What Is My Country?

Pondering what we mean by common phrases that we once took for granted

Remember this?

I saw a meme that got me to thinking: “What is my country?”

Two or three years ago, we all knew what was meant by “your country.” It was the United States of America—fifty sovereign but united states, plus the District of Columbia and a dozen protectorates and territories. And we were all for it, more or less.

We opposed certain things going on in our country. We had complaints about the way the government worked. We criticized some states whose policies risked pain for the rest of us. We disliked certain of our fellow citizens because they advocated for policies that jeopardized our country’s core values of liberty, peace, prosperity, self-governance, and responsibility. Sometimes, our disagreements were profound, such as between those who would kill unborn babies for sport and convenience and those who believe in the sanctity of life.

But we all agreed that the union must live on.

While some of us despised the Pledge of Allegiance and some of us loved it, we all knew what the pledge meant: loyalty and fidelity to one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. The symbol of our oath was the flag, and the animating organ of the nation was the federal government. For all its flaws, we believed that the government’s primary mission, as Jefferson propounded in the Declaration of Independence, was to secure these rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Or, as the preamble to the Constitution put it, “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

But that was the period bounded by the Civil War and Covid. For one hundred and fifty-four years we all knew what was meant by “my country.”

What is “my country” today? Can I pledge allegiance to a symbol of the government in Washington? Does “my country” still include California and New York? Illinois? Or the half-dozen other states that have formally rejected the Constitution and America’s founding principles?

It seems that “my country” no longer has boundaries or a definable shape. The southern border of my former country was once distinct, but now it seems to have shifted a few hundred miles north. The Rio Grande river no longer defines its southern border, having been given over to Mexico without treaty or fight. Some states, like California, threaten to kidnap children from other other states in order to perform ritualistic child mutilation. Other states, like Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and others, have given up on elections and, instead, reverse-engineer the votes to justify an outcome preordained by faceless, nameless bureaucrats or patrons.

In a nation where every school child could once recite from memory the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion, the press, speech and assembly, and protest, almost half the country now explicitly rejects those principles and demands criminal prosecution of anyone who exercises their rights. And by “half the country,” we include judges, prosecutors, Congressmen, and the current President of the United States.

I indeed have a country, and I pledge allegiance to it. But my country is not the one whose seat is Washington, DC. My country was displaced by a rude and foreign entity. My country’s government is in exile.

These usurpers lack the decency and courage to announce either their seizure of power or their intentions. They masquerade as traditional American leaders, even though they despise everything America stands for. They have seized the military, most of the courts, and all departments of government. They surreptitiously manage the editorial policies of every major television network and newspaper in the land, deciding who may speak and write and what they may share with audiences. They conspire with technology companies to deny First Amendment rights to the American people. They promise our enemies they will give them advance notice of any military planning, and they feel such immunity as to brag about their treason before a fawning Congress. They have taken over the fields of science and medicine, dictating a faux “truth” which is no longer subject to experimentation but, rather, decreed as moral absolutes by a gnostic secular priesthood.

In short, I feel like a displaced person, a man without a country. As a veteran, I feel like the high school football star whose alma mater no longer exists. My walls and closets are adorned with varsity jackets promoting a defunct school.

This feeling of displacement isn’t new. Readers know that I constantly (and to the annoyance of many) refer frequently to The End of America post from July 2020. That post subtly announced my estrangement from the country I served. Cloistered in my basement office for months, watching cities burn while police casually observed the mayhem and reporters for major newspapers and networks told us we were not seeing what was clearly happening over their shoulders . . . it was like a bad acid trip forced on unwilling victims who had been in isolation for four months, wondering if they’ll ever see their elderly fathers again and when the marauding gangs of untouchable arsonists will reach their suburban enclaves to rape, pillage, and burn with impunity.

It was in that context, having just spent half an hour kneeling at my desk praying my nightly Rosary for our beloved country, that it dawned on me, “our beloved country is a shlit hole that doesn’t deserve my attention, much less my concern.” I realized, then, that I could not be the only one thinking this. That moment, mind you, was in July of an election year when all signs pointed to Trump trouncing the feeble-minded Biden. The rigged election was still more than three months away. If anything, that night—07/21/2020—was a night I should have been Merrill-Lynch-bullish on America.

What’s more, I wrote that piece without a glimmer of emotion. I was neither happy nor sad nor angry nor frightened. Had I recited the piece to a psychologist, his notes would reflect, “the patient presented a flat affect.” I was as emotionally flat as Wile E. Coyote after his Acme Steam Roller catastrophically malfunctioned.

I just remember thinking, “this country is done for. I must warn people.” So, I did.

I would be lying if I claimed to take no satisfaction in history, to this point, proving me right. Oh, I know, history hasn’t yet proven me completely right. But history ain’t putting up much of a fight, either. Two rigged elections and an FBI-orchestrated fake insurrection later, the history of the United States is well on its way to making me look like Nostradamus. It’s only human for me to say, “I told ya so.”

As I tried to figure out how to end the post you’re reading—which I began a week ago—a new post appeared on American Greatness: The Great American Opt-Out: A Matter of Willingness, Willfulness, and Will. The essay by Bob Maistros, a former Reagan-Bush 84 speechwriter, went where I have been afraid to go. While have long predicted the end of America, I let on that I’m against it. I must now admit that I am, and have been for three years, growing in favor of disunion. I am against the continuation of the United States as a single country, in large part, because I believe the best hope for those of us in so-called red states is to divorce as quickly as possible and leave the blues to rot.

I am not alone. Bob Maistros writes:

Stein’s Law (as in Herbert) posits, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” America’s paralysis in fixing existential problems cannot go on at all, much less forever, without a ceding of its superpower status—if not a Weimar-level collapse. 

It must stop. Soon. But how? 

