’s changed. The ground’s shifted. The old landmarks don’t line up like they used to.

And folks who’ve lived honest, hardworking lives – folks who’ve paid their taxes, raised their kids, prayed their prayers, and minded their own business – are starting to wonder if the country they love is slipping through their fingers like creek water.

Now don’t get me wrong. The American people ain’t been asleep at the wheel. No sir. They’ve voted till their fingers cramped. They’ve written letters, signed petitions, marched in the streets, called their congressmen, and stood in line at town halls waiting for their three minutes at the microphone. They’ve done everything a free people are supposed to do.

But the trouble is – and I’ll say it plain – the folks in Washington don’t seem to hear them anymore.

It’s like shouting down a well. Your voice goes in strong, but all you get back is an echo.

I’ve watched this country a long time. Watched it strut. Watched it stumble. Watched it hand its birthright to smiling men in clean suits who said, “Don’t worry now, we’ll take care of things.” And every time a people lets someone else “take care of things,” they end up being taken care of.

You don’t notice it at first. That’s the trick…

It comes quiet. Polite. Paperwork-heavy.

Just a rule. Just an exception. Just an emergency.

Just for now. Just this once.

And the next thing you know, you’re asking permission to live the life your granddad bled for without ever knowing your name.

And the Constitution – that grand old document written by men who knew tyranny like a wolf knows hunger – well, it’s still there on the parchment, but sometimes it feels like it’s hanging on the wall more for decoration than direction. The Bill of Rights? Folks in power treat it like a menu – picking what they like, ignoring what they don’t.

And the checks and balances? Why, they’re about as sturdy these days as a screen door on a submarine.

Don’t mistake me – America has never been completely pure. Never totally saintly. We’ve always been a brawling, arguing mess of sinners, some with good intentions and bad habits and far too many malevolent, evil monsters with bad intentions for all. But we had one thing nailed down for a long while: power was dangerous, and it needed a short leash and a hard hand.

Then came the age of experts.

Smart men. Smooth men. Men who spoke of systems and management and the greater good. Men who promised security the way a loan shark promises relief – with interest due later, payable in obedience.

They didn’t march in with jackboots. They came with clipboards and concern. And folks, tired and scared and hopeful, let them in the door.

That’s how Leviathan eats – not in gulps, but in nibbles.

I’m sayin’ this to stir up the trouble that needs to be stirred up during these troubled and dangerous times. I’m saying this because it’s the truth as plain as the nose on your face. And if a man can’t speak the truth among his own people, then what good is freedom anyway?

But here’s where the road forks, and we’ve got to tread careful.

Now here’s where the old blood starts to boil.

A nation can survive bad leaders for only so many years in a row. It can survive crooked ones. But it Sure as Hell, cannot survive fools, cowards and traitors. What it can’t survive is when the law itself turns into theater – when the Constitution gets waved around like a flag at a parade while being ignored behind closed doors.

Because once law is optional for those in charge, it becomes a weapon against those who aren’t.

That’s when a free man starts to feel the walls inching closer. When conscience is called dangerous. When dissent is labeled disinformation. When obedience is praised as virtue and resistance as sickness.

And somebody always pipes up and says, “Well now, what do you expect people to do?”

That’s the right question. It’s just usually asked too late.

When a people reach the point where no institution restrains power, where no branch checks another, where law is a tool and not a boundary – they are no longer living in a stable constitutional order. They’re living in an interlude.

A people who won’t name their condition can’t correct it. A people who pretend the guardrails still work won’t notice when the road disappears.

Some folks – good folks, frustrated folks – start talking about tearing the whole thing down. Burning it to the ground so something better can rise from the ashes of this bastardized Constitution – and they ain’t wrong to seek its end. And I get the feeling behind it. I do. When a man feels cornered, he starts thinking with his fists as well as his head.

Violence is both a liar and a great revealer of truth.

It doesn’t end arguments – it ends people. And when it’s done, the best people in the war hope and pray the men left standing at the head of any new system are only the ones you’d trust with a grocery list, a bank account and the future of an entire nation.

America’s great, ugly miracle was a combination of guns and great, exceptional ideas centered on freedom and individual liberty married to “equality under the law” – the Constitution’s Original Intent and structure, before Marbury vs Madison enabled it’s mangling and bastardization. It was stubborn local power. It was juries with spines. States that could say “no.” Citizens who could refuse to clap on cue.

But let me tell you something my granddaddy told me, standing on the porch one evening while the sun bled red behind the hills:

“Fire’s a mighty tool, boy – but it don’t know the difference between what you want to burn and what you can’t afford to lose.”

