As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we have every reason to be grateful. Two and a half centuries after fifty-six men pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to the cause of liberty, the United States remains the most successful experiment in self-government in human history.
The Fourth of July is more than a holiday. It is an opportunity to remember what made America exceptional in the first place. The Founders understood that freedom was not self-sustaining. Liberty required virtue. Self-government required self-restraint. Constitutional government required citizens who valued truth over passion and principle over personality.
As a retired FBI Special Agent who spent years working counterintelligence matters, I learned that America's adversaries understand something many Americans do not: our greatest vulnerability is not military weakness. It is division. Russia, China, Iran, and other hostile actors do not need to defeat the United States on a battlefield. They simply need Americans to lose confidence in one another and in the institutions that make self-government possible.
The Soviet Union called these efforts "active measures." Today, they are conducted at digital speed through social media, alternative media ecosystems, bot networks, and influence operations designed to amplify existing grievances. The objective is not persuasion. It is polarization. Some Americans have become willing participants.
Over the last several years, a growing segment of what was the online Right has embraced a worldview that portrays nearly every American institution as irredeemably corrupt. Courts are dismissed as compromised. Law enforcement agencies are portrayed as enemies of the people. Public officials are assumed to be acting in bad faith. Every event becomes evidence of a conspiracy. Every disagreement becomes proof of betrayal.
The result is not reform. It is cynicism.
Many of the personalities driving these narratives—including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and others—deny supporting extremism or political violence. However, it is impossible to ignore the ecosystem that surrounds their messaging. Their rhetoric, and their minions who thrive in the detritus of their propaganda, often overlaps with narratives promoted by figures such as Nick Fuentes and other anti-system actors who openly reject core principles of the American constitutional order.
In fact, Representative Thomas Massie’s “Epstein Administration” narrative was cited by individuals who planned to perpetrate a terrorist attack on the recent UFC fight hosted at the White House. An intelligence tactic often employed by these individuals is “reflexive control” — the art of shaping a target's decision-making environment so that he voluntarily arrives at the conclusion you intended from the beginning. This usually takes the form of “I’m just asking questions.”
When audiences are repeatedly told that every institution is corrupt, every federal agent is a traitor, and every political opponent is an existential threat, the logical conclusion is not reform. The logical conclusion is that the system itself is beyond saving. That belief sits at the heart of accelerationism.
Accelerationism is the idea that existing political and social institutions should be destabilized or destroyed in order to hasten revolutionary change. Some would describe this parasitic ideology as finding hosts on the “extreme Right” or “extreme Left.” However, the late Rush Limbaugh often challenged the conventional notion that politics exists on a straight line, with the far Left and far Right occupying opposite ends of the spectrum.
Instead, he described politics as a circle. As movements drift farther from constitutional principles, they begin to resemble one another. The extremes may disagree about economics, race, religion, or culture, but they often share a common hostility toward institutions, constitutional restraints, and the rule of law. In Limbaugh's view, constitutional conservatives and traditional liberals could disagree vigorously while still remaining committed to the American system.
The real danger emerges when political movements become untethered from principle and consumed by grievance, cynicism, and revolutionary impulses. At that point, the extremes often converge—not in what they claim to believe, but in what they seek to destroy. It is a warning that would have sounded familiar to James Madison, who understood that faction, if left unchecked, could become one of the greatest threats to the survival of a republic.
The particulars of accelerationism vary, but the objective remains remarkably consistent: increase division, deepen distrust, and accelerate chaos.
In recent years, many Americans have become familiar with another term: stochastic terrorism. Unlike traditional terrorism, stochastic terrorism does not involve direct operational control. Instead, it involves the repeated demonization and dehumanization of perceived enemies in ways that increase the likelihood that unstable individuals will commit acts of violence on their own.
No explicit order is given. None is required. And slogans such as “We can’t vote our way out” are the battle cry.
History demonstrates that political violence is often preceded by rhetoric that normalizes extreme conclusions. Opponents cease to be fellow citizens and become traitors. Political disagreements become existential struggles. Institutions become enemies. Violence becomes easier to justify when people are convinced they are living under tyranny rather than participating in a constitutional republic.
Abraham Lincoln saw this danger long before the Civil War. In his Lyceum Address of 1838, he warned that reverence for the law must become "the political religion of the nation." Without that commitment, he feared ambitious men and reckless movements would exploit public passions and ultimately destroy the Republic from within.
The answer to corruption is accountability. The answer to government failure is reform. The answer to bad leadership is better leadership. The answer to political disagreement is persuasion. The answer is never nihilism.
America has survived challenges far greater than those we face today. It survived a revolution, a Civil War, economic collapse, world wars, political assassinations, and a decades-long Cold War against a nuclear adversary. Each generation faced moments when the future of the Republic appeared uncertain.
Ronald Reagan famously observed that freedom is "never more than one generation away from extinction." He was right. The preservation of liberty requires citizens willing to resist manipulation, defend truth, and place country above faction.