In the movie 300, a fictional version of the very real Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., Sparta’s King Leonidas found himself in a conundrum. It’s the same conundrum that Americans and the truckers in Canada are facing, today.
Xerxes, king of Persia, sent messengers to Sparta to force him into a Faustian bargain: “If you value your lives or your complete annihilation, listen to me,” the messenger said. “Xerxes conquers and controls everything he rests his eyes upon. He leads an army so massive, it shakes the ground with its march – so vast, it drinks the rivers dry. All the god-king Xerxes requires is this: a simple offering of earth and water; a token of Sparta’s submission to the will of Xerxes.”
“Submission,” said Leonidas. “Now that’s a bit of a problem.”
Spartans were a free and brave people whose women “gave birth to real men,” as Leonidas’s queen told the messenger. Submission was unthinkable. With a choice of slavery or annihilation, Leonidas relied on his instincts. “This is Sparta!” he yelled as he kicked the Persian messenger into a bottomless pit.
Then he prepared for war.
But being king did not make Leonidas supreme because Sparta had a divided government. War could only be decided by the ephors, the country’s highest magistrates without whose blessing no king dared venture into war. The ephors, who had secretly accepted Persia’s “submission” in exchange for gold, forbade Leonidas from going to war. Their final decision was law. In Sparta, whether man or woman, subject or king, no one was above the law.
Sparta was about to be annihilated and King Leonidas was forced to do nothing by a corrupt government who looked at any pushback against Persia as a crime. The law had become perverted.
This was the king’s conundrum.
“What must a king do to save his world when the very laws he’s sworn to protect force him to do nothing?” the perplexed king asked his queen later that night.
She answered his question, with a question, and it immediately unraveled his conundrum.
“It is not a question of what a Spartan citizen should do – nor a husband, nor a king. Instead, ask yourself my dearest love: ‘What should a free man do?’”
That’s the question for our times as we sit back and watch grinning tyrants ruthlessly destroy the institutions that protect our freedoms, without our consent. While rotten progressive policies, Draconian COVID mandates, and high-level intimidation are causing millions to suffer, millions to lose their livelihoods, and hundreds of thousands to die, woke governments – by law – are forcing law-abiding citizens to do nothing.
Think of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” protests. Thousands of peaceful, praying, and patriotic protesters were lumped in with a few Capitol rioters and viciously targeted as terrorists and insurrectionists by Nancy Pelosi and the Justice Department for questioning the dirty 2020 election. So far, it’s worked.
Woke district attorneys and the “defund the police” movement have deliberately snapped the thin blue line, exposing innocent people to robbery, violence, and murder; and businesses to burning, looting, and smash-and-grabs. When victims deign to defend their lives and property, the full weight of the legal system bears down on them.
Kyle Rittenhouse won his case, but the ferocity of the legal apparatus against him had a chilling effect on law-abiding citizens who are now forced to think more seriously about defending themselves as protections are being dismantled. One eye watches the criminal, the other watches the law.
“Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons, and gendarmes [armed French police] at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim – when he defends himself – as a criminal,” wrote French economist Frederic Bastiat in his pamphlet, The Law (1850).
Some things never change, which Canadian truckers are finding out. For years, they dutifully sat back watching tyrannical mandates do more harm than good. After witnessing their wives, kids, colleagues, and fellow citizens suffer without an ounce of mercy from the government, enough was enough. Submission is no longer an option.
The world sees exactly what the truckers are fighting for, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau painted them as Nazi racists who spread threats, violence and hatred. “This illegal activity must stop, and it will stop,” he purred.
Truckers are now forced to rely on their instincts.
“I will die to protect my family and my children from overreach by the government,” said one protester, 60, who was fired for not getting vaccinated. His son faces termination, and his pregnant daughter was “harassed” into getting vaccinated.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency and threatened truckers with a year of jail, up to $100,000 in fines, confiscated money sent to them through GoFundMe, and the Ontario Superior Court of (lopsided) Justice issued an order to freeze monies coming into GoFundMe’s Christian-based competitor, GiveSendGo.
“There will be consequences for these actions,” Ford said. “And they will be severe. … Let me be clear, [the] government does not direct our police forces, but we do set the laws.”
These people have no clue what they're dealing with – in Canada or in America. Americans just want to get back to normal. They are sick of the forced mandates, the forced CRT, the forced illegal immigration, the forced climate change response, the reckless spending on junk ideas like “infrastructure equity,” and the forced “men can have babies” propaganda.
It’s all forcing free people back to their roots.
Here are the basics: God gave us all life, liberty, and property – with property being rightfully earned through the “ceaseless application of our faculties to natural resources,” as Bastiat put it. The right to life, liberty, and property existed before government.
We don’t need government’s permission to defend our lives. We don’t need government’s permission to defend our liberty. We don’t need government’s permission to defend our property.
Since defending life, liberty, and property is a natural law, no manmade law on Earth has the legitimate authority to prevent free people from protecting their lives, their liberty, or their property. Government was created to protect them, collectively. When government, by law, stops protecting these three, it loses legitimacy, and laws become perverted – unnatural law.
Today, leftist politicians are attempting to institutionalize perverted law, believing that they can endlessly threaten and muzzle masses of people while they, with good intentions, pave highways to Hell.
But when you make an absolute mess of the country, without the consent of law-abiding people, and you use the law as a bludgeon to force them to do nothing as everything dear to them is destroyed, don’t be shocked at what happens when they wake up one day and ask themselves: “What should a free man do?”