“The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty” is here!
As many of you are aware, my new book, The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, was released last week.
To celebrate my book’s release and give you a taste of the contents, I’m providing an excerpt for you to enjoy. I hope that it will tweak your interest enough to visit TheNewAxisOfEvil.com and purchase a copy of the book endorsed by Dr. Ron Paul (Yes . . . THAT Ron Paul) when he said:
“David Leach does an admirable job defending liberty against the multitude of threats that seek to extinguish it.”
Enjoy!
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9/11, THE PATRIOT ACT, AND THE NEW AXIS OF EVIL
“These [NSA] programs were never about terrorism:
they’re about economic spying, social control, and
diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.”
— EDWARD SNOWDEN
(Whistleblower who exposed National Security Agency spying)
Speaking before the American people in his 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush presented his strategy for how America would respond to the new threat to liberty facing us in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In his speech, Bush identified three countries as being primarily responsible for this threat: North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. He labeled these enemies “an axis of evil.”
“Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.
Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September 11, but we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens.
Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom.
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade.
States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil . . . (Emphasis added)
In the face of this very real threat, America responded to Bush’s call to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America, our friends, and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Sadly, as the passing of time has led us to forget the events of that terrible day, the resolve to defeat the axis of evil has waned, and the threat to freedom has returned with a vengeance from
these same nations.
As history draws ever closer to repeating itself, the words of Winston Churchill in the days leading up to World War II ring true:
When the situation was manageable, it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand, we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
International terrorism is a very real threat to our God-given liberty and freedom, but there is another that is just as insidious and even more devious. It has been at work for decades yet has gone mostly undetected because it has been working from within the system.
Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, this new threat has been stealthily at work undermining the very foundations of liberty endowed to us by “(our) Creator,” as penned in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson and, in piecemeal fashion, it has been steadily working to destroy the Constitution and our “unalienable rights.”
Using the governmental structure established in the beginning by our Founding Fathers — Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches — this new threat has brought America to the precipice of the total destruction of liberty.
From the American Revolution to wars in the Middle East, from communism to radical Islam, these three branches of American government, meant to protect and preserve liberty and freedom, have instead become tools to bring oppression and the loss of freedom.
I call these three branches . . . The New Axis of Evil.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001—THE DAY LIBERTY DIED IN AMERICA
When we annually recognize the terrorist attacks that took place in New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, we are reminded of many things. We remember the thousands of innocent lives that were lost and the billions of dollars in economic damage. But as great and tragic as these losses were, another loss continues to be the greatest of all — the loss of liberty.
The demise of liberty didn’t occur at the hands of the hijackers; it occurred at the hands of the New Axis of Evil. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The PATRIOT Act. The PATRIOT Act II. National Security Agency (NSA) spying. Fake cell phone towers
being used to tap your cell phone. These are just a few examples of how the government of, by, and for the people has become the government over, above, and beyond the people.
As the list of post-9/11 changes above shows, George W. Bush, the president who “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system,” could have just as easily stated that he was willing to abandon freedom to save freedom post-9/11. While it was popular at the time to blame Barack — Terrorism? What terrorism? — Obama for the situation, we must remember that this particular attack on liberty began under Bush. There are many who say Bush’s intentions were purer than the presidents who succeeded him, but they are mistaken
Just days before the anniversary of 9/11 in 2014, the DOJ released two memos detailing the Bush administration’s legal justification for monitoring the phone calls and emails of Americans without a warrant under a secret program dubbed Stellar Wind that began after the September 11, 2001 attacks. “Even in peacetime, absent congressional action, the president has inherent constitutional authority … to order warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance,” then-assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith said in a heavily redacted 108-page memo dated May 6, 2004.
Checking . . . checking . . . checking . . . Nope! It’s not in the Constitution. In fact, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says the exact opposite:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated … 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.
Sounds pretty clear to me. Post-Bush, the Axis of Evil grew more powerful when the next Republican president moved into the White House in 2016. Under the leadership of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, the US Cyber Command — an idea originally proposed by Barack Obama — was created within the NSA to give the agency greater power to spy on Americans. Trump also reauthorized FISA-702, which allowed the NSA to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance on Americans.
The government’s liberty-killing agenda took off post-9/11, but their tyrannical reaction to COVID-19 took it to places previously unimagined under the PATRIOT Act.
In a piece I wrote in March 2020 about how COVID-19 was leading America to the end of liberty and the beginning of tyranny, I referenced an article written by John Whitehead, the founder and president of the Rutherford Institute. It is Whitehead’s contention (and mine as well) that COVID-19 tyranny was leading America down the road to becoming a full-blown police state:
“This coronavirus epidemic, which has brought China’s Orwellian surveillance out of the shadows and caused Italy to declare a nationwide lockdown, threatens to bring the American Police State out into the open on a scale we’ve not seen before.”
Socialist policies and the tyranny they create became the norm during the so-called pandemic. Donald Trump’s daughter and advisor on economic matters, Ivanka, had her feminist, socialist dream of government-mandated paid family leave become a reality when one of the first coronavirus bailouts — Families First Coronavirus Response Act — included taxpayer-funded paid family leave and provisions for taxpayer-funded sick leave. Other socialist-based policies such as prison reform, gun control, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal also experienced major advances.
The events of 9/11 brought us the PATRIOT Act, so it was with a bit of irony that COVID-19 tyranny brought us a Patriot Act for healthcare, a plan created by Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner. Kushner envisioned forming a government/private-sector partnership to create a new “surveillance and data collection system” to track coronavirus Americans. Parts of Kushner’s vision became reality when vaccine passports were jointly developed by a group of health and technology companies under the belief that governments and businesses would eventually require proof of being vaccinated before being allowed to return to “normal.”
The Axis of Evil’s use of COVID-19 to destroy liberty continued under Joe Biden. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Biden identified a new terrorist threat: Americans exercising their God-given, constitutionally protected right to free speech to criticize the government’s COVID-19 policies. In a terrorism threat advisory released in 2021 by Biden and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS), it was determined that people pushing “anti-government rhetoric,” including people standing in “opposition to COVID-19 measures,” would be classified as “domestic terrorists.”
The advisory lumped people exercising their free speech rights via online forums, people who disagreed with COVID-19 restrictions, and Al-Qaeda into one all-encompassing category. In the eyes of Joe Biden, exercising your free speech right to protest masks and vaccine mandates and/or using social media to do so made you no different than the terrorists who crashed planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 9/11.
From Bush to Biden after 9/11, Washington made killing liberty in the name of safety standard operating procedure.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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