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Many Voices, One Freedom: United in the 1st Amendment

March 29, 2024

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The story of Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned is not, strictly speaking, true of course. Fiddles did not exist in the summer of 64 A.D. when the Great Fire of Rome destroyed two thirds of the city, leaving half of its population homeless. Most historians believe that the class of instruments to which the fiddle belongs, the viol, was not developed until the late Middle Ages. If Nero played anything, it most likely would have been the cithara, a large string instrument that was common at the time.  
However, the sadistic and irresponsible emperor (he had murdered his mother only 5 years before the fire) was clearly not unhappy that his capital largely burned to the ground. Just the year before, Nero announced that he wanted to level most of the city and rebuild it according to his liking and it was only the Senate’s refusal to cooperate that prevented this from coming about. Indeed, while admitting that the story was not confirmed by eyewitness accounts, the Roman historian Tacitus recorded that Nero was supposed to have sung about Troy’s destruction while he watched Rome burn. Another Roman historian, Suetonius, claimed that, from the safety of a tower, Nero watched the city on fire “and exulting, as he said, in ‘the beauty of the flames,’ he sang the whole of the ‘Sack of Ilium,’ in his regular stage costume.”
The fact that the emperor built his Golden Palace and pleasure gardens on land razed by the fire led some Romans to believe that Nero ordered the fire be set intentionally. Indeed, the Roman statesman and historian Cassius Dio asserted that the emperor paid thugs to set the fires and then he sang and played the lyre while watching from his palace.

Fire in Rome by Hubert Robert. A painting of the fire burning through Rome.


No one is accusing the Democrats of intentionally setting off the violence and fires that have marred America in recent weeks, of course. But their lack of timely, appropriate action to protect their citizens from the anarchists indicates that, like Nero, the Dems do not seem particularly unhappy about what has transpired. They seem to be thinking that the violence, portrayed in a biased fashion by a vehemently anti-Trump mainstream media, has the potential to damage President Donald Trump’s re-election chances.

Instead of standing strong in their dealings with criminal thugs threatening our cities, they stand strong on the nonsensical “fight to stop climate change,” an impossibility even if humanity was contributing to a climate crisis.

They are indeed fiddling while the United States burns.
What the Dems seem loath to acknowledge is that there are ominous similarities between current events in our nation and what was taking place in Germany in the early 1930s when Adolf Hitler and his brutish followers managed to overturn German society and create a nation in their own immoral image. Germany had been the star of Europe, but an unemployed degenerate who could speak loudly for hours convinced the Army that Germany could and should control all of Europe. As an individual, the Democratic nominee bears no resemblance to the German dictator, but the destructive path he wishes to forge for the nation certainly does.
We also see similarities between what is happening now and what took place in this country nearly 250 years ago. Then, a lot of settlers in the original 13 colonies that would become the United States of America woke up and asked themselves why they were still taking orders from a king who was thousands of miles away. After all, he did nothing for his colonial subjects, refused them a voice in Parliament, but still felt entitled to place taxes on the tea they drank. The undercurrent of frustration over the King’s disrespect of what the colonists had achieved lead to the Boston Tea Party wherein one evening citizens dumped a shipment of Tea from England into Boston Harbor. It was the spark that ignited the Revolution.
After months of unending mob violence often defended by the Democrats as peaceful protests (remember Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s assertion that the six-block protest camp in her city could allow a “summer of love”), most Americans are finally awakening to the fact that they’ve been sold a shoddy piece of goods by naïve politicians and their corrupt accomplices in the media. The mob may have used the killing of a black thug as their rationale, but the goons have no interest in bringing about something called racial justice. If there were such a thing, most of them would be in jail or the cemetery.
Indeed, justice of any kind is the last thing on their minds. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be calling for the defunding of the police.

Without police, there can be no justice, as we’ve seen in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Rochester and all the other cities where the police have been ordered to stand down, so the arson and looting can continue unabated.

Almost overnight, we have gone from being a nation of laws to being a burning wasteland where only criminals dare go out at night. Until a few months ago, if you wanted to see nightmarish cityscapes, you had to go see movies like “Mad Max,” “Escape from New York” or “Planet of the Apes.” Today, you merely have to go to Portland, Seattle or Chicago.
Now, much of America has become a war zone even though no foreign enemy has dropped a bomb on us or invaded our shores.
The question, it seems to us, isn’t if American patriots will fight back, but when. We are not sure what it will take in 2020. Perhaps it will be a Biden victory, especially if it’s seen to have happened as a result of partisan chicanery.
Biden has pretty much implied that unless he wins the election, the violence is likely to continue. It sounds like a threat, but it could be an empty one because we don’t believe he has any influence over Black Lives Matter or Antifa.
So far as we can see, the violence is just as likely to continue, no matter who’s sitting in the Oval Office. At least if it’s Trump, it’s more likely that the federal government will finally put a stop to it.
However, if the responsibility to put an end to the nihilism in our streets falls to every-day, garden variety, American patriots, we suggest they take a page out of the enemy’s playbook. If the arsonists and thieves can get away with calling themselves demonstrators and peaceful protesters, we suggest this updated version of the 1776 Minutemen refuse to be labeled vigilantes and, instead, call themselves the peacekeepers. If the citizens of Rome had organized themselves against Nero, their city might have been spared from the evil that befell them. It’s still not too late for America if good people stand up to the evil that has infected our nation.
Thank you to Burt Prelutsky, a conservative essayist who sparked the idea for this article.

MANY VOICES, ONE FREEDOM: UNITED IN THE 1ST AMENDMENT

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