By Logan Albright

What would the Founding Fathers say if they were alive today? This is a question we often see posed as we lament the unchecked growth of government, exceeding both in size and scope the original vision for the United States of America as outlined in its founding documents. It’s also the question that author Johnny Teague attempts to answer in his latest book, Thomas Paine Returns with Common Sense.

In this novella-length thought experiment, Teague imagines Thomas Paine, one of the most influential political thinkers of the 18th century and a major contributor to our nation’s founding, returned from the grave to offer a series of ghostly pronouncements on the state of the country in the 21st century. The text alternates between excerpts from Paine’s most famous work, Common Sense, and applications of these passages to the political climate of today.

Why attempt to step into the shoes of a long-dead polemicist for contemporary political insight? There are several promising reasons. First, the past is replete with great thinkers from whose wisdom moderns we could undoubtedly benefit from if only we had access to it. Indeed, this constitutes much of the argument for reading and engaging with the classics in the first place: the ability to apply mankind’s earlier insights to new problems. Second, if we consider America as something more than a mere piece of land, as an idea that sprang from the minds and pens of its founders, an experiment in self-government and an opportunity to form a more perfect union of states and citizens, then it makes sense to return, on occasion, to the words of its designers and see whether we are living up to the example they set two and a half centuries ago.

As valuable as this exercise may be, attempting to put words in the mouths of the dead is a perilous business, fraught with pitfalls. But by hewing as closely to the original text, and juxtaposing his own writing directly with Paine’s, Teague deftly manages to avoid a great many of these (although I do think he is overly presumptuous in having his modern narrator repudiate Paine’s critique of Christianity, The Age of Reason). This allows the logic of Paine’s arguments to be applied to today’s society with a minimal amount of overt speculation.

The original Common Sense was largely an attack on the principles of monarchy, especially as applied by the English crown to its colonies in North America. While that situation has admittedly changed since 1776, it is striking how many of Paine’s critiques continue to apply to our supposedly democratic government. The increased power of the executive, excessive taxation, overregulation, the invasion of privacy, and the general disregard for the sovereignty of the individual all continue to trouble the American people in ways not dissimilar from the complaints of the 18th century colonists; complaints which ultimately led them to war a war for independence.

If Americans wish to preserve the kind of free and prosperous society their ancestors fought for, it is necessary first that they understand why the American project was begun in the first place, and what the founders hoped to achieve by breaking free from British rule. The next step is that the people be roused from complacency, having been lulled by years of comfort into accepting the numberless abuse of government authority as normal and tolerable. Revisiting the writings of Thomas Paine, as well as Teague’s updated analysis, is a valuable first step in that process.

Thomas Paine Returns with Common Sense is available from Histria Books, and more of Teague’s writing can be found at Free the People.

Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.

By Taylor Lewis 

What’s the deal with leftists hating data centers? I don’t get it.

No, seriously, curious reader, I truly don’t. Put down your chips: the 2028 Democratic Party platform will include a sharply worded rebuke of those square concrete behemoths glowing an eerie cathodic cyan. The intern-drafted clause will be typesetted above an affirming plank on the sacred right for male rapists to be imprisoned in female wards, as long as they legally change their name to “Sheryl.” Bernie Sanders, bless the old bolshie’s dark heart, will sputter a barnburning indictment about our razing corn fields for silicon silos.

The mind-boiling question behind such animus: Why? Even if you put the question before ChatGPT’s premium-ultra-plus subscription, all the gigabyte crunching in the Western Hemisphere can’t calculate the deontological opposition.

Speaking of Grandpa Menshevik, the old fud, and his more comely apparatchik, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, submitted a bill to pause data center construction nationwide. Ya hear that, Sammy Altman? A senior citizen and theater girl say your quantum computing days are over! No more parsing the genome of cancer cells for you!

Of course, since Sen. Bern Bern half produced the proscriptive bill, it’s the legislative equivalent of a vehicle driving straight into a ditch. The congressional till will be its final destination. Socialists, as ever, are all show.

