Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

One of the most unmistakable indications that a civilization is in decline is when it is no longer capable of telling its heroes from its villains. Three heroic individuals, recently in the news, come to mind.

The first is Edward Snowden, a person who gambled everything, his career and liberty, his life and love, on the moral principle that people have a right to privacy in their communications with others. His "crime" is that he told America and the world what's being done to them by a gaggle of conspirators nobody ever had a chance to vote against and who, in any decent society, would be serving long prison sentences.

Over the past few weeks, I have heard this young man called more vile names than any ever used on Richard Nixon. I have heard more evil and barbaric torture and punishment suggested for him than any I ever heard for any Nazi war criminal. The fact that, owing to his defense of freedom, he has had to take refuge in the gangster kingdom of post—Soviet Russia, is an indictment of what the U.S. government has become—everything any American soldier since Bunker Hill, New Orleans, the Alamo, Antietam, San Juan Hill, the Argonne Forest, Normandy, Pork Chop Hill, Khe Sanh, Baghdad, and Kabul ever mistakenly believed he was fighting against.

America's second unrecognized hero—and right here I guess I'm going to lose about half of my readers, those who've been faithfully attending the mass media's Five Minute Hate every day for the past several months—is George Zimmerman, late of the Neighborhood Watch, a lone figure out in the dark and the rain, defending a Productive Class community beset by goblins and looters of the (lower) parasitic class.

Allegedly against the advice of the "experts" and "professionals" whose sage wisdom ("buying a gun is a bad idea—you'll only end up getting hurt") made one in three Americans victims of violent crime in the 1960s—until we ignored and defied it, and armed ourselves—he abandoned the supposed safety of his car to keep an eye on someone he regarded as suspicious, only to be attacked without provocation and nearly murdered, as he clearly would have been without the means of self-defense.

As his reward for standing firm at civilization's gates, in true Bizarro fashion, he was put on trial (when in fact he should never have been charged), described by the media in the foulest possible terms (which absurdly included creating two whole new races, "white Hispanics" like Zimmerman himself, and "black Hispanics" like one of the women on his jury), deliberately set up as a target for criminal lynch mobs, and had his life-saving weapon stolen from him by statist goons abusing their authority as usual and threatening to violate his Constitutional rights further by illegally subjecting him to double jeopardy.

Before you even think of calling me a racist, here, answer this question: who is the greater racist, someone who believes that race had nothing to do that night with what happened between Zimmerman and his would-be killer, or someone who creates two new anthropological groupings so that the innocent self-defender can be accused of being a racist?

Time for a massive reset: although he can certainly be excused if it didn't feel that way to him, it was not George Zimmerman on trial in Sanford, Florida, but the basic concept of individual self-defense, which I have heard described by minority race-baiters as specifically "white" in character. You have a social duty, in their demented view, to offer yourself up to the collective as a passive victim—and die.

If you think I exaggerate, I've also seen a poster issued by the government of New South Wales, an Australian state, asserting, in the face of every conceivable tenet of natural and common law, that self—defense—preserving your life—is not a sufficient justification for having a gun or shooting an assailant with it. There are too many of us, anyway: the United Nations—Agenda 21—says 9/10 of us, 6.3 billion of us, should be disposed of. To the government—to any government, we are all just indistinguishable, interchangeable units in a vast, impersonal (but highly profitable and aggrandizing to some) machine.

That sick, stupid, evil ideology, in essence, is what Zimmerman was put on trial for having unwittingly challenged. Here in Colorado we have a new statute that limits the number of cartridges you may carry in your gun so you can't incapacitate an entire gang (the legislators' actual constituents) before they can kill you and cook you and eat you.

But I differ—and I will not beg to do it. As I said in the earliest of my writings on the subject, even before The Probability Broach, it is the aggressor—the initiator of force—who sets the relative value of his own life against that of his intended victim. Contrary to the race pimps, he is the one who makes himself worthless. Morally, it is his own finger on the trigger of the gun that finally kills him. He has simply discovered a convoluted way of committing suicide. This is neither a black thing nor a white thing, it is a stupid thing.

Adam Kokesh is America's third unrecognized and unappreciated hero.

The Second Amendment mandates that each individual has an absolute right to own and carry weapons, anywhere, any time, in any way he (or she) wishes. There is no mention, in the Bill of Rights, of special circumstances or locales in which that right may be suppressed or even limited. In fact—look up the word "infringed"—anything remotely like that is flatly prohibited. If anything, that should especially apply within the District of Columbia, seat of government and (likely as a direct consequence) one of the highest rates of violent crime in America.

Apparently Adam believes what it says in the Constitution, and made a movie of himself loading and carrying a shotgun right there on the Event Horizon of civilization's blackest hole. A few days later (apparently it took them all a lot of mumbling and stumbling around to figure out what to do in the face of the hideous threat represented by one man with a shotgun), dozens of heavily armed and cowardly armored thugs smashed their way into his house—outside their jurisdiction but with local accomplices—terrorized his houseguests, ransacked his home, and consumed uncounted hours attempting to get his safe open.

Some number of these staunch defenders of truth, justice, and the Stalinist way were observed by neighbors bringing bags of evidence into Kokesh's home, whereupon the miscreant was charged, not merely for having exercised his Second Amendment rights, but his Ninth Amendment right as well, to possess illegally prohibited agricultural products.

Since then, Adam has been chivvied about, hidden, revealed, charged, uncharged, and charged again, passed from one agency of pigs to another like the legal hot potato he is. He has put his life and liberty on the line in what well may prove to be the last revolution in human history. For Authority, which, like a dying dinosaur, doesn't realize its 10,000 year age of dominance is over, it's a "them or us" situation.

And for anyone to whom three heroes are not enough to restore their hope, there are Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Glenn Greenwald. Before you bring it up, I don't give a rat's ass why they did what they did—and neither should you—only that they got it done.

Of course there's a lot of stupidity out there, in addition to the heroism.

I honestly but mistakenly believed that Barack H. Obama couldn't possibly get more pathetically idiotic than he was already—until he declared that the "white half" of himself is a racist, racism, by implication, being a genetically inborn condition in anyone who isn't sufficiently melanized. He's wrong, of course: it's the bucket-headed half, two thirds, three quarters, or nine tenths of himself that's racist.

Also evil and insane.

At the other end of the albedo spectrum, Chris Christie, the RINO governor of New Jersey, a 300-pound tax-gobbling oath-breaking member of the (upper) parasitic class, with even more fat between his ears than around his waist, has recently called libertarian rejection of the government's Reichstag-style fear-mongering "a dangerous strain of thought" and mischaracterized Rand Paul (who doesn't seem to know what kind of kumquat he is) as one of the movement's most dangerous leading lights.

The facts, of course, are (A) that Rand Paul is not a libertarian, and (B) that Christie and his entire neofascistic ilk have already done vastly greater damage to America than 9/11 ever could. Along with cretinous specimens like Jay "I just wish that damn ol' Internet had never been invented!" Rockefeller, and Michele "We have to destroy individual liberty to save it!" Bachmann, they are a political cancer, aggressively eating out the very substance of everything that was ever decent and admirable about this country and the ideals on which it was founded.

So the question lies before us: can intelligence and heroism save our uniquely wonderful culture before imbecility and cowardice destroy it?

Stay tuned.