For the past several weeks a friend of mine has been stopping by every evening with his radio tuned to various talk radio programs. I do not much care for radio talk show programs, but I have enjoyed listening. (If that sounds contradictory to you, consider this; just because you like a thing, it does not necessarily mean it’s a good thing or that you should like it. I also enjoy watching television but prefer not to see the content which is often saturated with propaganda and unmoral behavior. Even though these things are entertaining, they may be spiritually and intellectually damaging.)
To get to the point, while listening to a curtain vibrant yet misinformed host from New York City a few weeks ago, a caller asked the host if he thought the United States was a tyrannical government. The Host responded by saying that it was definitely not a tyrannical government because his show was still on the air.
What an asinine comment to make. Has this guy never stepped out of his radio studio?
Every day American Citizens are harassed and arrested without due precess of the law. That, by the very definition of the word is tyranny. It has nothing to do with whether a particular radio talk show host is on the air. Radio has only been around in our civilization for less than two hundred years, and there have been loads of tyrannical governments in history long before then.
The host was referring of course to his misunderstanding of the 1st amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. He supposed that so long as the government continued to allow him to state his opinions on the air, tyranny did not exist.
First of all, the Constitution of the United States of America does not grant anything to the citizenry. It guarantees liberty by limiting the scope of powers of the federal and state governments to not include infringement upon the rights of the people.
The Bill of Rights, as the first ten amendments of the federal constitution are referred as, exist only because a skeptical citizenry didn’t understand the restrictive nature of the Constitution and requested them as an added assurance that the government may never overstep those particular inalienable rights. Like many misinformed people today, the host of that radio show is under the assumption that the existence of the Bill of Rights only grants those rights as privileges to the people from the government.
Second, his opinions support the propaganda of the political party system and are therefore helping to mislead the people. Instead of focusing on the fact that the Republic is limited by the Constitution, he latches on to what the socialists need the people to be focused on.
These are non-issues when you know the Republic does not have the authority to debate them in the first place. The controversy that radio hosts help fuel are crucial in establishing a majority opinion with the public. That, in turn, misleads the people to believe that the democracy is working.
This is why the forefathers talked about the importance of a well informed public. If the citizenry knew that these issues in the news and debated by their representatives and agents were contrived to establish public turmoil and usurp the Republic, they would stop endorsing it and start enforcing the limits of the Constitution.
Is the United States a tyrannical government? You bet. So long as the people let illegal police forces exist in any form, we will have a tyrannical government. Any time you have a citizenry fear any government agency or entity, you have a tyrannical government. It is the people who are sovereign, it is the government that is comprised of servants.
