Yet, consider the following:

We may still have fundamental freedoms of speech and the press, but America is in a transition from liberty to despotism, a halfway house on the road to tyranny. We already have economic tyranny in America. If you add up all the taxes you pay, including income taxes, Social Security, sales, real estate, gasoline, telephone, and dozens of other hidden taxes, government loots over forty percent of your hard-earned income in taxes.

Yet, only a hundred years ago, the average worker paid no more than five percent of his income in taxes. In 1901, there was no income tax, Social Security tax, or most of the other taxes you pay today. In the Middle Ages, medieval rulers took about 20 percent of their serfs’ produce. Our government now taxes us worse than serfs. If government claims the right to forty percent of your income, it claims the right to forty percent of your labor, and forty percent of your life. In effect, the people we “elect” have put us on a chain gang until May 10th of every year, working for the bureaucrats.

Most parents may not see it this way, but local governments, in effect, kidnap your children through public-school compulsory-attendance laws. They force you to send your children to government (public) schools that waste twelve years of your children’s lives and turn them into illiterates. They then tax you to support these so-called “schools.”

“War on Drugs” government SWAT teams can break down your door in the middle of the night without a warrant, based on the drug tip of a malicious, anonymous informant, then threaten you in your own living room. Drug laws dictate what we can or cannot put in our own bodies. These laws tell us we do not have the right to smoke marijuana, even if we have cancer and the marijuana alleviates the nausea from chemotherapy drugs.

Government tells us we cannot commit suicide if we have terminal cancer with excruciating pain, nor can a doctor assist us to commit suicide. By these laws, government tells us it now owns our bodies. These laws deny our right of free choice for important personal decisions in our lives.

Try building a new home for yourself, and you will run into a hornet’s nest of building department inspectors, zoning commissions, environment impact statements, and local agencies who will tie you up in knots. Try starting a small business and you will need government licenses and approvals. Local, State and Federal tax authorities, like vultures, will then devour your profits with their ever-increasing taxes.

Taxes loot your hard-earned money to pay for dozens of “entitlement programs” such as Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, welfare programs, health care for illegal immigrants, and now a “welfare” program for the entire population of Iraq called the Iraq war. Your voluntary consent is not required for these programs. Government forces you to pay for them.

Federal, State, and local police agencies use asset-forfeiture laws to steal the cars, homes, businesses, and bank accounts of innocent people under the pretext of a War on Drugs. Victims of drug raids then have to prove their innocence and sue the agency to get their property back. Asset-forfeiture laws have turned too many local police departments into agencies for legalized looting.

Anti-gun politicians make thousands of gun laws that restrict a woman’s right to protect herself from a rapist, a homeowner’s right to protect himself from a robber in the middle of the night, or American citizens’ right to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees our right to bear arms is under massive assault. It may be only a matter of time until we lose this right altogether.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations can control who an employer hires, fires, or promotes, how much he has to pay his employees (minimum wage), and what their “conditions of employment” must be. This same agency can sue an employer into bankruptcy for “discrimination” or other “infractions” of its regulations.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can stop a home builder from building homes, a farmer from farming his land, a rancher from grazing his cattle, an oil company from drilling for desperately needed oil, or a logging company from cutting down trees to give us lumber for new homes. EPA regulations sharply jack up the price of oil and destroy property rights in America for a great and noble cause — to protect “endangered” species like the Alabama mud rat, mosquito-infested swamps called “wetlands,” and “delicate” frozen Arctic wastelands that look like the surface of the moon.

The Food and Drug Administration forces drug companies to spend over $500 million and seven years to get approval for a new drug. It puts pharmaceutical companies through a regulatory torture chamber that strangles the development of thousands of new, life-saving drugs. It has made SWAT-team raids on vitamin stores to “protect” us from Vitamin C and other dangers.

