Frightened, or Free?

When our country’s founders declared our Independence, we became the first nation in history that was based not a religion, not on a royalty, not on a race, but on a new set of God-given principles called inalienable rights.

Since then, from all corners of the world, freedom has seduced countless human beings who seek its blessings.

But just as freedom seemed almost free, the bill came due on September 11th, and we were devastated by its horrible toll.

Since then, we’ve watched social and political marketers jockey for position, seeking advantage on the back of tragedy for more government regulation, intrusion and expansion.  We’ve witnessed a fire sale of American liberties at bargain basement prices, in return for the false promise of more security. 

Freedom is the first bargaining chip of a scared people.  But it’s always a losing bet. 

I’m here to say, don’t do it.

Maybe you’re thinking, Wayne, you’re the NRA guy --- what does this have to do with guns?

Well,  as goes the fate of my freedom, so goes the fate of your freedom.  This fight is everybody’s fight.  And giving up freedom will never win it.

Let’s start with an obvious question almost nobody has asked: Tell me, exactly which airport security regulation failed that should have, or could have, prevented Sept. 11th?  

There’s not one.  But the media blamed substandard airport security at the hands of poorly-paid people.  As a result, our airports have become a place where you can see physically what’s happening to us psychologically.

You see red-faced, teary-eyed 15-year-old girls enduring security wands orbiting their breasts while electronic squeals detect the metal in their underwire bras.

You see grandmothers shaken down and stripped of their cuticle clippers and knitting needles. You see grandfathers, men who likely fought or lost loved ones for this country, in various stages of undress.

You see women cringe as security men let their wands linger between their legs.

You see countless innocent American citizens -- even pilots themselves -- dumping out pockets and purses, turning over nail files, tweezers, pen knives and key chains, and then subjected to humiliating physical indignities that grow more sordid with each day they’re tolerated.

Congressman John Dingell, who has a steel hip joint and surgically-implanted ankle pins, was asked to drop his pants at Washington's Reagan National Airport.

My friend and former NRA president General Joe Foss flew out of here a few weeks ago.  He’s a genuine American hero, the former Marine Corps pilot who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for shooting down 26 enemy planes during World War II.   

So here’s this 86-year-old war hero carrying his Medal of Honor to show the cadets at West Point.  He puts it through the X-ray and the security people went nuts.  They didn't even know what it was.  They stopped him, yanked him out of line, hassled him, patted him down, and made him take off his boots three separate times.  They finally let him board the plane ... and fly to South Dakota, where he was once governor.  In fact, the airfield in Sioux Falls bears his name!

For what, are we sacrificing all reason and judgment?  No one is any safer and we know it.  But everyone is delayed, defiled and demeaned.

And when it doesn’t work, where will it stop?  When we’re all naked?  Boarding planes in airline-issued hospital smocks?   I guess it’s okay to wand-rape someone’s daughter in public, but no profiling!   No, we don’t want to risk offending an Islamic ex-con with two aliases and no job, paying cash for a one-way airline ticket with no luggage, whose shoes are packed with plastic explosives. 

Who’re we fooling?  Terrorists fit into fairly narrow categories of gender, age, nationality and religion. 

And what about the millions of people who are in this country illegally?  Just because they're on American soil, are they entitled to the same degree of liberty and privacy as a Medal of Honor winner, or a high school cheerleader, or you, or me?  No!

I say, if anyone’s going to lose freedoms, make it the illegal aliens.  Not my mother, your daughter, our pilots or war heroes.  If anyone deserves a little extra scrutiny after September 11th, it ought to be a few million illegal aliens.  And we shouldn't have to x-ray, frisk and humiliate honest Americans to justify it!

Please don’t misunderstand me.  I have great respect for this Administration.  But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with confiscating nail clippers from grandmothers and poking magnetic wands up skirts. 

Too many are too timid to ask what these outrages are supposed to achieve. Too many are too polite to say that our Bill of Rights is too sacred to give up for homeland security or for anything else.

Don’t expect mainstream media to do it.  America’s Great Disinformation Machine has grown so big and brazen, so bloated and pervasive, that as a people we’re too numbed up and dumbed down to fight back.

Sure, they’ll do stories fretting about the living conditions of 150 of the world’s most evil people.  The media cares more about the prison menus of Taliban butchers than about your aunt getting strip-searched at the airport.   The media’s not interviewing her!

And I’ll tell you another scandal the media’s not covering -- and never will -- and that’s how they’re embezzling the First Amendment under so-called campaign finance reform. 

You know, we don’t put people in jail for free speech in the United States of America.  But that’s exactly what the McCain-Feingold bill would do.  It outlaws political speech by groups like the NRA or CPAC or ACLU or NAACO or Fund for Animals or the Sierra Club 30 days before a primary election and 60 days before a general election.  No political speech for any individual or any organization … except politicians and the big media conglomerates!

I mean General Electric, NBC, CBS, ABC, Viacom, AOL-Time Warner, the Washington Post, New York Times, these multi-billion-dollar media conglomerates and the hundreds of companies they own, can say whatever they want.  But not you and me.

Where in the Constitution does it say they’re freer than us?

The media could spend millions or billions of dollars creating programming about their pet causes and their pet politicians, while they ignore or vilify you and me.  And there’s no way we could respond for any amount of money.  What media wouldn’t take that deal?

