There is an eighty-five minute documentary that you should watch. It is called The Thread of Liberty: Keeping Our Republic. It comes from Ned Ryun, the author and American Majority CEO who wrote a very good book called American Leviathan two years ago, a work that was subsequently turned into an excellent documentary about our country’s oppressive administrative state. Ryun directed and produced this new film to celebrate America’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday. While working on the project, he served on President Trump’s 1776 Commission.
I really appreciate what Ryun accomplishes with his books and documentaries. In effect, he reminds Americans of their birthright, while giving them a refresher course on the historical and intellectual struggles that have brought us to this point in time.
Mixing arguments from history, philosophy, political science, and Christianity in an effort to encourage freedom-loving Americans to protect and preserve their country is not easy. Ryun wants conservatives to get out and vote during an era when a lot of people have begun to see elections as useless exercises in performative theater. He wants Christians to take their civic duties seriously during a century when corporate officers and government officials regularly demonize Christians.
He wants people to understand why they should continue fighting for the principles underlying American Exceptionalism during an amoral, nihilistic, anti-American age when cultural and political leaders often detest and publicly denounce the United States. These are difficult tasks.
In my own writing, I do my best to remind readers why they should be proud of their country. Sometimes people are quick to express in the comments that there is little to celebrate because the country is all but lost. Other times, commenters will point out that the time for history lessons and philosophical arguments has already come and gone. A lot of people rightly worry that America is headed for civil war, and many feel that rational debate is futile when bloodshed may well lie just beyond the horizon.
I have always been of the opinion that whatever happens down the road, those of us who wish to defend America from her enemies must have a firm grasp of and appreciation for America’s founding principles. In this regard, the more success that outright communists have in taking over the Democrat Party as part of their institutional conquest of the United States, the more committed patriotic Americans must become to the cause of defending our God-given rights and liberties. As our enemies become more emboldened in their campaign to destroy America, we must find within ourselves the confidence to resist and persevere.
This is why Ryun’s Thread of Liberty is so timely. It tells the story of America exceedingly well. Whereas Barack Obama’s presidency rejected American Exceptionalism, introduced a cancerous self-hatred within the body politic, and provided cover for Islamic supremacists, Antifa domestic terrorists, and anti-American communists to run for political office on platforms openly calling for the destruction of our constitutional form of government, Ryun’s documentary shows just how remarkable America’s founding principles have always been.
Whereas race hucksters, such as Al Sharpton and Eric Holder, and instigators of racial hate hoaxes, such as the Ku Klux Klan-supporting Southern Poverty Law Center, pit Americans of different races against each other, encourage Americans to topple over statues of the Founding Fathers (because some might have owned slaves), and push for special preferences in college admissions and hiring decisions depending upon an applicant’s skin color, Ryun explains how the Civil War continued the American Revolution’s fight for human liberty, inalienable rights, and equality under the law.
Whereas leaders of the Democrat Party openly conspire to aid and abet illegal aliens in defiance of federal law, permit non-citizens to vote in elections, pack the Supreme Court with dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-socialists, and empower government bureaucrats to micromanage every detail of our lives, Ryun’s film shows how a century of regressive “progressivism” has instituted the “soft despotism” of “experts” who rule as cubicle kings and queens.
The Thread of Liberty does a tremendous job of defending the American Experiment and demonstrating how America’s founding principles have directly guided the country through its darkest times. While the vast majority of Democrat voters have been indoctrinated to despise their country, dismiss the Founding Fathers as racists, and reject the constitutional safeguards set up to protect our God-given rights, Ryun’s documentary shows how the Founders’ vision informed the Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the mid-twentieth-century’s Civil Rights Movement.
Those who wish to destroy America use our nation’s worst conflicts as a means to delegitimize both the spirit and legal framework of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, while those very documents embody the quintessential American virtues that have continued to lead us down the path toward freedom, security, and prosperity.
To be sure, the thread that connects the generation of our Founding Fathers with our own is worn and unraveling. There is a real fear today that we might lose our country and, therefore, lose our liberty.
How can we preserve a constitutional republic that has already abandoned Madison’s system of checks and balances among coequal branches of government in favor of a sprawling administrative Deep State whose members govern despotically and cannot be voted out of permanent bureaucratic office? How can we protect our inalienable, God-given rights when most elected officials reject the authority of God and insist that government is the source of all rights? How can we speak and pray as free people when the Intelligence Community conspires with social media companies to censor our speech and lawmakers empower prosecutors to persecute people of faith for their religious beliefs?
How can we enjoy our liberty in peace and use our private property as we wish when a century of jurisprudence has enabled presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to erect an administrative state Leviathan that claims unmitigated authority to regulate every element of our lives? Is there anything remaining of the thread of liberty, or are we unmoored from our country’s founding principles and drifting into a morass of administrative state tyranny?
In asking these questions, Ryun’s documentary serves as a jolt of electricity in the two-hundred-fiftieth year of the American Experiment. One of the things that his film does so well is to show the viewer that Americans have stepped up to the abyss and nearly lost their country many times before.
The War for American Independence, the interstate squabbles that arose during the uncertainty of the Articles of Confederation, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, the Reconstruction era, the flight from farms to factories, Jim Crow laws, two world wars, the disastrous growth of the unconstitutional administrative state — every decade of the past two and a half centuries has pulled at that thread of liberty and threatened to separate us from our American inheritance.
Ryun also points us to the prescriptive remedy by highlighting Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic work, Democracy in America. What the French political philosopher, historian, and anthropologist recognized in the United States of the 1830s was a country whose people governed themselves effectively because they valued Christian virtue, civic organizations, and church fellowship over the machinery of government.
Self-confident, self-sufficient, moral people who cherish their liberty more than the empty promises of politicians are the essential bulwark against tyranny and the perpetual guarantors of personal freedom.
America’s survival depends upon a return to the nuclear family, a renewed sense of Christian duty, reinvigorated patriotism, and the replacement of bureaucratic “experts” with “We the People.”
That’s the “covenant” connecting Americans today with those who first secured our liberties two and a half centuries ago. That’s the thread of liberty that we must make strong once again.