Just as Issues & Insights has documented millions of citizens fleeing blue-state economic, political and social rot, the sole solution for Red America is to simply vote with its feet. 

That is, walk. Opt out.

In July of 2020, I was simply warning that America’s end is here. Now, I am saying the smart thing to do is to actively promote its end. It’s time to make national dissolution our number one and only priority. (Priority means first, and there can be only on first thing, by the way. You can’t have two priorities anymore than you can have two genders.)

Maistros goes on to give a recipe for this much-needed national divorce.

But a more likely route is for red states—perhaps the 18 that unsuccessfully banded together to challenge the 2020 election results—to declare the union dissolved, whether due to that illegitimate outcome [of the 2020 election] or because of the unceasing, extraconstitutional thwarting of sovereignty in the swamp. Perhaps invite red counties in blue jurisdictions to be annexed into neighboring jurisdictions, or even form new states. 

Maistros, though less precise than I was regarding the shape of the new, post-USA countries, sees a similar process to mine:

In either event, it’s not difficult to conceive the formation of a provisional government, pending a new constitution and elections, including current members of Congress and federal judges from departing states, and an executive of existing governors. 

I’ve read the essay three times, now, and I can find no flaw in Maistros’s prognosis or prescription. In fact, the more I think about it, the more obvious dissolution becomes. Here’s an example of how dramatically the United States has fallen: The Conservative Manifesto, my first book published in 1993.

I took tremendous pride 10 years ago when I re-read the book and realized I had not changed my mind on anything. Nor had any topic become “dated,” even though I used contemporary references throughout. All the bad things I said must be stopped have continued and grown far, far worse. All the good things I promoted remain good today.

But, now, there is much I must disavow. How could “truths” remain inviolate for 30 years, yet turn to heresy in just 3?

Well, truths do not change. For something to be true, it must have been true at the beginning of time and remain true to end of all ages. Truths must be true always and everywhere or they never were true at all. So, the truths in The Conservative Manifesto were and remain true. What changed was the things I attributed truth to, specifically, the virtue of the United States and the belief that institutions like the CIA and FBI and DOD were inherently forces for good. I believed, then, the Republican history of the United States. I believed the hippies were heretics and the GOP was orthodoxy.

I was wrong. Many of us were. Some remain wrong.

Sometime long before the Reagan Administration, the institutions built to preserve the American Ideal were infiltrated and corrupted by enemies of that ideal. The infiltrators were smart and cunning. They looked and talked like defenders of liberty and lovers of the Constitution, but they were wolves in sheep’s clothing. The CIA and FBI and DOD became Trojan Horses filled with enemy troops waiting for nightfall to spring forth from the belly of the beast to wreck havoc on an unsuspecting nation.

Well, folks, it’s dark out. The portal to hell is open, and demons are pouring out into our streets. They’ve taken over the institutions of government we erected and formed because they seemed, as Jefferson put it, “most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

And, as the elections of 2020 and 2022 proved, we will not restore them using the same tools employed to destroy them. Our institutions failed one election at a time, and each election brings us further from the ideal, not closer. (If you don’t believe elections are rigged, you’re not paying attention—it’s called “willful ignorance,” and it’s a sin.)

Therefore, our only political ambition must be at the state level, and it must be a simple declaration of dissolution of the United States and a repudiation of the Constitution. I know that’s hard for some to hear, but the Constitution is what constituted the United States government—you must repudiate the animating document to destroy the monster it brought to life.

That’s not to say a new constitution won’t look a lot like the old one. There’s no copyright on the original, so many parts could be copied and pasted directly. But other parts must be improved. The new federal government must be significantly weaker—closer to the one constituted by the Articles of Confederation.

Many readers (and I’m picturing about 20 of them in my mind right now) will read this post and think, “Bill has lost his mind.” But I ask you to remember a few of Jefferson’s other words from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. The assertions that, when governments become destructive to certain inviolable ends, the people have a right and a duty to alter or abolish those governments. Yes, Jefferson warned against breaking up a government for “light and transient causes.”

But no one can claim our grievances are “light and transient.” The government of the United States suspended the Bill of Rights, conspired to deprive your rights to exercise religion, speak, and assemble. It circumvents state laws, guaranteed by the Constitution and the Tenth Amendment, in order to murder and mutilate children through abortion and so-called transgender “care.” It works overtime to abolish the Second Amendment, and has been trampling on the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th Amendments for decades. It steals 1/3 to 1/2 of your income to pay for things morally repugnant to a Christian nation. It incites wars for the profit of favored companies and to satisfy the egomania of military officers. It has borrowed $32 trillion and stuck you with the bill. It threatens to arrest you for speaking the truth about a person’s sex. And it threatened you to inject DNA-altering compounds into your body. In short, if the United States government were the government of any other country on earth, you and I would be demanding its ostracization from global community.

The enemy, which is the United States government, wants to enslave us all in a demonic dystopia. Up to this point, we have pretended that the government is simply a child going through a mischievous phase out of which it will soon grow. But our child’s mischievousness has advanced to criminality and even to mass murder. By continuing to support this child, we are culpable in its crimes.

Prudence dictates that we divorce ourselves from this monster-child now, before it consumes us all, while we still have the means to resist.

Which brings us to Mr. Maistros’ close:

At America’s accelerated rate of decline, there is not a moment to waste. And with every elite political, economic, social, cultural, and judicial institution mobilized against its citizenry, no further “point of no return” to be passed.

This gives me great joy and hope. We, who admire the founders, have been blessed by God with the chance to do what they did—to found a “new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We can recapture for our posterity what a holy land built according to God’s plan—as best as we can know it.

Today is a new day, and tomorrow can be brighter, but only if we have the courage to sever the bonds that tie us our decrepit recent past.

God save our land.