By Douglas V. Gibbs
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” – John Adams
“A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” – James Madison
“Politics is downstream from culture.” – Andrew Breitbart
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.” – Charlie Kirk
Over the weekend, as a part of America’s 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, President Trump hosted a UFC Freedom 250 event in Washington D.C. While I was unable to watch it live, I watched most of it later, including the incredible bout for the lightweight UFC championship. The event was held at the Ellipse, with thousands of people present. It was a grand event, fun to watch, and when Justin Gaethje exclaimed after his victory, “I’m an American,” and then provided his words of support for America and those who have fought to maintain our liberty, it filled me with a lot of patriotic pride. It was a good thing to see.
Often, there is more going on than we know, however. Behind the scenes, merely days before the event, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies disrupted a terror plot that had been planned, which was designed to cause mass-casualties at the UFC event near the White House. Twenty-three people have been identified as a part of the potential network of plotters, with five people so far in custody. The alleged plan was to use explosive-laden drones to hit buildings near the event, create a panicked evacuation, and then steer the fleeing crowds toward a pre-staged sniper team. Then, the plan was to send a “second wave” to the White House gate to storm the property.
The FBI first learned of the terrorist plot on June 10, and acted rapidly. The United States Secret Service worked closely with the FBI during the investigation. One suspect told investigators the goal was to target “capitalist elites,” “billionaires,” or any politicians who has received donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The investigation spanned across multiple states and 12 FBI field offices. Former FBI agent Jason Pack told Fox News Digital that the alleged scheme appeared to have moved beyond online rhetoric and into operational planning.
Vice President J.D. Vance said of the threat, “this is very, very dark stuff…This is what happens when people turn the rhetoric up so loud that disagreeing with somebody is a cause for violence. We got to tell everybody to tone it down… I think a lot of my Democratic colleagues in Washington have got to look themselves in the mirror and say, why is so much of this political violence coming from our side of the spectrum?”
Anti-Capitalist, communist-driven operations within our country is nothing new. The Soviets began infiltrating back in the 1930s. The attempts to dismantle our constitutional order has been an ongoing process, but I do admit it seems to be reaching a crescendo in recent decades. The effects of the movement has become apparent in things like the rise of candidates like Graham Platner, AOC’s billionaire bashing, and Bernie Sanders’ rise to the top of the Democratic Party and his call for the government to begin seizing wealth of successful companies. Americans have become angry because deception and lies have become such a norm among those who we elect to represent us – and that means on both sides of the aisle. It brings to mind Republican Representative Rob Wittman of Virginia who recently, to avoid questions he could have easily answered, faked a phone call as he walked along the sidewalk near The Capitol as a podcast reporter launched questions at him.
We have been convinced that the system is rigged, and in many ways it is. So we lash out against large corporations, even if it means ruining our economies. Those critical of “big oil” are screaming to get rid of Chevron Oil from their town in Richmond, California, even though the oil giant’s presence creates jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue. Collectivism has convinced many young Americans that the community is more important than any individual, and big evil corporations and anyone else who has reached a high level of success is a “threat to democracy.” So they celebrated Luigi Mangione’s murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, considering it a shot across the bow against giant privately-owned corporations, and hoping his “extreme emotional disturbance” can be grounds for keeping him out of prison and being sent to a psychiatric facility, instead.
It’s a wave of communism-inspired thinking that is permeating the American landscape. It’s an anti-American wave of thinking that has become a common malady among leftist extremists, socialists and Islamists. It’s the punk you remember from high school who walked around with his chest stuck out, ready to fight if anyone ever crossed him because he was right, everyone else in the world was wrong, even if the facts said otherwise. They believe they must oppress to protect us from oppression. They must silence us because they claim we seek to silence them. They have moralized their way into politics, claiming they are there to save those discriminated against from liberty by offering class warfare, class resentment and government dependency.
The detest God, liberty, and anything else they believe might be connected or willing to defend American exceptionalism. The system is unacceptable, so it must be torn completely down. Discovery, innovation and growth is bad, to these people, because it allows success and wealth which they deem as antithetical to the rights and happiness of the oppressed. It must all be torn down, destroyed so that a new world of equity and inclusion can be built – you know, after those who disagree are eliminated.