Federal agents can persecute a religious sect they don’t like, as the Feds did in Waco, Texas. They persecuted these people partly because the sect owned allegedly “illegal” firearms, firearms the 2nd Amendment says they had the right to own. After slaughtering innocent women and children in a ball of fire, none of the Federal agents were ever prosecuted or sent to prison for their actions.

Finally, in response to the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Federal government passed an “anti-terror” bill that created secret military tribunals. These tribunals will be like medieval star-chambers, where defendants’ legal rights will be ripped to pieces, and trial by jury will be denied.

These tribunals have set a terrible precedent. It is only a matter of time before government prosecutors expand the vague definition of “terrorism” to an ever-widening list of “crimes” that can be used against American citizens. Government judges and prosecutors will then be able to try and convict Americans without the “messy” need for juries, proof, evidence, or the presumption of innocence.

Does all this sound like “the land of the free?” Government in America is a growing tyranny. It is a government that would shock our Founding Fathers, a government they would consider a greater tyranny than the British monarchy they fought a revolutionary war against. Worse, whatever freedoms we have left are being taken from us at an ever-accelerating rate.

If you, my reader, do not see this, it is not your fault. Your liberty has been taken from you gradually, one new tax and regulation at a time. You have become accustomed to the taxes and regulations. You think they are “normal” and therefore nothing to complain about. You mistakenly believe that because you elect your representatives, and because they enact laws based on majority rule, that their laws, taxes, and regulations are moral and legitimate. It is like your wife or husband not noticing you have gained thirty pounds over the past five years because they see you every day, and the weight gain was gradual.

So it is with gradual tyranny. But if Americans living 150 years ago suddenly came back to life today, they would be shocked, for they would see the stark difference in their freedom.

President Bush and his Republican lemmings continue to waste hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives to protect the “freedom” of the Iraqi people. Well, how about first giving Americans back the freedom that is their birthright, the constitutional freedoms our Founding Fathers fought and died for?

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“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”  –– H.L. Mencken

The driving force behind the eco-radicals’ fierce efforts to strangle the free market with environmental regulations is their virulent hatred for a free, prosperous economy. Yet behind this hatred is an even deeper one. To understand why they try to wreck our economy, you have to grasp the shocking fact that many eco-radicals hate the human race and Western civilization. They hate the fact that you, your family, your friends, and millions of other human beings live and prosper on this planet.

Most of us are naive about the environmental movement. We believe that when eco-radicals say we should “protect the environment,” they mean we should protect it for people. What they really mean is that we should protect the environment against people. People are the enemy. Rats, swamps, and old-growth forests must be protected against you, your family, and the rest of the human race.

To confirm this, just watch nature programs on public television. In every program I’ve seen, human beings are depicted as the enemy. These programs portray humans as vicious, violent destroyers of birds, wildlife, forests, rivers, and oceans. Nature is seen as “pure,” “fragile,” and “innocent” (including child-eating hyenas and alligators). Environmentalists or their sympathizers create these programs, so the programs reflect the environmental movement’s deepest attitudes toward the human race.

If environmental groups valued human life, they wouldn’t try to cut our oil supplies by banning drilling in arctic wastelands or off the coast of Florida and California. They wouldn’t ban the hunting of alligators that kill children. They wouldn’t file lawsuits against housing developments that give people shelter, to protect kangaroo rats.

They wouldn’t have lobbied Congress to ban DDT, the pesticide that saved the lives of millions of people worldwide from malaria. They wouldn’t ban logging in northwest forests to protect spotted owls, a ban that destroyed over 30,000 logging and sawmill workers’ jobs.

Here’s what one environmentalist had to say about loggers losing their jobs:

“Loggers losing their jobs because of Spotted Owl legislation is, in my eyes, no different than people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down.”

In other words, forcing owls to move to another forest because you cut down trees they nest in is just as evil as murdering six million people in gas chambers. Owls are as important as six million human lives. If loggers unintentionally kill a few owls, they’re as evil as the murderers who ran the Nazi gas chambers. Therefore, we should have no sympathy for loggers who lost their jobs. Here’s another quote:

“Somewhere along the line . . . we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth . . . Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along[emphasis added].”