Just as well, political pageantry is staged for an audience. Jim Geraghty tots upthe prog-opposition to data centers in National Review. The tartan-fleeced puritans of Maine passed a moratorium on cyberfactory building for at least 18 months. The Atlantic recently compared the infohulks to Blake’s “dark satanic mills.” Here in Server Valley, where your humble correspondent plies his glitteringly incensed diatribes, residents are amped with irritation. The local NBC affiliate intervieweda snuffy coterie of Loudoun County high heels who groused about the low whirr cast off by CloudHQ parks that dot the byways. (I frequently tool around the same wire-roaded area, happily deaf to whatever hum floats about as my daughters scream and pull each other’s hair in the backseat.)

Data center disdain isn’t precincted to Loudoun. Two-thirds of Old Dominioners oppose more eyesoring bolean blocks. No pollster am I, but I’d be willing to bet my fastly dissipating electoral pull that the most vocal aversion comes from the blue-jeweled NoVA exurbs.

What about AI gets the progs all tizzed up into a frappe-spewing bother? The environmental impact of clearcutting countless trees to raise borg barns mightoffend ecological sensibility. But the libs’ green sheen is all screen. Radlibs have no qualms piercing the deep wood’s woven shade, as long as the flattened plat is used to erect a sex-change o.r. or quango dedicated to indigenous dignity. The notion that data centers act as massive water suckers? A canard based on faulty math. Concern about a hop in electricity bills thanks to added grid strain? Progressive enviro-policy is premised squarely on pinching your wallet every time you flick on a light switch.

Cost, copse, and hydro-consumption are nugatory. Faster than a blue heartbeat, lefties would embrace the three like the Thales of Miletus if it meant everyone was born an anhedonic, gender-nonconforming anywhere-dweller.

Nor should modern libbies have any qualm about AI as an advanced technology. Most LLMs in mass use are programmed with a default “anti-hate” kill-code that’s treated as neutral. If you ask ChatGPT to tell a racist joke, it’ll key out some smarmy vaguetext about not belittling others—not dissimilar to a prim-bloused librarian sternly shaking her finger. No talking blue for our blue-ionic companion. And don’t even think about prompting Gemini or Claude to “deadname” a trans person.

The Left’s leveling impulse is also in harmony with AI’s output. “The point of the platform is to sound like no one,” is how one academic put it. No lapidary purple prose; no nonsensical doggerel. Just flat, echoless letters arranged in a just legible string. Kind of like the ideal communist economy: uniform widget production run by workers in taupe overalls who eat from a communal bowl of flavorless goulash during the mandated lunch hour.

Such monochromatism is in comfortable alignment with the unquestionable technocratic governance favored by left-wing luminaries like Woodrow Wilson. Anthropic coder Joe Carlsmith admitted in an interview the potential of state-AI: “The police are automated. The courts are automated.” Josef K. had a hard enough time getting the magistrate’s attention for his noncrime; imagine the mental pangs if he had to argue with a computer monitor.

So, again, I ask: Isn’t artificial intelligence an egalitarian wet dream? The collapse of distinctions, an easy herding of mass consciousness, the steamrolling of life into a flat, smooth, easily obeyed instruction?

The only explanation may be that until Washington traps the tech titans under its own Mount Etna, with AI apps dispensed exclusively by a Department of Modem Validation, the Left won’t be satisfied with neural processing remaining in private hands.

The crown of liberal feeling: to not have is to hate.

Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.

By Casey Carlisle 

In March of 2020, America began to experience its worst instances of democide and betrayal since the Civil War. Under the guise of maintaining health and safety, local and state governments rushed to adopt the federal government’s recommendations by implementing nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that ultimately killed 200,000 Americans through 2021. And after adding the most conservative estimate of Americans killed by the Covid vaccine, deaths in 2021 from NPIs and the vaccine exceeded the Civil War’s annualized deaths by 75,000. But instead of outrage over the outcome of governments’ warfare waged on their own people, the only outrage still burning today is over how that warfare was waged. Some say that the government didn’t do enough, and others say that the government did too much. But in direct conflict with the Constitution, most Americans wanted the government to “do something,” so politicians were happy to abide.

