Ends, means and the road to tyranny

Wiping out the hives of your enemies is how to make them stronger

Everything the current administration running the White House has done is with one overriding goal in mind: to wipe out the hives and hidey holes of its enemies. This means Big Education, Big Law, Big Government and all their constituencies and embedded self-interests. They have specifically empowered Lictors and given them the fasces of caesar’s authority, such as Tom Homan, a professional deporter who knows all the tricks to get someone out of the country while avoiding a court challenge. It’s not an original idea.

During COVID-19, progressives empowered health officials with nearly unlimited authority to halt the economy, suspend worship, and do all kinds of tyrannical things that continued despite other places having begun to open up after the worst times passed. They justified their actions by saying they were saving lives, but many times, they covered up atrocities in nursing homes, hospitals, and prisons while they cheered at large gatherings supporting their pet causes and shuttered churches.

Historically, in the days leading up to World War I, President Woodrow Wilson created an infrastructure of propaganda and censorship, labor controls and oppression, to make the country do what he believed ought to be done. Then the Spanish Flu and the war ravaged the nation.

During World War II, FDR interned 120,000 Japanese-Americans, 80,000 of them citizens of this country by birth, because of their potential dual loyalty due to their ethnic background. Simultaneously, immigration by Jews fleeing the Holocaust was severely limited, leaving many to die in the concentration camps and gas chambers, or by digging their own mass graves. The answer given when questioned about these practices is ending them requires winning the war.

The ends justifying the means always puts us on the road to tyranny.

There will be a response to the current administration’s efforts to sidestep, ignore, and defy the means, guardrails, procedures, processes and basic fairness. It will lead to more tyranny, when government officials who were normally protected under limited immunity for their actions are able to be prosecuted. Then the response will be for the president to pardon them, immunizing them from any prosecution. This has already begun as President Joe Biden proactively pardoned many in his administration (and family) from the current administration’s efforts to root them out for punishment.

Tyranny means when the powers in charge exercise and justify their power for its own sake, not for the purpose it was granted. The Constitution’s preamble says that’s to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The raw exercise of power in pursuit of destroying the hives of your enemies, even if your enemies have pursued your own destruction, do not further these aims.

But the road to tyranny always has a turnaround called hope.

Thirty three years before Jesus Christ rode the foal of a donkey on the road into Jerusalem, greeted by eager crowds shouting “Hosannah! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” Herod the Great, the tetrarch, murdered all the babies in Bethlehem in an effort to destroy the hive of the Messiah, who was prophesied to be born there, and confirmed by the arrival of the wise men who came to worship Him. The Messiah would be a great threat to Herod’s power, in that Herod believed He would overthrow Roman rule, by which Herod derived his authority. An angel warned Joseph, Jesus’ step-father, to get out and go to Egypt.

After three years of public ministry, preaching to thousands, performing miracles, and just before going to Jerusalem, raising Lazarus from the dead, an act that only God can perform, the members of the Sanhedrin and the chief priest Caiaphas sought to kill Jesus, because he represented a threat to their power. How could the Messiah not come from their own number, or present Himself to them for their approval (and control), they thought. So they went about plotting his death.

The Jews in Judea wanted to be free from Roman tyranny, but rejected the means of their salvation from it, because he wouldn’t fight the Romans. His freedom came from a new covenant where the Father himself sought to place the Law in our hearts, not from the destruction of their enemies which had marked the Old Testament’s covenant.

Jesus overcame death. Even as he yielded his spirit on the cross, God’s power went out from Him.

At that moment the curtain in the sanctuary of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, rocks split apart, and tombs opened. The bodies of many godly men and women who had died were raised from the dead. They left the cemetery after Jesus’ resurrection, went into the holy city of Jerusalem, and appeared to many people. (Matthew 27:50-53.)

He had said he would rise from the dead in three days, so the Sanhedrin asked the Romans to place a guard at His tomb, so that Jesus’s followers would not be able to move His body and claim He was resurrected.

All the actions of the tyrants to grasp power only worked to prove they had none, and to give more evidence that Jesus did in fact rise and walk from the tomb.

Do you understand this principle, my friends?

It is by God’s spirit that we defeat those who wield power for its own sake and then hand that power to the next in the line of tyranny. Regardless of the best efforts of people like David French or Erick Erickson, the guardrails and processes set in place by our Constitution and founders will erode and crack under the strain of tyranny seeking its own power.

All our designs on good ends, and stopping those who seek different ends for us—the social engineers, utopians, progressives—lead to nowhere but tyranny.

We’ve been in this cycle of erosion for many decades, and I believe that no power of our own can break it. If it were not for the Resurrection, there would be no way to break it. If it were not for the Resurrection, there would be no hope for the world.

Dwell on that as Easter approaches.

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