We live in amazing times, and we are so blessed and fortunate to be the benefactors of those individuals who fought for our freedoms and our liberties. But it is our responsibility to ensure that we continue to enjoy the benefits that you and I didn t earn.
00:01:25.500I know I like to point out all the things that are going wrong in culture and society.
00:01:28.780But we do live in pretty incredible times.
00:01:31.700And we are so blessed and so fortunate to be the benefactors of those individuals who fought for our freedoms and our liberties and our pursuit of happiness.
00:01:43.560And that's what I want to talk with you about today.
00:02:30.200So many people believe that just because we can pursue happiness that we're entitled to health care
00:02:35.880or we're entitled to, quote, unquote, livable, workable wage or we're entitled to housing.
00:02:43.760That isn't what the founders intended.
00:02:46.320What the founders intended is that we are able to pursue those things with equality, with a level playing field.
00:02:56.560And America, to be fair, hasn't always lived up to that ideal.
00:03:00.240But we are closer, I believe, than any other nation throughout all of human history to realizing and accomplishing that dream.
00:03:08.380But it isn't anybody's responsibility to ensure that you continue to enjoy the benefits that you and I didn't earn.
00:03:17.660I would say as you're celebrating this weekend, the Fourth of July weekend or Canada Day weekend, however it is dubbed or termed,
00:03:25.060that we remember to spend time with our family and friends and our loved ones celebrating righteously the freedoms that we enjoy.
00:03:33.580But what I do want to make sure that I acknowledge and share with you today is that there is an inextricable connection between the rights that we enjoy and the responsibility that we have.
00:03:45.980Too many people have forgotten that there is an associated responsibility with the rights that we have.
00:03:51.780They just believe because they've enjoyed their entire lives the rights that somebody else afforded them that they're just going to in perpetuity have that.
00:04:00.220Guys, unless we as men are willing to step up and take responsibility for our livelihoods, for our well-being, for securing those rights, both foreign and domestic, those rights will slip away.
00:04:13.460And I've had the thought as an American that there's no way that can happen.
00:04:20.860Look at all of cultures, the greatest civilizations that the world has ever known.
00:04:25.820And most of them, 99.9999% of them, have fallen.
00:04:32.140And part of the reason they fall is because they have no longer been able to secure the rights that they establish for themselves.
00:04:41.380This is the crux of what it means to be a sovereign man.
00:04:44.820In 2016, I wrote a book called Sovereignty for the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Men.
00:04:49.840And in it, I lay out the idea of responsibility for your own life.
00:04:54.200Men, we have a responsibility to be protectors, to be providers, to preside, which is synonymous with leadership, over and for people that we love, people under our care, people who are unable to do it for themselves.
00:05:09.660And unless we as men step up, we're going to see these rights dwindle slowly in some cases and drastically in others.
00:05:17.000And don't for a second think that just because America is the powerhouse that it is, that there can't be just some moment in time that threatens that.
00:05:27.760Now, granted, that wasn't a direct threat to our democracy necessarily, but it was a warning shot across the bow that said, you are not invincible.
00:06:42.780It isn't enjoyable to recognize that you individually and personally have deficiencies.
00:06:47.080It isn't always fun and enjoyable to recognize that your city or town or village or province is as good as it could be.
00:06:57.740It isn't as good to acknowledge that maybe you don't have the close friend circle that you ought to.
00:07:04.240But unless you're willing to acknowledge the truth that we don't have everything figured out, that we do have vulnerabilities, and we do have areas for improvement, then we will never improve.
00:07:15.520We've spent centuries at this point resting on the laurels, the coattails, riding the coattails of other people.
00:07:46.540You see this quote-unquote free nation and the restrictions and rules and regulations.
00:07:51.540You see the power struggle between corporations and oligarchs and lifelong political actors all vying for power and control over you.
00:08:05.860These people don't care about your freedom.
00:08:09.260They don't care about your well-being.
00:08:12.480They don't care about your life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:08:15.360They care about their own power, and they wield those phrases and the founding documents of this country, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, as a tool to amass more power.
00:08:30.360And it's like that old adage of the boiling frog in the pot.
00:08:34.500Now, we don't know how true it is, right?
00:08:36.960But the adage is that if you put a frog in medium-temperature water and gradually heat it up, that he'll stay in there just long enough to cook himself to death or death by a thousand cuts, if you will.
00:08:48.480It doesn't seem significant in the moment, but you start adding up all these little things, the Patriot Act and the way taxes are structured from the implementation of income tax to the implementation of property tax.
00:09:00.800Even things that are taxes like registration fees and those sorts of things that aren't, quote-unquote, called taxes, but actually really are, these things add up.
00:09:12.000And your freedoms are being taken away from you right before your eyes.
00:09:19.960You celebrate it because you're not a sovereign man.
00:09:22.840So when the government comes in to pay off your student debt, you're excited about it because you're an idiot and ignorant about the fact that it really wasn't the government that did anything at all except for steal from the common man to pay somebody else.
00:09:39.340You see it when you're taxed to death, literally.
00:10:07.700And as much as I would like to just reap the benefits of somebody else's effort, we don't get to do that for very long.
00:10:14.420As I said earlier, there is an inextricable connection between the rights that we enjoy and the responsibilities that we have.
00:10:21.780And so I would ask yourself, if you're an honest, righteous, moral man, where are you failing to take responsibility for yourself, for your family, for your community, for your neighbors, for your country?
00:10:38.700It's easy to say, oh, somebody else will do it.
00:10:40.940It's easy to say, that's not my responsibility.
00:10:44.220It is your responsibility if you hope to enjoy the freedoms that you have previously enjoyed and if you hope to sustain those freedoms for your kids and your grandkids.
00:10:55.180The reality is, is that if you're roughly my age, I'm 43 years old, that these freedoms aren't going to be taken away from us, that we're not going to live in a time where we're subject to a king or anything like that.
00:11:09.620But the reality is, we might come into a situation where our children are.
00:13:54.220Those people need to be revolted against in the mediums that are available to us as citizens with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:14:05.040And anybody that stands in our way of doing that ought to be acknowledged and ought to be dealt with.
00:14:10.840Guys, it's very, very important that we continue to maintain our rights.
00:14:17.680It's not enough that somebody 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 250 years ago, believed enough to pay the ultimate sacrifice for acknowledging and restoring these rights to us, the American citizen.
00:14:34.920We actually have to do something about it.
00:14:36.740So, enough talking on social media about how amazing this country is.
00:14:44.380I get tired of seeing what I would call patriot porn where everybody's putting up their flags and shooting their guns and their fireworks.
00:15:01.760It's what it actually means, what it represents, and what we as people are willing to do about it.
00:15:07.980I don't care about the fireworks and the celebrations if it means nothing because we're not doing what we're celebrating in the first place.
00:15:21.500And know, again, as I said earlier, there's an inextricable connection between the rights that our founders acknowledged and that God has bestowed upon us and our responsibility to uphold them.
00:15:31.760And when we find the correlation between the two and we do something about it, then we can look our children in the eye and say, we helped secure those rights for you.
00:16:04.480That is the work that we've been doing here for the past almost decade now, teaching you to become sovereign, to not rely on big daddy government, to not rely on the financial institutions,
00:16:14.860to not rely on formalized education or academia or big pharma or corporations in general, but to rely upon yourself and your neighbor and your community members and your brothers and sisters and the people who are close to you,
00:16:29.640that we can lock arms, shoulder to shoulder, step by step, reclaim the freedoms that this country once enjoyed.