Behind Enemy Lines. The complete text of my speech in Olympia WA. 13 December 2014.

What you read below is the corrected text of my speech in Olympia on Saturday afternoon. At the last minute, I added a preamble for reasons that my later report will make clear. The YouTube video is available here. If you like this, please send the text and the video link everywhere you can.

Well, I'd like to introduce myself, for some of you don't know me. My name is Mike Vanderboegh. I'm from the great free state of Alabama, and I must say it's a trifle colder than I'm used to, this season at any rate. If you've got to pigeonhole my politics I'm a Christian liberatarian. I believe in God, free men, free markets, the rule of law under the Founders' Republic and that the Constitution extends to everyone regardless of race, creed, color or religion. I also believe that the Second Amendment is the guarantor of liberty in this country -- the right to keep and bear arms which is not created by the Constitution but which is merely codified by it.

Now I am the founder of the Three Percent movement. I'm also very humbled by the fact that I was one of the guys that broke the Fast and Furious story in December 2010 on the Internet -- one of the guys who helped the whistleblowers first get in touch with the Senate and then with Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News and the rest is history. I've been a Second Aamendment activist for 20 years and I gotta to tell you something. I've seen a lot of history in those 20 years but today -- this day -- this is history in the making. Look around, this is history in the making and you are making it.

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So I want to tell you, welcome to the resistance behind enemy lines. I bring you greetings from your fellow resistance fighters in CT, NY, MD and CO. Look around you. What you see are fellow soldiers of the army of the American Republic in mobilization against a tyranny that the Founders themselves warned us about – a tyranny that their diligent study of history told them would one day come. Despite their best efforts and plans THAT DAY IS HERE.

But so, as they expected, YOU ARE HERE AS WELL in answer to their ghostly call across the centuries. You are here.

As I said, you are by no means the first to join this resistance. In CT, NY, MD and CO this fight to defy tyrannical state laws has been quietly raging for over a year and a half now. I know this because I have been behind enemy lines in those states. I have personally broken their laws by smuggling forbidden items. So have my friends. I have met the brave men and women who have faced down their own state governments – who have refused to kowtow to unconstitutional diktats – and who maintain their defiance even when threatened with the coercive powers of their local regimes. They have defied those governments and the tyrant wannabes don’t know whether to defecate or go blind.

You know the Founders were as suspicious of unrestrained democracy as they were of absolute monarchy. Both can be tyrannical. Both can be deadly. Both are threats to life and liberty and property. This is why they crafted a constitutional republic. The Founders knew that the mob could be manipulated by cynical elites to rob other citizens of their liberty, their property and their lives – cynical elites, wealthy men, powerful men, with unceasing appetites for more and more power. Sound like anybody you know? Are you listening Bill?

Tyranny as you have now experienced with I-594 can be voted into existence by a majority. This does not make it right. This does not make it legitimate. Indeed it is a violation of natural law and natural rights derived from God. And I refer you to the Declaration of Independence for the finest expression of that truth.

For as a people we have been here before. The faces change. The soothing lies told to mask the tyranny shift, but the conflict is the same – the question is the same and has been since the time of the Founders – DO THE PEOPLE SERVE THE GOVERNMENT? OR DOES THE GOVERNMENT SERVE THE PEOPLE?

This is the question that Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Michael Bloomberg answer one way and we answer the other – there is no negotiating or finessing the answer. It is not possible. It is one or the other. It cannot be both. One side or the other will win the argument AND I SWEAR BY THE FOUNDERS’ REPUBLIC AND THE GREAT GOD JEHOVAH THAT WE WILL WIN THIS FIGHT! WE WILL WIN IT, OR DIE TRYING!

For as the Founders knew, it does not matter if a common criminal breaks into your home to rob, rape and pillage or if a majority of your neighbors vote to have the same thing done to you – the inalienable right to self defense of liberty, property and life remains the same. And let me tell you a home truth that we know down in Alabama -- and I say it to you and I say it to all the Bill Gates, Paul Allens and Michael Bloombergs of the world – WHEN DEMOCRACY TURNS TO TYRANNY, THE ARMED CITIZENRY STILL GETS TO VOTE! So be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

And I am not joking when I say that you are now behind enemy lines. If we are going to tell the truth let us first tell the truth to ourselves. Let us have no illusions. Let us not try to sugarcoat what is obvious to anyone who has eyes to see. The people who crafted I-594 knew exactly what they were doing. Tyrants develop appetites for other people’s liberty and property and lives – and they will manipulate the mob in order that they might eat. Such people are the very definition of what the Founders called “domestic enemies of the Constitution.” So let us be plain. If they are enemies of liberty and they have temporarily succeeded in stealing ours, then they are enemies of the Founders’ Republic and you here in Washington are now indeed behind enemy lines. This is no joke. This is as serious as it gets.