In other words, this eco-radical wishes the human race to die out—for your family, your children, your friends to die, so that the “sacred” Earth will be free of the “plague” of human beings.

These are quotes by radical environmentalists. These quotes eloquently reveal the eco-radicals’ utter hatred and contempt for the human race, and for human life and progress on this Earth. Are these the kind of sick people that we, and State and Congressional legislators should be listening to?

I knew that the environmental movement values swamps and kangaroo rats over human life, but I didn’t realize how sick this movement really is until I read a shocking article in the New York Times. It seems that in Brazil, “endangered-species” regulations forbid hunting “protected” wildlife. This ban includes the dreaded jacaré and caiman, two Brazilian alligator species.

The jacaré is a vicious, prehistoric, man and child-eating monster who inhabits the Amazon River Basin. In the high-water season, alligators infest the riverbanks near where Mrs. Ramos lives. One evening in August, an eighteen-foot jacaré emerged from the lagoon to forage for food in waters flowing around the stilts of her house. The New York Times article described what happened to Mrs. Ramos’s son:

“Gilson (Mrs. Ramos’s 17-year-old son) went down to tie up his canoe,” said Sidecley Conceicão Andrade, a barefoot, 12-year-old neighbor. “In the dark, he thought he grabbed the canoe, but it was the jacaré’s tail. It took him away and ate him up.”

Can you imagine the horror of being eaten alive by an alligator? Can you imagine the nightmares and searing pain Mrs. Ramos must feel when she thinks of her son? Well, Brazil’s environmental regulations killed her son and hundreds of other innocent victims of alligator attacks.

Imagine that you lived in Florida and were the parents of a beautiful little girl. How would you feel if an alligator protected by the Endangered Species Act snatched your daughter and ate her alive? How would you like hearing your little girl crying for her mommy or daddy while the alligator ripped her to pieces? I apologize for describing such a horror in detail, but I want to bring home the real meaning of environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act. If you want to picture the essence of many eco-radicals’ contempt for human life, just remember what the jacaré did to Mrs. Ramos’s son.

Radical environmentalism and its strangling regulations threatens our health and our lives. But environmentalists can hurt us only because most of us have fallen for their propaganda. The problem is that we’re a good-natured, but sometimes naive people. We give everyone the benefit of the doubt, including environmentalists. We think eco-radicals are normal human beings like we are, and couldn’t possibly mean what they say. That’s what the world thought about Hitler—people didn’t believe what he said in his book, “Mein Kampf.” But we can’t be naive any longer.

We have to judge eco-radicals by their words, values, and actions, and recognize that the agenda of too many environmentalists is evil. The only way to stop them is to de-fang them, to take away their power, to repeal most environmental regulations and abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Franklin Bremmer stared at the death lists, and saw his mother’s name. His face turned white. He moaned, “Oh, God, mother! Oh, No. Oh, God, no!”

He had just visited his mother last night. He remembered her sweet voice, the soft, white cheek he had kissed, the look of worry on her face when she had said he looked tired, his favorite foods she had made for him, waiting on the kitchen table. He adored his mother. He had been taking care of her for five years, and her heart was bad, very bad. She needed a by-pass operation quickly, or she would die. A week ago was her 75th birthday.

In this year 2020, Franklin Bremmer worked as an “analyst” for the Philadelphia Division of the Federal Rationed-Care Board. He looked down at the monthly list of elderly patients who would be denied life-saving heart operations because they were too old, because they had passed the 75-year old cutoff age. He looked at this monthly death list, the part of his job that twisted his stomach every first of the month, and he saw his mother’s name, Mary Bremmer.

Part of Franklin Bremmer’s job was to determine who would live and who would die. He had to make a “cost-benefit” analysis for each human being on the list. He had to judge if giving that person the operation they desperately needed was “medically inappropriate” based on the cost.

