photo courtesy of Slate.com

I’m against tyranny. This is a popular political position. Americans pride ourselves on defending liberty from the machinations of malevolent power all over the world. It is our heritage, beginning with the Boston Tea Party, to demand that government be held accountable to the governed. Our ancestors answered the call of resolute and courageous leaders to fight the tyranny of their own government, and won. There were many, especially among the ruling class, who sided with the tyrant, did his bidding, and betrayed their fellow human beings for personal gain. Ultimately, they lost, despite all their money, connections, and cunning deceptions. This demonstrated one of the axioms on which America is founded, that the right of self-governance is a fundamental and inalterable component of human existence.

Tyrants are allowed to exist by the people over whom they exercise power. Their evil is perpetuated not by might, but by fear. The people of Russia could oust Vladimir Putin this very hour if they all stood together. His spies, his propaganda, his corrupt bureaucracy, his kangaroo courts, all are carefully designed to divide and conquer his people. Individually, they are helpless against him. United they are the unstoppable Russian people. No one knows this better than the tyrant himself. No one in the land is more afraid than the tyrant.

Unfortunately, taking a stand against tyranny has become a fringe position in American politics with regards to domestic policy. In matters of foreign policy, we are all bombast and braggadocio. We are the tyrant of the world. We boast of carpet bombing an already broken country wherein a small minority are waging psychological warfare against us through terrorism. If the geopolitical situation was a schoolyard, we would be the hulking bully threatening a handicapped kid in front of the teacher.

When it comes to our own surveillance state, media monopolies, customer service bureaucracies, and wildly unjust legal system, we are divided and fearful, effectively conquered. This is exactly how the tyrants want us to be. Yet the fundamental attitude of the American people toward tyranny remains unchanged. The fact that we are living under it has only strengthened our resolve. This is why Donald Trump remains so popular despite the machinations of the Republican establishment. It’s not (necessarily) that his supporters are racist, sexist, or isolationist. They’re just tired of government that doesn’t represent them and they are speaking truth to power about who is actually in charge here. Unfortunately the leader they have chosen is a tyrant (hence the endorsement from Putin) who employs divide and conquer tactics like racism, sexism, and isolationism.

There is only one presidential candidate, out of a double digit field, who is willing to stand up to American economic tyranny, vowing to protect civil liberties, disrupt media hegemony, stop the outsourcing of customer service jobs, and make significant changes to the justice system to address the obvious lack of racial justice. That candidate is Bernie Sanders. He, like Trump, leads a movement that will not be dissuaded by political machinations, media slurs, or bureaucratic stonewalling. His movement unites the people instead of dividing them. Also, it is much, much bigger. Today’s poll numbers indicate that he is statistically tied nationally with establishment candidate Hillary Clinton, who until this point has enjoyed a comfortable lead over every other candidate of either party.

When media monopolies claim that Bernie Sanders is unelectable, they are attempting to perpetuate their economic tyranny by dividing and conquering us. Bernie Sanders is a natural born citizen, over 35 years old, who has lived in this country for the last fourteen years. Those are the qualifications for electability established by the American people. If we vote for him, he will become president. The media monopolies are lying to protect their own interests.

When Hillary Clinton claims that Bernie’s agenda is impossible to implement, she is attempting to conquer us through fear. She is demanding that we accept that our elected representatives will enact the will of economic tyrants rather than the will of the people, disregarding the fact that the establishment of both parties has been utterly flummoxed by voters who reject the status quo. Donald Trump has identified and targeted a market that is unreachable by the economic tyrants. The tyrants’ only hope is that Trump supporters never find out that Bernie Sanders represents a better response to economic tyranny, because if they do, the tyrants are doomed, not at some hypothetical future point on a historical timeline, as all tyrants are, but this very year. It is our duty as Americans to make sure they do find out.

Cautious Hillary supporters are correct in their assessment that the bully will hit us if we don’t give up our lunch money. When Senator John McCain refused to take money from Super PACs, the Wall Street banks allowed the economy, which they had been corroding with bad debt since the Clinton years, to collapse, virtually guaranteeing that the opposite party would win the White House. They had the money to continue the game. They still own the houses they foreclosed on. They chose not to continue because one politician was agreeable to allowing Wall Street to make the rules, and the other politician was not. Their guy won in a landslide. They could do that again and blame oil prices or slow growth in China. If we nominate Bernie Sanders, they probably will.

Yes, the bullies will hit us if we don’t give up our lunch money. However, there is no guarantee that they won’t hit us anyway, or that they won’t hit us in the future. They have been hitting us, over and over, despite our repeated capitulations. We’re practically out of lunch money. The only way to stop a bully is to stand up for oneself. We must stand with Bernie Sanders and let the scare tactics fall where they may. Our foreign policy is that we are already spending more on defense than the next 20 nations combined. Our strategy for defeating ISIS is to become the great society that our founding fathers hoped we would become.  If we must die at the hands of tyrants, let us die free.