In this new world boys can be girls and girls can be boys, and they will even defend transgender sports when a man who says he’s a woman sexually assaults a female competitor during a wrestling match. They demand that you celebrate their WOKE and sexually deviant beliefs, by their demand, and if you dare have an opinion otherwise, you will be punished. The baker who refuses to bake a gay cake will be put out of business, and a baseball player that writes a Bible verse on his baseball cap after being forced to wear a Gay “Pride” hat will be given verbal warnings and could be fined or suspended for repeated “unauthorized writing” on their uniforms in violation of uniform regulations. In other words, celebrate what we tell you to celebrate, and keep your own opinions silent.
And if a young man (Karmelo Anthony) murders another (Austin Metcalf), based on the alleged virtue of the oppressed versus white privilege argument, the black man who murdered the white man in cold blood with a knife while his victim had no weapon on him and provided no imminent threat to the safety of the killer must be considered “self-defense” – otherwise, the whole thing is racist and unfair. Protests emerged, with some articulating there must be a violent response. Even members of Congress, threatening violating Separation of Powers, screamed about the 35 years in prison sentence dealt to Anthony after the jury gave their verdict – claiming that the jury selection produced an all-white jury (which it didn’t) and that somehow Congress should be able to interfere with our judicial system. Such is the madness that identity politics has brought upon our culture.
Violent responses to things are the norm, anymore. Just look at New York’s “fans” after the Knicks recently won the NBA Championship. Look at the anti-ICE protests like what we saw at Delaney Hall in New Jersey. The attempted assassinations against President Trump. The execution by a gunman of Charlie Kirk. Antifa radicals clashing with police chanting “Charlie Kirk deserved to die” at a TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit.
What have we become?
It is true that the violence and domestic terrorism on the rise in America is a direct result of leftist Democrats spewing violent rhetoric, but the rhetoric and violence is a deeper symptom of something even more alarming. It is the result of our culture abandoning its moral foundation and becoming, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “corrupt and vicious.”
The Democrats have been calling their opposition “Nazis,” “Fascists,” and “White Supremacists,” with the Southern Poverty Law Center doubling down on the rhetoric while secretly feeding the “enemy” funding and support and targeting Christians and Turning Point USA (Charlie Kirk) while running cover for groups like Antifa. They do it because they need an enemy to accuse. They require a scapegoat. And they are willing to do whatever it takes to keep that power so that the game can continue to be played based on their rules. That’s why they drag out the vote in places like California – they need to make sure their candidate wins at all costs. And if you question it, California has even incriminated investigating election fraud.
It truly is, as many pundits have pointed out, a culture war and a war for our minds.
Franklin’s warning was not merely a philosophical observation but a prophetic statement about the very conditions we now witness in America. When virtue erodes, liberty cannot be sustained by constitutional structures alone. The second half of Franklin’s quote (As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters) is precisely what we’re experiencing today – a society that has abandoned its moral foundation and now finds itself increasingly subject to a desire of more government control disguised as progressive governance.
The rot began when we allowed secularism to displace Christianity and our moral compass to be pushed aside by WOKE politics so that it could instead dominate the culture. Our founders recognized that freedom and self-governance requires adherence to the rule of law, and adherence to the rule of law requires virtue. Without the internal constraints of religious morality, external constraints become necessary. This is why we are watching the expansion of an ever-expanding regulatory state, the expansion of the surveillance apparatus, and the cancellation of those who dissent from the new orthodoxy.
The evidence of our moral decay surrounds us. We have gotten to the point that we normalize violence as political expression. These are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a society that has lost its moral bearings – the very kind of society that Franklin described as “corrupt and vicious.”
The solution is not more legislation or stronger enforcement but a return to the Christian moral framework that once undergirded American society. This means restoring the family as the fundamental unit of society, teaching children biblical values rather than critical race theory, and rebuilding communities around churches rather than political ideologies. It means recognizing that true freedom is not the license to do whatever we want but the liberty to do what we ought according to God’s moral law.
Without this moral restoration, America will continue its slide toward totalitarianism. The left’s vision of equity and inclusion is not an alternative to tyranny but its most insidious form – where conformity is enforced not by jackbooted thugs but by social media mobs, where dissent is punished not by imprisonment but by cancellation, where control is exercised not through overt oppression but through the subtle manipulation of language and thought.
The choice before us is stark: either reclaim our Christian heritage and the virtue it engenders, or accept the masters that Franklin warned would inevitably rule a corrupt and vicious people. The future of American freedom hangs in the balance, and it will be determined not by elections or court decisions but by whether we can restore the moral character of our people.
We can’t get our political house in order until we get our cultural house in order.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