The Washington Medical Board bosses were desperate to cut costs. Taxes on young working couples were skyrocketing to pay for the exploding medical care of 270 million Americans, including forty-million baby boomers. There had been tax riots. Congress was putting enormous pressure on regional Rationed-Care Board bosses to cut costs so they could stop the relentless rise in taxes.

There could be only one end result—rationing. The elderly baby-boomers were first to go under the ax. The bureaucrats’ rationale was that saving the lives of seniors over 75 was not a “benefit” that was worth the medical costs to “society.”

The bureaucrats chose 75-years old as the arbitrary cut-off age for any expensive operation. His mother could enjoy another 15 years of healthy life, another 15 years of walking in the sunshine with him, of making his favorite foods, of working in her flower garden. But she was now condemned to death by number crunchers who did cost-benefit analysis with people’s lives.

He never thought that his mother would fall under the ax. He always put this possibility out of his mind. But a repressed part of him knew this day would come. For 12 years now, the system had been moving towards collapse. The problem had been building since 2008, when Barack Obama was elected President. He promptly enacted the socialized-medicine program with the help of a Democratic-controlled Congress.

The problem accelerated when the baby-boomers started to retire by the tens of millions around the same time. The system was now collapsing from the weight of 275 million Americans on universal health care, collapsing from the economic weight of a program costing $3 trillion dollars a year, and rising.

Everyone now demands the best medical care using the latest technology. This was the mythology that liberals had brainwashed everyone with for the last fifty years. Everyone had the “right” to the best medical care, regardless of cost, and that health care should be “free,” paid by the government (taxpayers). It was a prescription for disaster.

Since government paid for everyone’s health care, since patients paid only small deductibles, naturally they kept demanding more medical services, free prescription drugs, and free hospital care, in a never-ending cycle. There is no limit to the medical care that 275 million Americans now demand. Unlimited demand exploded health-care costs.

Then, on the supply side, government strangles doctors, hospitals, drug, and health insurance companies with thousands of regulations, crippling the free-market competition in health care that would have lowered costs. These regulations sharply reduced the number of practicing doctors, and skyrocketed the cost of drugs and hospital stays. Health-care costs ballooned year after year, all caused by government’s ever-tightening noose around the health-care industry’s neck.

Unlimited demand and strangled supply. Franklin Bremmer was now facing the disastrous consequences of a once vibrant free-market health care system destroyed by socialized medicine. He was facing the inevitable result—rationing. Not enough money left to support the system. Impossible to raise taxes any more without civil revolt. Rationing had finally come full-blown to America, like the plague, like it had in England and Canada by the 1990’s.

And the dreadful results were the same as they were, and still are, in England and Canada—the death lists. People waiting for years to get heart operations, cancer treatment, hip replacements. People by the thousands dying on the lists while they waited.

Then even the death lists didn’t work. Finally the lists were eliminated and the rationing departments took over. Bureaucrats like me were hired. Bureaucrats who would ration care, decide who would get the operation they needed and who wouldn’t, who would live or die.

So Franklin Bremmer, Rationed-Care Board senior bureaucrat, working for the system for over twenty years, now looked down at the piece of paper he was destined to see. He saw the death list with his mother’s name on top.

Franklin Bremmer thought of his mother’s sweet, loving face. He thought of his duty as chief of the Rationed-Care Board. He felt a heavy surge of guilt for having been part of a system that had come to this, that now forced him to kill his own mother and thousands of other mothers on the monthly death lists.

Something then snapped in Frank Bremmer’s mind, something gave a wrenching twist. He sat in front of his computer for a long time. Then, as in slow motion, he turned on the computer. He punched in his password. He brought up the lists of all elderly patients in Philadelphia waiting for a heart operation. He saw his mother’s name. He changed her birth-date entry. Mary Bremmer was not born in 1945 any longer. She was born in 1965. Mary Bremmer was now 55 years old. He hit the save button. His mother would now get her heart operation.