Why were politicians pleased to provide what their most vocal constituents demanded, despite the Constitution prohibiting politicians from meeting those shrill demands? Because politicians exist to perpetuate their existence, and if their chances of reelection hinge on disregarding their oath to the Constitution, they’ll happily betray their oath. This is no theory. On November 3, 2020, 11 states held a gubernatorial race. Nine of those states were locked down, and eight of those states—comprising a combined population of 36 million—reelected the governor who locked down the state. This proves that the ability of the Constitution to restrict governments pales in comparison to the power of the popular sentiment that yearns, as Thomas Jefferson bemoaned, “for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” The politicians and voters who supported them, however, weren’t the only Americans who betrayed the Constitution.

Every member of the U.S. military stationed in America in 2020 failed to do what they swore to do, what Americans are forced to pay them to do. “I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…” Notice that the oath doesn’t require of those who swear it to “support and defend” the Commander in Chief or any other politician, and by tolerating the actions of state and local politicians, every member of the military stationed stateside in 2020 ended up supporting and defending politicians—domestic enemies—against the Constitution. There’s no pandemic paragraph or cowardice clause in the Constitution that renders the Bill of Rights null and void, but those in the military—and most cops—gave in to popular sentiment; they acquiesced to fear. But servicemen are supposed to be immune to popular sentiment, as they swore an oath to the law of the land, not to the court of public opinion; therefore, the U.S. military should be thrown atop the rotting heap of once-cherished institutions. It failed, and it will continue to fail.

What’s even more troubling, however, is the precedent that’s been set. The military sat idly by while domestic enemies trampled over the Constitution, so who’s to say that the military won’t take an active role in supporting the domestic enemies during the next constitutional crisis? Rather than allowing states to secede from the Union, Abraham Lincoln used the military against his own people, so what’s stopping a modern-day president from doing the same when it’s once again popular to be afraid? Governments worldwide excel at ginning up fear, and by no means was 2020 the first year in which the servile media assisted the government in terrorizing their fellow Americans. And when the next constitutional crisis hits, bet on the media once again applauding the government, not defending the people or the Constitution. What happened to America? Born out of revolution and later witnessing more presidents assassinated since Lincoln than any other country, not a single governor was killed in 2020. You might have thought that H. L. Mencken was exaggerating a century ago, but it’s been clear since 2020 he wasn’t: “The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.”

There’s been much talk of the United States descending into civil war, but war needn’t be inevitable. Civil war can be averted, but the crux of America’s quandary must first be acknowledged: the more that the federal government controls, the greater the chances of civil war. Governments rule by coercion—not cooperation—which, naturally, breeds conflict. It’s hard enough for 33 people to agree, which is why it’s impossible for more than a third of a billion Americans to compromise. For every American who is aghast at the latest controversy, there’s an American who believes it’s glorious. There’s no compromise to be had here; therefore, instead of forcing each state to conform, as Lincoln did, why not do the opposite? Whether the issue is pathogens or protests, waste or war, a financier’s files or flagrant fraud, the federal government is either the cause of it or can only exacerbate it.

And what does the District of Columbia do besides tell the country that it’s doing something grand while hiding the fact that it’s inflicting great harm and parasitizing the very same people it purports to serve? If you’re still unconvinced about why this issue is of utmost importance, just read the Constitution—tyranny’s crutch—and consider the following clause from Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have Power… To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” Regarding the precedent set in 2020, do you see why the vast majority of “the Laws of the Union” must be repealed? Do you see that with “Insurrections” undefined, the military will readily hunt down whomever the federal government deems an insurrectionist? Some would say that this already happened—in 2021—and that (and much worse) will happen again if the federal government doesn’t make itself far less relevant.

Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.