Oppressive Government and a Complacent, Apathetic Public Are a Recipe for the Erosion of Hard-Fought Liberties 250 Years after the Declaration of Independence
Opinion
There is hardly any aspect of American life that the government does not now touch.
Some of that involvement is the work citizens have long expected: delivering water, regulating or supplying power, building and maintaining roads, providing a safety net for the poor and the elderly, policing and locking up criminals, fighting fires, educating children and young adults, and defending the country.
The problem is how far that reach has gone beyond those core duties — telling us where we may build, what we may build and how we may build it; restricting how we may defend ourselves; watching our movements with mass-surveillance technology such as Flock license-plate cameras; vacuuming up communications under the banner of “safety”; dictating how we sort our garbage; mandating medical decisions for our children by restricting who can and cannot go to public schools based on vaccination status; and, in the most grotesque cases, threatening to take children from parents who refuse to affirm a child’s claim of being born in the wrong body.
Now comes the ultimate insult.
We are told we may not question election results or examine ballots that appear irregular. We are blocked from a meaningful look at voter rolls that federal officials say may include hundreds of thousands of noncitizens in California alone. Elected sheriffs are being told they may not handle voted ballots, even during an investigation. And while taxpayers are commonly advised to keep records for years — in some cases seven — California law requires that voted ballots from federal elections be destroyed after a mere 22 months if no contest or criminal case has been filed. Legitimate public requests for election-log records are ignored without consequences.
Something stinks. The rot is evident. The corruption is pervasive.
On Thursday, Sept. 24, the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco may not keep or count the roughly 650,000 voted ballots his office seized under a search warrant as part of an investigation into the November 2025 special election. The court ordered the ballots returned to the registrar of voters and held that voted ballots must remain in the election official’s custody even during a criminal inquiry. In a companion ruling, the justices said Attorney General Rob Bonta has authority to issue binding directives to county sheriffs.
Whatever one thinks of Bianco’s investigation, the message to the public is unmistakable: even an elected sheriff with a warrant is not allowed to look at the paper ballots that decide who governs us. The entire California political machine seems determined to destroy what might be evidence of rampant election corruption.
We have lost something the colonists bled to secure.
“Give me liberty or give me death!” was Patrick Henry’s cry to the Second Virginia Convention in 1775. It helped spur a revolution and a long, bloody fight for God-given rights. California now stands at a precipice. Will we allow judges and officials to dismiss citizens who have seen irregularities with their own eyes?
We are not blind. We have discernment. The Lord has given His people the ability to distinguish right from wrong, truth from deception, transparency from cover-up.
What is happening in Shasta County, in California, and in other states has been years in the making. Recently, and potentially even more concerning, are verified reports that the Chinese government has hacked into the voter registration records. They already manufacture our voting hardware. If apathetic citizens stay home this November, the cheating methods already in use — voting machines, bloated and inaccurate voter rolls, questionable ballots, ballot harvesting and more — will decide the outcome. Those who now run Sacramento are not interested in equal opportunity. They want power and to tax the productive into oblivion.
What would the Founders say to us?
Benjamin Franklin, leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked whether the new government was a republic or a monarchy. He answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” It was never a guarantee.
President Ronald Reagan warned: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
That generation is this one.
Gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, as senior legal advisor to the UCLA Voting Rights Project, signed a Sept. 9 letter urging the Shasta County Grand Jury to begin removal proceedings against County Clerk/Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis — not for failing to run an election, but for questioning ballots after certifying results and seeking a closer look at paper that did not look, feel, or smell like the rest. If citizens and an elections official report that some ballots differ in thickness, texture, color, and smell, and that voting boxes appear filled with the uniformity of a printer rather than a pen, the official response is not “examine them.” It is “be silent, or be removed.”
That is not a republic confident in its elections. That is the world George Orwell described in 1984.
Shasta County is a conservative stronghold. That has not stopped its Board of Supervisors from failing, in key respects, to honor the public’s demand for transparent government.
The board recently voted to keep county emails for only two years — after staff asked for one. Officials said the change would ease the burden of public-records work. The effect is the same either way: fewer messages left for citizens to see. Before that vote, Outlook mail was kept indefinitely. Is this yet another effort to destroy what might be evidence of government bureaucracy run amok?
The same board, through their County Council and Administrative Office, has denounced Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis for saying election-office employees entered secured rooms. Rather, than investigate what may be criminal activity, they rush to protect the identities of perpetrators. Furthermore, it has not made sure that records requests about elections are answered before the documents are destroyed. Neither the board nor the sheriff — whose total compensation has been reported above $400,000 — has investigated the stack of citizen complaints about chain of custody and transparency in elections run before Curtis was appointed.
In the November 2024 election, citizen observers pointed to an unexplained gap: 90,162 ballots counted, and only 87,379 voters on the list the registrar produced — a difference of 2,783. The board’s answer was to write the U.S. Department of Justice and wait. Local officials and staff kept drawing their pay and conducting business as usual.
Entrenched elections-office employees then turned on the appointed registrar they are obliged to follow. They undermined him and accused him of inappropriate remarks. Now that Curtis is asking for an investigation of alleged fraudulent ballots and of employee entries into secured rooms — entries he says were caught on video — the county administrative office wants him removed, not the employees on the tape.
Good is called evil. Evil is called good. Is this the best a conservative county can do?
Vote on Nov. 3 as if your remaining liberties depend on it — because they do. Tell every neighbor who “can’t be bothered” that they may be plenty bothered later, when what little freedom is left is gone. Steve Hilton, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, has promised to cut taxes and regulations, and has advocated for voter ID. He has assembled a team of candidates who want to clean up fraud and stop the wasteful spending and government handouts to illegal aliens.
The Democrats who treat election questions as heresy have piled on taxes and regulations that drove oil refiners out, pushed California diesel above $8 a gallon, targeted gas stoves, power tools, lawn mowers and furnaces, and helped produce the inflation that is emptying this beautiful state of the people who built it.
The Declaration of Independence turned 250 this year. The question it still asks is not whether government will grow. It will, unless we stop it. The question is whether a free people will still consent to be governed — or whether we will, at last, remember that we were never meant to be oppressed, spied on, and trampled on.