Franklin Bremmer, an honorable man, then went to his supervisor and resigned his job, the job he had worked at for 20 years, giving no reason for his resignation. He just walked out of the building on a bright Spring day, and went to visit his mother.

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In our daily lives, most of us believe we are free Americans. The average person can still go about his business, travel where he wants to go, and freely choose his goals, friends, and career. We still have freedom of speech, the press, trial by jury, and many other liberties our Founding Fathers wrote into the Bill of Rights and Constitution. We are still freer than any other people on Earth.

Yet, consider the following:

We may still have fundamental freedoms of speech and the press, but America is in a transition from liberty to despotism, a halfway house on the road to tyranny. We already have economic tyranny in America. If you add up all the taxes you pay, including income taxes, Social Security, sales, real estate, gasoline, telephone, and dozens of other hidden taxes, government loots over forty percent of your hard-earned income in taxes.

Yet, only a hundred years ago, the average worker paid no more than five percent of his income in taxes. In 1901, there was no income tax, Social Security tax, or most of the other taxes you pay today. In the Middle Ages, medieval rulers took about 20 percent of their serfs’ produce. Our government now taxes us worse than serfs. If government claims the right to forty percent of your income, it claims the right to forty percent of your labor, and forty percent of your life. In effect, the people we “elect” have put us on a chain gang until May 10th of every year, working for the bureaucrats.

Most parents may not see it this way, but local governments, in effect, kidnap your children through public-school compulsory-attendance laws. They force you to send your children to government (public) schools that waste twelve years of your children’s lives and turn them into illiterates. They then tax you to support these so-called “schools.”

“War on Drugs” government SWAT teams can break down your door in the middle of the night without a warrant, based on the drug tip of a malicious, anonymous informant, then threaten you in your own living room. Drug laws dictate what we can or cannot put in our own bodies. These laws tell us we do not have the right to smoke marijuana, even if we have cancer and the marijuana alleviates the nausea from chemotherapy drugs.

Government tells us we cannot commit suicide if we have terminal cancer with excruciating pain, nor can a doctor assist us to commit suicide. By these laws, government tells us it now owns our bodies. These laws deny our right of free choice for important personal decisions in our lives.

Try building a new home for yourself, and you will run into a hornet’s nest of building department inspectors, zoning commissions, environment impact statements, and local agencies who will tie you up in knots. Try starting a small business and you will need government licenses and approvals. Local, State and Federal tax authorities, like vultures, will then devour your profits with their ever-increasing taxes.

Taxes loot your hard-earned money to pay for dozens of “entitlement programs” such as Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, welfare programs, health care for illegal immigrants, and now a “welfare” program for the entire population of Iraq called the Iraq war. Your voluntary consent is not required for these programs. Government forces you to pay for them.

Federal, State, and local police agencies use asset-forfeiture laws to steal the cars, homes, businesses, and bank accounts of innocent people under the pretext of a War on Drugs. Victims of drug raids then have to prove their innocence and sue the agency to get their property back. Asset-forfeiture laws have turned too many local police departments into agencies for legalized looting.

Anti-gun politicians make thousands of gun laws that restrict a woman’s right to protect herself from a rapist, a homeowner’s right to protect himself from a robber in the middle of the night, or American citizens’ right to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees our right to bear arms is under massive assault. It may be only a matter of time until we lose this right altogether.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations can control who an employer hires, fires, or promotes, how much he has to pay his employees (minimum wage), and what their “conditions of employment” must be. This same agency can sue an employer into bankruptcy for “discrimination” or other “infractions” of its regulations.