Politicians couldn’t be criticized by those pesky issue ads that hold them accountable. What incumbent wouldn’t take that deal?

You know, in civics class we learned that if you see something you don’t like in America, you join a group, get active, speak up and the worst thing that can happen is you lose.  Under this bill, you speak up and the worst that can happen is you go to federal prison for 5 years and pay a $25,000 fine. 

It’s the biggest, dirtiest, stinkin’est assault on freedom I’ve ever seen. We as citizens should be free to say whatever we want about politicians 20 days, 30 days, five minutes before an election.  That’s what makes America different.

But the media won’t talk about that part of the bill, and the politicians won’t talk about that part of the bill, because they’re exempt from the gag order in that part of the bill.

King George threw colonists in jail for pamphleteering against the crown.  You tell me, what’s the difference?

We will not be silenced.  If we have to, we’ll launch the Good Ship NRA and drop anchor in international waters just off the coast and broadcast the truth from our own TV towers.  We’ll tie a radio antenna to a hot air balloon, let ‘er go a thousand feet straight up and we’ll broadcast the truth on our own Radio Free America.  John McCain, we will not be silenced!

The America being designed right now won’t resemble the America we’ve been defending.  The muzzling and cattle-prod treatment of honest Americans is just a visible version of intrusions already happening invisibly, electronically, silently.

Think about that telemarketer that calls you, by name, at home, at dinnertime.  That’s a clue that a lot of people you don’t know .... know a lot about you.

Many politicians are endorsing a national ID card, at the same time the federal government is working with the states to develop driver's licenses that can electronically store information, like fingerprints.

Plus your retinal scan, voiceprint, hand geometry or DNA.  Maybe your credit history, your residential information, your banking history, your medical and mental health records, your marital status, your ATM withdrawals, turnpike use, library checkouts, movie rentals, pharmacy prescriptions, phone call records, and firearms by serial number and address.  Imagine all that information encrypted in a hologram on your national ID card ... but a hologram you can’t read.  Only higher authorities can read it.  

What's the potential for abuse of a system where all that information gets compiled and is available only to criminal hackers, corporate marketers, corrupt politicians and government hacks?

And couldn’t terrorists counterfeit such an ID?  In Tijuana, you can get a fake American Green Card for about $500.  In Europe, counterfeit Euros appeared just 48 hours after the new currency was released.  Passports are supposed to be tamper-proof, too. Yeah, sure.

Meanwhile, Congress has given the CIA vast new powers and billions of dollars to use them.   The CIA can now read secret grand jury testimony without a judge’s prior approval. They want to intercept e-mail without a warrant and more powers to eavesdrop on people.

And the technology exists to pull it all off.

You heard about the cameras and software that captured every fan’s face at last year’s SuperBowl in Tampa.   Computers instantly compared each face to those of criminals stored in a database.

Around the country, work is underway on optical technologies that can identify you hundreds of feet away by the color spectrum emitted by your skin,  or your body’s unique dimensions, or the "force profiles" of your walking feet, or the speckles in your irises.

Beyond detecting human identity, they’re detecting human intention!   Like computers programmed to recognize movement associated with criminal behavior.  Another system tracks features of your face and figures out what your expressions mean emotionally!  Computers will look at what’s on your face and decide what’s in your heart.

The only people who can stop all of this are you and me.  Indeed, the only people who’ve ever drawn the line, by refusing to toe the line, are the patriots like you who stand up and say, NO MORE.

Maybe you think that with President George W. Bush in the White House, everything is safe. You think you can put aside your principles, just this once, to be a loyal conservative.

Maybe you worry that if you question or criticize, your phone will stop ringing ... your access will dry up ... you'll get dropped from the Washington party circuit.   But I’m here to challenge any weak spines in this room, and in any room, who want to be on the White House A-list while their voices are silenced in American elections and their nieces are humiliated in America’s airports.

I know the risks I run by what I say here.  I've taken some lonely roads to stand up for the principles I believe in.  But if we, as conservatives, don't stand up for these fundamental truths, who will?

Never accept the idea that surrendering freedom – any freedom – is the price of feeling safe.

Because when a national ID card is beat by a terrorist counterfeit, what then?

When the FBI’s internet-sniffing software Carnivore fails to detect a terrorist clue, what then?

When we’ve consigned our privacy and firearms and identity and free speech to our government in the name of security, will we be safe? 

We all know from history what can be lost.  But so far, no one in history has figured out how to get it back.

The more we tolerate forfeiture of freedom, the more we are a nation where privacy is a luxury and freedom is suspect, the more we distrust each other and government distrusts us ...  the more our liberty will be frisked, X-rayed, fingerprinted, strip-searched, silenced and finally lost.

My friends, the bottom line is this:  The danger isn’t that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don’t realize that he is already inside the castle walls.

We’ve got a decision to make.  Today we find ourselves straddling the Continental Divide of freedom.   We look left, and we see the empty promises of security in puffy soft clouds of safety, if we’ll only blindly step off the cliff.  

We look right, and we see the craggy granite peaks of Freedom, the sheer vertical face of Liberty, that offers a sure-footed ascent to those who accept the risk and responsibility.

We know the right way to go.   And it’s the hard way to go.  But we will create followers if we will simply lead, embracing from all corners of the world only those who revere freedom’s blessings. 

Anything less, and freedom should rightfully be the dominion of a people greater than we.

Thank you

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© 2002 National Rifle Association