Revolutions, real ones, don’t behave. They don’t stay in the lines. They don’t stop when you ask them to. They take on a life of their own, like a brushfire in August.

Still, one cannot sit in a coward’s cocoon, while hoping and praying an ever growing, increasingly intrusive and tyrannical government doesn’t scoop them up in its massive surveillance net and unwarranted and illegal controls.

They still say “We the People,” but it sounds rehearsed now – like a line delivered after the meaning has drained out of it.

Elections feel less like choices and more like permission slips. Policy rolls on no matter who wins. The public argues; the machine advances. And the distance between the governed and the governors grows so wide it might as well be a canyon.

A government of, for, and by the government – that’s what you’re looking at.

And when that becomes normal, history tells us what comes next. Not overnight. Not with fanfare. But with inevitability.

More control.
More centralization.
More “coordination.”
Less dissent.
Less autonomy.
Less room to breathe.

Call it socialist. Call it technocratic. Call it totalitarian with better branding. The label doesn’t matter nearly as much as the outcome.

The next revolution in this country will be started and finished by hard, righteous American patriots, who won’t stop, who won’t quit, until they emerge on the other side victorious to rebuild a nation from the ashes of chaos, where true freedom and liberty exists for all – a nation, however, that doesn’t tolerate the intolerant tyrannical radicals and nihilistic communists and Islamofascists who have never supported freedom and liberty in any way, shape or form.

I ain’t preaching surrender. I ain’t telling you to bow your head and shuffle along like a mule with a broken spirit. No sir. The true American people ain’t built that way. Never have been. Never will be.

History is honest in a way men rarely are. It shows that when every peaceful mechanism is smashed, when conscience is outlawed, when a people is reduced to permanent subjects with no lawful recourse – ugly things follow.

No old man worth his salt pretends otherwise.

But a free people must never rush toward that darkness or romanticize it. Because once you cross that line, you don’t get to choose where you land — only who survives the fall.

So what’s a free people to do when the government grows deaf and the Constitution grows thin?

I’ll tell you.

They stand taller. They speak louder. They organize tighter. They build stronger communities. They teach their children what freedom really means – not the watered-down version in textbooks, but the real thing, the kind that costs something.

They practice civil courage – the kind that requires iron-willed resolve and a spine of steel, backed by the knowledge that a time for their rifles and bullets may lay ahead in the not-too-distant future.

And most of all – they endure.

Freedom isn’t lost in a day, and it isn’t saved in one either. It’s defended by men and women who refuse to surrender their minds, their speech, their communities – even when it costs them comfort, friends, or sleep.

The rifle is the soul of liberty.

The soul of liberty is the refusal to kneel – quietly, stubbornly, and for as long as it takes.

Freedom and individual liberty die when good people decide it’s just too much trouble to keep them alive.

America was not born tidy. She was born shouting, half-drunk on courage and rage, arguing with God while loading muskets. The men who carved her bones into parchment did not trust power – any power – least of all their own. They hedged it, split it, chained it, and pointed it inward like a gun with mirrors for barrels. Checks. Balances. Ambition countering ambition. A fragile machine meant to be run by flawed men, not angels.

And yet – here we stand, two centuries on, with many feeling that the machine has been captured, its governors stripped, its safety valves welded shut. Emergency stacked upon emergency. Decree piled on decree. Rights treated not as birthrights, but as permissions – revocable, conditional, temporary.

A free people can endure hardship. They can endure loss. What they cannot endure for long is humiliation dressed as virtue.

So the question sharpens like a blade:

What is a free people to do when law becomes costume, when institutions wear legitimacy like stolen medals, when conscience itself is declared contraband?

So, should the day arrive – and I believe it will – when our freedoms and liberties are so sorely suppressed, we must be extreme and relentless in our defense of Liberty and our hard attacks aimed at reclaiming true freedom, once and for all.

And if our republic is to be born of civil bloodshed once more, we must make certain what manifests from the ashes emerges smaller, harder and more resolved in the name of freedom and liberty, and kinder to the people and their inalienable God-given rights.

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

February 26, 2026

~ the Author ~
Justin O. Smith Has Lived in Tennessee Off and on Most of His Adult Life, and Graduated From Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, With a B.S. And a Double Major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – Minors in Military Science and English, for What Its Worth. His Real Education Started From That Point on. Smith Is a Frequent Contributor to the Family of Kettle Moraine Publications.