Because of the recent Supreme Court “Kelo” decision, your property rights have become null and void. Now any developer who wants to put up a new shopping center can get your local government to condemn your home, and your neighbors’ homes, through their power of “eminent domain.” Local government bureaucrats can now demolish your home, not for public use like a highway, but to let a private developer profit from your land and pay more taxes.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can stop a home builder from building homes, a farmer from farming his land, a rancher from grazing his cattle, an oil company from drilling for desperately needed oil, or a logging company from cutting down trees to give us lumber for new homes. EPA regulations sharply jack up the price of oil and destroy property rights in America for a great and noble cause — to protect “endangered” species like the Alabama mud rat, mosquito-infested swamps called “wetlands,” and “delicate” frozen Arctic wastelands that look like the surface of the moon.

The Food and Drug Administration forces drug companies to spend over $500 million and seven years to get approval for a new drug. It puts pharmaceutical companies through a regulatory torture chamber that strangles the development of thousands of new, life-saving drugs. It has made SWAT-team raids on vitamin stores to “protect” us from Vitamin C and other dangers.

Federal agents can persecute a religious sect they don’t like, as the Feds did in Waco, Texas. They persecuted these people partly because the sect owned allegedly “illegal” firearms, firearms the 2nd Amendment says they had the right to own. After slaughtering innocent women and children in a ball of fire, none of the Federal agents were ever prosecuted or sent to prison for their actions.

Finally, in response to the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Federal government passed an “anti-terror” bill that created secret military tribunals. These tribunals will be like medieval star-chambers, where defendants’ legal rights will be ripped to pieces, and trial by jury will be denied.

These tribunals have set a terrible precedent. It is only a matter of time before government prosecutors expand the vague definition of “terrorism” to an ever-widening list of “crimes” that can be used against American citizens. Government judges and prosecutors will then be able to try and convict Americans without the “messy” need for juries, proof, evidence, or the presumption of innocence.

Does all this sound like “the land of the free?” Government in America is a growing tyranny. It is a government that would shock our Founding Fathers, a government they would consider a greater tyranny than the British monarchy they fought a revolutionary war against. Worse, whatever freedoms we have left are being taken from us at an ever-accelerating rate.

If you, my reader, do not see this, it is not your fault. Your liberty has been taken from you gradually, one new tax and regulation at a time. You have become accustomed to the taxes and regulations. You think they are “normal” and therefore nothing to complain about. You mistakenly believe that because you elect your representatives, and because they enact laws based on majority rule, that their laws, taxes, and regulations are moral and legitimate. It is like your wife or husband not noticing you have gained thirty pounds over the past five years because they see you every day, and the weight gain was gradual.

So it is with gradual tyranny. But if Americans living 150 years ago suddenly came back to life today, they would be shocked, for they would see the stark difference in their freedom.

President Obama continues to waste hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives to protect the “freedom” of the Iraqi people. Well, how about first giving Americans back the freedom that is their birthright, the constitutional freedoms our Founding Fathers fought and died for?

Still think you’re living in the land of the free?

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“Look, Mr. Straun, John, can I call you John? We’ve been at this for 25 days. We’re all sick of this. We all want to go home. You’re the only one left. You’re the one keeping us here. I got things to do at home. I got to go to work and make a living. All of us do. The judge is mad as hell at us. You’re going to hang this jury. You’re going to make this trial into a farce and waste of time. You have no right to vote acquittal. You heard the judge’s instructions. The jury is not allowed to judge the law, only the facts.”

“The fact are clear as day, aren’t they?” Dillard ranted. “You even admitted that to us. The guy was found with marijuana in his car. That’s against the law. And the guy admitted the marijuana was his. What more do you need?” said Raymond Dillard, the jury foreman. Raymond Dillard was tall, beefy, in his 30’s, and he was getting mad, so mad he wanted to beat John Straun’s head in.

Straun was a small, slim man in his 30’s, with a straight back, dark brown hair, large, steady eyes, and a firm mouth. He seemed not to care at all about all the trouble he was causing. And he seemed to be fearless.

John Straun said, “I don’t care what the judge said. I happen to know for a fact that a jury has the right to judge the law. Jury nullification has a long history in this country. A jury has the right to judge the law, not just the facts.”

