A reader and correspondent (and long-term friend and sister in faith) shared one of Bob Livingston’s postings, by Brandon Smith, which you can read here.

We here at TPOL are unsure exactly who this Brandon Smith is – there are apparently several who inhabit the internet and blogosphere, most of whom seem to be “Regressives” – though they claim the name “Progressive”…and Woke.

This guy doesn’t seem like one of those, though. And his conclusions are fearsome indeed, and worth pondering about by lovers of liberty.

What he describes as being planned now is one of the major causes of the collapse of the SPQR (the Roman Empire) – the importation of mercenaries along with their families and their cultures, which ultimately destroyed the Pax Romanum.

These immigrants were both used to control rebellion and supposedly protect the frontiers against worse, and to tear down the society and economy. Among other things, they helped corrupt the “christian church” which by then had merged with the imperial government. (4th Century). They introduced and integrated more paganism, which combined with the gnosticism and judiazers, corrupted the New Testament church. And society in general.

But this Brandon Smith doesn’t fit in that category, at least based on this commentary. He does not use the term “barbarian” but his descriptions fit just as the Franks, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and others did in Roman times: these are barbarians coming into the civitas. Not that we (like Rome) don’t have enough home-grown barbarians.

Of course, Rome was far from the only nation (or empire) destroyed by barbarians – especially by barbarians in cooperation with the ever more corrupt leadership. Not just in DC, just as it was not just in Rome and Constantinople.

Keep in mind: mandatory human government is always in rebellion to God, but there are some who are more rebellious than others. There are many historical examples.

We can look at the Saxons, Angles, and then Danish turning the British (Latinized, admittedly) into the Welsh (literally originally meaning “foreigners”) as they were invited in to help and then took over.

We can even look at the original Texians who were invited into Texas (Tejas at the time) by the corrupt First Empire government in Mexico City. Why? To protect the frontier against barbarians (Comanche, etc. – our own TPOL ancestors in part) and ended up gaining control of Texas and another 1/3 of Mexico.

Or what the Mongols did to China in the 1300s or the Islamicist Arabs to Egypt, Canaan, Syria, and all of North Africa! There are many more historical examples.

But we do not learn from history any more than the children of Israel did – or nation after nation. We do not put our trust in God, but in alliances and compromise and physical wealth. We allow ourselves to be corrupted by wealth and ease, and become agents of our own destruction.

The last quote shared by our correspondent, though not from Mr. Smith, is deeply disturbing to me:

 ”You guys have no idea how painful it is to have been young during the absolute peak era of the greatest empire in human history and now be forced to watch it all unravel. The saddest part is that we are doing it to ourselves.” – Peachy Keenan on X (Reposted by William A. Jacobson, Saturday, August 17, 2024)

Is the FedGov, the United States, an empire? Sadly, yes.

We do not have to wait for a Gaius Julius or Octavian/Augustus. As we have stated before in the pages of TPOL, it is not too premature to state that the Republic is dead and has been for a long, long time.

Nathan’s thoughts: When I was a senior in high school in Colorado, I was part of my school’s “speech team” and did original oratory and extemporaneous speaking: both skills that I have used constantly since then. At a speech meet in Fort Collins, Colorado, one of the other contestants gave a rousing speech calling in 1973 for establishing a “Pax Americana” over the entire world. (Some would say, with some justification, that it started in 1944.)

Sadly, that is essence is what the powers-that-be in DC have attempted in the last half-century. And like the Pax Romanum and the Pax Brittanica before this, the FedGov has failed. And the attempt has corrupted us and – almost certainly like Roman and the United Kingdom – doomed this once-great and unique union.

But we hope and seek to restore liberty, we must clearly understand what has gone wrong in the last five decades, century, and even longer.

To put it bluntly, we do not have the resources to waste engaging targets that are not critical to the enemies of liberty. Or to use a less violent metaphor, we have to point the fire extinguisher’s nozzle at the actual burning material and not the flames.