Claiming legitimacy of a single election, they will send armed men to your door to work their will upon you – to feed their appetites. This is the iron fist of tyranny that they wrap their velvet lies around. DO IT – THEY COMMAND – OR ELSE. To which I would reply, or else WHAT? For the truth is that the rule of law as crafted by the Founders protects THEM from US far more than it protects US from THEM! And if they destroy that rule of law they will be taught that lesson by the very people that they seek to victimize. They will be taught that lesson by YOU.

But we did not have to be here, at this place, with our backs to the wall, our firearms on our shoulders – forced into these awful choices. We are here because of failures -- failures of our own and failures of those entrusted to wage the political fight to secure our liberties from just the sort of threat that I-594 represented. If we are going to tell the truth to the domestic enemies of the Constitution, let us also tell the truth to ourselves and to our allies in this fight.

For years gun rights groups have fought on the same battlefields using the same tactics and consistently, incrementally, sometimes almost invisibly, we've LOST. We've lost because we let the enemies of liberty define the battlefield. Yet having been pushed back, again and again, the people that we entrusted to defend our liberties politically are now insisting that WE ALL DO THE SAME THING AGAIN AND AGAIN because. . .well, because that is what they do. And if you don’t like it, if you don't like the fact that they are losing your rights for you, you simply need to send them more money SO THEY CAN LOSE SOME MORE.

Let us be honest. Petty jealousies, touchy egos and cynical jockeying for position lost the political fight against I-594. The NRA did the minimum required to convince their members that they were doing something without really doing something because they did not want to ally themselves with Alan Gottlieb. For his part, Alan Gottlieb seemed happy to have NRA cede the battlefield to him for he would claim the credit for the vistory. ONLY ONE THING HAPPENED, THEY DIDN’T WIN. They lost. WE lost. And now we are here because grown men and women acted like jealous children. But it is time to cease acting like children. Because of our own failures it is time to stand up and act like adults. This is not a game with no consequences, and merely played for points. This is deadly serious. this is as serious as it gets. And as my friend David Codrea says, it is time for any chair in a bar fight – regardless of who gets the credit afterwards.

And this means working with the very people whose mistakes are responsible for I-594’s win. The fact that we are here today, armed, pointing out that I-594 is trumped -- is NEGATED -- by the Law of Unintended Consequences, does not mean that the political fight is over. Folks, it's just getting started. We NEED the NRAs and the Gottliebs of this state to put away their petty jealousies and to fight – really fight – not to make deals that compromise essential liberty. We need them to work together.

But we are here today to remind them and to remind the enemies of liberty in this state THAT IF THEY FAIL THERE ARE ALWAYS SECOND AMENDMENT REMEDIES. And if that scares them, if they are made uncomfortable by that, if they continue to bicker like children and play the “pragmatic game” trying to be liked by the press and “understood” by their enemies – they should understand there is always US – eternally US -- the resistance army of the Founders’ Republic. And like that determined minority of colonists – that original Three Percent who fought the forces of the greatest empire on the planet to a standstill – WE WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED, WE WILL NOT COMPROMISE, WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN AND WE WILL BE HEARD – ONE WAY OR THE OTHER.

(The WSP estimated the crowd at 1800. I estimated it at 2000. In any case it was, locals said, one of the largest gun rights actions in Olympia and Washington state EVER.)

So I say to the deal makers who claim to be on our side, if you want to make a deal you had bloody well make it based on THAT reality. To the NRA and the SAF, to Wayne LaPierre and Alan Gottlieb, to all the leaders of every so-called mainstream gun rights group – and yes, even to the domestic enemies of the Constitution like Bloomberg and Allen and Gates – I say, take a good look around you at the reality that one side’s failures and the other side’s successes have produced. Take a look around at the reality. That reality is you. Yeah.

And when they have done so, when they looked around and seen which way the wind is now blowing, I would quote these lines from that most under-appreciated American philosopher Frank Zappa who wrote:

Do you love it?

Do you hate it?

There it is,

The way YOU made it.

For we are the Three Percent. We will not fire the first shot, but if needs be we WILL fire the last. We will not target innocents like the militarized police units that will be dispatched to the doors of our homes in furtherance of I-594. BUT WE WILL ANSWER THE GUILTY.

We are here. We are NOT going away. If that scares you then deal with it. But leave us alone. Ease up out of our faces. Take your hands off our liberty and property and keep them to yourselves as the Founders intended.

Leave us alone! That's all we ask. That's all we DEMAND.

Like the flag says, “Don’t tread on me.” DON’T TREAD ON US!

And to all of you resistance fighters here today, I say emulate your fellow soldiers of liberty in CT and elsewhere who are also behind enemy lines – Be watchful. Be patient. Fight the political fight. Think and act outside the box. Work to prevent violence. But always be prepared, as the Founders were. And remember Blackerby’s advice:

“Trust in the Lord, boys, but keep your powder dry.” Thank you very much.