Raymond Dillard and a few other jurors sneered. Dillard said, “Oh, are you a lawyer, Mr. Straun? You think you know more than the judge? What history are you talking about?”

John Straun said calmly, “No, I’m not a lawyer. I’m an engineer. But in this particular case, I do know more than the judge. When I found out I was going to be on this jury, I did a little research about the history of juries, just for the hell of it. Most people don’t know this, but jury nullification has been upheld as a sacred legal principal in English common law for 1000 years. Alfred the Great, a great English king a thousand years ago, hung several of his own judges because they removed jurors who refused to convict and replaced these courageous jurors with other jurors they could intimidate into convicting the defendant on trial.”

“Jury nullification also goes back to the very beginning of our country, as one of the crucial rights our Founding Fathers wanted to protect. Our Founding Fathers wanted juries to be the final bulwark against tyrannical government laws. That’s why they emphasized the right to a jury trial in three of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. John Adams, second President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, third President and author of the Declaration of Independence, John Jay, First Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Alexander Hamilton, First Secretary of the Treasury all flatly stated that juries have the right and duty to judge not only the facts in a case, but also the law, according to their conscience.”

“Not only that, more recent court decisions have reaffirmed this right. In 1969, in “US. vs. Moylan,” the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of juries to judge the law in a case. In 1972, the Washington, D.C. Court of Appeals upheld the same principal.”

Raymond Dillard said, “Yeah, if that’s the case, how come the judge didn’t tell us this?”

“That’s because of the despicable Supreme Court decision in “Sparf and Hansen vs. The United States in 1895.” John Straun said. “That decision said juries have the right to judge the law, but that a judge doesn’t have to inform juries of this right. Cute, huh? And guess what happened after this decision? Judges stopped telling juries about their rights.”

“The judge knows about jury nullification. All judges do. But they hate letting juries decide the law. They hate juries taking power away from them. That’s why judges never mention a jury’s right to judge the law, and most judges squash defense attorneys from saying anything about it in court. Remember when Jimmy Saunders’ defense lawyer started talking about it? The judge threatened him with contempt if he didn’t shut up about jury nullification.”

“And since you asked me,” Straun continued, “I’ll tell you a little more about jury nullification. Did you ever hear of the Fugitive Slave Act? Did you ever hear of Prohibition? Do you know why those despicable laws were repealed? Because juries were so outraged over those laws that they consistently refused to convict people who violated them. They refused to convict because they knew that these laws were unjust and tyrannical, that Congress had no right making these laws in the first place. So, because juries wouldn’t convict, the government couldn’t make these laws stick. They tried for many years, but finally gave up.”

“What do you think this mad War on Drugs is that we’ve been fighting the last sixty years? It’s the same as Prohibition in the 20’s. It’s the same principle. A tyrannical government is telling people that they can’t take drugs, just like in the 20’s they said people couldn’t drink liquor. What’s the difference? A tyrannical law is telling people what they can or can’t put in their own bodies. Who owns our bodies, us or the self-righteous politicians? Does the government own your body, Mr. Dillard? Do you smoke, Mr. Dillard? Do you drink beer?”

Dillard nodded his head, “Yeah, I do.”

“Well, how would you like it if they passed laws telling you that can’t smoke or drink a beer anymore. Would you like that, Mr. Dillard?”

Dillard looked at John Straun, thought about the question, then admitted, “No, I wouldn’t, Straun.”

John Straun turned to the others around the table. “You, Jack, you said you’re sixty-five years old. You like to play golf, right? What if they passed a law saying anyone over sixty-five can’t play golf because the exercise might give him a heart attack? You, Frank, you said you eat hamburgers at McDougals all the time. What if they passed a law saying fatty hamburgers give people heart attacks, so we’re closing down all the McDougal restaurants in the country, and they make eating a hamburger a criminal offence? You, Mrs. Pelchat, I see you like to smoke. Everyone knows that smoking can give you lung cancer. How would you like it if they passed a law banning all cigarettes? What if they could crash in the door of your house without a warrant to search for cigarettes in your house, like the SWAT teams do now, looking for drugs? Mrs. Pelchat, how would you like to be on trial like Jimmy Saunders because they found a pack of cigarettes you hid under your mattress?”

