Editorial note: Larry Kirkpatrick’s religious liberty sermon from a couple of weeks ago is, in contrast to most religious liberty sermons, well worth watching. It is extraordinarily thoughtful and insightful.
American has been gradually losing freedom almost since the founding, but Larry believes that there have been certain historical events that serve as demarcation points, separating American history into phases. Larry divides American history into three phases: Early stage (from 1776 to 1865), middle stage (from 1865 to 2001) and late stage (from 2001 to the present). The stages go from most free to least free.
The transition from early stage to middle stage is marked by the North’s victory in the American Civil War. It is not often mentioned, because of the South’s dark motive for wanting to leave the union, but the South was constitutionally correct in assuming that if the states voted, as states, for independence, then as states ratified the Articles of Confederation and, finally, as states ratified the Constitution of 1787, then the states could likewise, as states, vote themselves out of the union. Lincoln decided otherwise, a war—by far the bloodiest in American history—was fought, and Lincoln forced the South to stay in the union. The Civil War settled for all time that there is no right of states to secede from the union. No matter how tyrannical the federal government becomes, we cannot leave the political union of the United States, no matter how peaceful and democratic may be our attempts to secede. I salute Larry for having the courage to point this out.
(Today, the ideological divide is not so much sectional, regional, or state-by-state as it is the urban areas, which are Leftist, against the rural areas which are more conservative. The rural counties of California, and the eastern counties of Oregon and Washington would love not to be ruled by the urban, coastal communists in those states! But alas the attempts of these rural counties to secede from their Leftist states is doomed at the outset.)
I’ve dialogued with Larry about the sermon, and I suggested that middle stage America should be divided into early middle stage and late middle stage by the year 1913. That year saw the creation of America’s central bank—the privately owned “Federal Reserve.” The establishment of the Fed put control over interest rates and the volume of currency in circulation in the hands of the plutocrats. Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744 –1812) a German-Jewish banker and the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty, reportedly said, “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!”
Inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon; it is the result of the debasement of the currency. Depending upon how it is measured, between 40% and 80% of the dollars now in existence were created by the Federal Reserve since January of 2020. Obviously, when the Fed prints that much new money, it is going to cause massive inflation, and it did. Most of us, myself included, could not even imagine a regime of sound money, because we never lived under such a system.
And if no central bank had been established, we would not now be fearing a “central bank digital currency,” which would give the government the ability to bring to reality Revelation 13:17 (and, yes, Larry discusses the threat of CBDCs in his sermon).
Also in 1913, the 16th Amendment was ratified, which gives the federal government the right to directly tax personal income. Prior to 1913, the federal government was funded primarily by tariffs, and there was no personal income tax. Now, the federal government has the right to know about every penny you earn, and can and will harass you with audits and demands for payment, and can put liens on your real property without judicial process. Although your returns are supposed to remain secret they will be leaked whenever you become inconvenient to the ruling elites; President Trump’s tax returns have been leaked multiple times. (Let’s hope Trump can deliver on replacing the Internal Revenue Service with an External Revenue Service that collects tariffs.)
Although I didn’t mention it to Larry, I just noticed that the 17th Amendment, allowing for direct, popular, election of senators, was also ratified in 1913. This was a blow to federalism and states’ rights similar, in my opinion, to the Civil War. When the state legislatures appointed senators those legislatures were far more powerful, and the men they sent to Washington had to be much more protective of state rights and prerogatives; no legislation was passed through the senate that did not protect the rights of the states as sovereign entities.
Truly, 1913 was a significant year in the loss of ordered liberty as envisioned by our founders.
But I completely agree with Larry regarding 2001. I personally do not believe that the terror attacks of September 11 on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon were an “inside job,” but I understand why people believe that: the reaction to the attacks, particularly the passage of the “Patriot Act,” changed America forever, profoundly and for the worse.
The founders intended for us to have privacy in our “persons, houses, papers and effects,” and they ratified the 4th Amendment, as part of the Bill of Rights, to guarantee that privacy:
"[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures , shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause , supported by oath or affirmation , and particularly describing the place to be searched , and the persons or things to be seized ."
That’s gone now. The vast intelligence-gathering network that was developed during the cold war and subsequently, to use against America’s enemies, was re-directed inward, to use against American citizens. We are now constantly surveilled by our own government. Every telephone call is recorded, every text message and email is collected, and every other piece of “signals intelligence” is scarfed up by the National Security Administration (NSA). Every piece of mail, even, is photographed.
In theory, under section 702 of the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” the government is not supposed to be able to access, without a warrant, the contents of that “signals intelligence,” when the information originates from Americans in America. But the warrant requirement is generally ignored—hundreds of thousands of warrantless searches through signals intelligence databases have been documented, both by a former NSA director, Admiral Mike Rogers, as well the FISA judges.
But even when not ignored, the FISA warrant process presents a negligible obstacle to invasion of privacy. We saw that with the Russia Collusion Hoax perpetrated against President Trump. The FBI used opposition research paid for by Hilary Clinton, which they knew was false, to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump, and renewed the warrant three times, even though they were by then spying on, with no real basis, the elected President of the United States.
We also live in the age of “surveillance capitalism.” The tech lords record every google search you make, and everything you say in proximity to a smart phone; when you mention something that can be bought or sold, you get advertisements for that thing, as Larry mentions, for the next week. It would be bad enough if it were only corporations wanting to sell you something that had access to your personal browsing and speaking data. But the reality is that those corporations will give your data to the government if the government asks for it, usually without even asking to see a warrant or a subpoena.
We live in a world of zero privacy.
There is a lot of good stuff in this sermon, including the mention of the book “Live Not By Lies” and the beast from the abyss of Revelation 11. Larry understands that the atheistic Left, not just the papacy, is a threat to religious liberty.
