The first responsibility of any government is to defend and to protect its own citizens.

There is no obligation, in law or common law or even by inference, for any government to defend the aspirations of people who are nationals of other countries, or to prioritize those aspirations over the aspirations of its own citizens.

From time to time governments may decide to assist foreign nationals, as the United States did in some of our foreign wars. But this is the exception, not the rule. And even these interventions did not prioritize foreign nationals over our own citizens.

President Trump is restoring common sense and sanity to a government which had lost its way. The American people never voted for open borders, for globalism, and for the surrender of their national sovereignty.

Successive administrations — both Republican and Democrat, functioning more like a UniParty than opposing parties — have gradually dismantled essential components of our national sovereignty. We know how this was done: trade deals which favored multinational corporations over U.S. citizens, shipping jobs overseas, ignoring the ever-growing illegal alien population (now estimated to be in excess of 20,000,000) which has driven down wages and expropriated entire sectors of the economy (i.e., meat packing, landscaping, etc).

In addition to these deleterious effects on the American people, U.S. citizens are being killed by illegal aliens at an alarming rate due to DUI deaths, overdose deaths from massive drug smuggling, and by outright murder.

But the crisis is larger even than these personal and community tragedies. We are losing our sovereignty. Our citizenship is being devalued, debased, and nullified. A country which cannot control its borders is no longer a country.

We must ask, what’s the use of a government which cannot protect its own people and defend its own national sovereignty?

Though no one wants to see anyone out of work or missing a paycheck, why should anyone be asked to care more for a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand government employees whose pay is delayed, than for the survival of their country?

A government that cannot deliver on its fundamental responsibility to secure its own borders and to assure its own sovereignty not only deserves to be shut down, it deserves to be dissolved.

We know what’s going on. Huge forces, populated by sometimes strange bedfellows, want the status quo to continue because it suits their purposes of profits and/or political power. These are the globalist multi-national corporations, the ethno-centric zealots of the Left, the great majority of the Democratic Party, and the Never Trump wing of the Republican Party as exemplified by Mitt Romney.

Despite perfunctory lip service, these people want open borders, ineffectual border security, mass migration, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and globalism. They truly believe that the era of the nation state is a relic of the past, and they are doing everything they can to accelerate this vision of their utopia.

But the American people never voted for this utopia and do not want it anymore than the Brits, the French, the Poles, or anyone else.

This is what the “shut down” is all about. The stakes could not be any higher — which is why the president must not and cannot surrender.

The author divides her time between the mountains of Appalachia and the swamps of DC.