By Paul Craig Roberts - June 26, 2024

Occasionally I note that conservatives are ineffective defenders of liberty. The primary reason is that they confuse America with the government. The government is not America. As our Founding Fathers understood, government is our enemy. They attempted to restrain our enemy with the Constitution and the separation of its powers. In effect, America is the Constitution, and the government’s attacks on the Constitution are attacks on America.

Conservatives confuse the government’s attacks on the Constitution with defenses of America. If you make immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional actions of the government known, as Assange did, you are denounced as a “commie who hates America,” not heralded as a watchdog for accountable government. Conservatives accepted the suspension of habeas corpus and spying on citizens without warrants as protections against terrorism despite the fact that these attacks on the Constitution stripped away our protections against arbitrary and unaccountable government.

Mike Pence personifies the conservative mentality. Read his response to Assange’s release:

It is utter nonsense that Assange endangered the life of US troops by reporting leaked information of US war crimes and US deception of its own public and its allies. It was Washington’s wars, contrived affairs justified on the basis of concocted information that Washington knew to be false–such as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction–that cost the lives of American soldiers and large numbers of civilians in the countries relentlessly bombed by Washington. Assange’s reporting, had it been acted on, would have saved many lives, including those of US soldiers. Instead, Washington and the whore US media used massive propaganda to turn the release of truthful information into charges of treason and espionage, and treason by a non-citizen as well. Treason against a country can only be done by a citizen of that country.

Assange is not an American citizen. If Assange were to murder a fellow Australian citizen, he cannot be charged with murder in the US. Washington’s position is that US law applies to the entire world and everyone in it. This is obvious from Washington sanctioning citizens of other countries that fail to meet Washington’s approval. From Washington’s standpoint, its “rules based order” are the laws for the entire world.

In the name of national security, American conservatives will tolerate any and all violations of the Constitution that protects us from tyranny. Consequently, conservatives find themselves allied with tyranny against liberty.

That Donald Trump chose Mike Pence as his vice president indicates that Trump does not have the judgment that his agenda requires if it is to be successful. Will it be any different Trump’s second time around, or will he again be staffed by the establishment that hates him?

Who can Trump appoint to his government who knows Washington but is not a part of it?

If such people exist, do they have the stamina to withstand the stress of the fight?

So much has been lost that I fear that defense of America will never again be anything other than the defense of Washington.

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