“Do you all see what I mean? If they can make it a crime for Jimmy Saunders to smoke marijuana, why can’t they make golf, hamburgers, and cigarettes a crime? If you think they wouldn’t try, think again. They had Prohibition in the 20’s for almost ten years, till they finally gave up. The only reason they haven’t banned cigarettes is because there are thirty million cigarette smokers in this country who would scream bloody murder. They get away with making marijuana and other drugs illegal only because drug-users are a small minority in this country. Drug users don’t have any political clout.”

Raymond Dillard sat down in his chair. The others started talking among themselves. John Straun started seeing heads nodding in agreement, thinking about what he had said.

“OK, Straun,” Dillard said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Jimmy Saunders shouldn’t go to jail for smoking marijuana. Hell, probably most of us tried the stuff when we were young. Clinton said he smoked marijuana in college. Bush said he tried drugs in college. Probably half of Congress and their kids took drugs one time or another. O.K. we agree with you. But what about the judge. He said we can’t judge the law.”

John Straun stood up. He was not a tall man, but he stood very straight, and he looked very sure of himself. He looked from one to another of them.

He said, “If you agree with me, then I ask you all to vote for acquittal. You are not only defending Jimmy Saunders’ liberty, but your own. You are fighting a tyrannical law that is enforced by a judge who wants the power to control you. I told you that many juries like us in the past have disregarded the judge’s instructions. They stood up for liberty against a tyrannical law. Are you Americans here? What do you va!ue more, your liberty, your pride as free men, or the instructions of a judge who doesn’t want you to judge the law precisely because he knows you’ll find the law unjust? Will you stand with those juries who defended our liberty in the past, or will you give in to this judge?”

“Here’s another thing to think about,” John Straun said with passion. ”What if it was your sister or brother on trial here? Do you know that if we say Saunders is guilty, the judge has to send him to prison for twenty years? I understand this is Saunders third possession charge. You know the “three strikes and you’re out” rule, don’t you? The politicians passed a law that if a guy gets convicted three times on possession, the judge now has no leeway in sentencing. He has to give the poor guy twenty years in prison. What if it were your sister or brother on trial? Should they go to jail for smoking marijuana, for doing something that should not be a crime in the first place? Do we want to send Jimmy Saunders to prison for twenty years because he smoked a joint, hurting no one? Can you have that on your conscience?”

“Do you know that there are almost a million guys like Jimmy Saunders in federal prisons right now, as we speak, for this same so-called “crime” of smoking marijuana or taking other drugs? These men were sent to prison for mere possession. They harmed no one but themselves when they took drugs. How can you have a crime without a victim? When does this horror stop? It has got to stop. I’m asking you all now to stop it right here, at least for Jimmy Saunders. The only thing that can stop tyrannical laws and politicians is you and me, juries like us. If we do nothing, we’re lost, the country is lost.”

“I’m asking you all to bring in a not-guilty verdict, because the drug laws are unjust and a moral obscenity. I’m asking you all be the kind of Americans our Founding Fathers would have been proud of, these same men who fought for your liberty. That’s what I’m asking of all of you.”

John Straun sat down and looked quietly at Dillard and all the others around the table. They looked back at him, and it seemed that their backs began to straighten up, and they no longer complained about going home. They were quiet. Then they talked passionately amongst each other.

Fifteen minutes later, they walked into the courtroom and sat down in the jury box. When the judge asked Raymond Dillard what the verdict was, he was stunned when Dillard, standing tall, looking straight at the judge, said “Not guilty.” Over the angry rantings of the red-faced judge, all in the jury box looked calmly at John Straun, and felt proud to be an American.

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