We are living through the Second American Revolution

On March 23, 1775, a month before the first shots would ring out at Lexington and Concord, Patrick Henry entered Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia to deliver a bold conviction. “The war is actually begun,” he said, “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Henry’s rallying cry remains one of the most iconic speeches in American history and is one of my personal favorites. Indeed, multiple times since we moved to northern Virginia in 2021, my family and I have made the drive south to see Henry’s speech reenacted. The message remains as compelling as ever, and this year, on its 250th anniversary, I believe it is especially relevant to our current political moment.

We are facing a struggle for ordered liberty. We are challenging a political regime that subverts our rights, ignores our petitions, persecutes our friends and spurns our way of life. We are, as I put it on Steve Bannon’s War Room last July, “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” 

When I first suggested this, the Biden campaign, MSNBC hosts and their wax-museum conservative counterparts relentlessly mocked and attacked me – just as British loyalists and “moderate” colonists no doubt did to Henry in 1775 when he correctly predicted that conflict was inevitable. But much as the subsequent victories at Lexington and Concord confirmed Henry’s prediction, President Trump’s definitive victory in November and his blitz of executive actions to cut down the deep state since taking office have confirmed my own.

The American people are once again asserting their right to self-governance. They are rejecting submission to unelected bureaucrats and slavery to technocratic government. They are embracing common sense and exercising their power to advance the common good. And the left – bereft of ideas and more concerned with maintaining the status quo than honoring the will of the American people – has responded to this popular upheaval with desperation, profanity and violence.

This became obvious to every American when President Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania last July. It has only become more undeniable since. 

On Inauguration Day a man in Oregon threw Molotov cocktails at a Tesla and threatened the driver with a gun. Later that month, a woman in Colorado repeatedly went to a Tesla car lot to spray paint “Nazi” on the dealership’s sign. This, it turns out, was only the beginning. Since then, the American car business has been under attack across the country, as more cars get set alight. 

Meanwhile a crazed Massachusetts man came to Washington with Molotov cocktails, knives and the intent to burn down the Heritage Foundation and kill Pete Hegseth, Speaker Mike Johnson and Scott Bessent.

In February, Democrat elected representatives joined in and began pushing crazy rhetoric of their own. Representative Kweisi Mfume – whose birth name is Frizzell Gerard Tate – proposed a “street fight” to push back against Elon Musk. Ilhan Omar escalated even further, arguing that Musk’s efforts “might actually see somebody get killed.” And to make the second American Revolution analogy concrete, Representative LaMonica McIver came right out and said, “We are at war!”

This insane rhetoric only shows how out of touch Democrats are with the American people. Today their motto is effectively: give me $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala or give me death. It is the antithesis of the American spirit, and their “resistance” is as pathetic as it sounds.

That’s because the Democrats don’t represent a “resistance” at all. They are part and parcel of the Uniparty establishment that controls Washington and has been working for decades to expand its malign influence into every part of American life. Similarities between them and the overbearing British who ruled over the colonies in the 1760s and 70s abound.

The British forced Patrick Henry and his fellow patriots to quarter soldiers in their homes. Our tyrannical elite is forcing us to pay millions of dollars to process illegal immigrants into our country, house them in our communities and educate them in our schools.

Britain’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 restrained Americans’ frontier spirit by forbidding them from settling west of the Appalachian mountains. The unelected bureaucrats that rule us are restraining that same spirit through overregulation and censorship.

King George III and the British parliament unjustly taxed the colonists to pay for their incompetent management of a global empire. And if Donald Trump’s dismantling of USAID has proven anything, it is that our rulers have been unjustly taxing us to pay for their own incompetent management of a global empire.

The Second American Revolution pits this insulated elite class of managers and bureaucrats against an increasingly broad swath of the American people, whom they do not know, can make no credible claim to represent and have utterly failed. The diverse coalition that elected President Trump this November proves as much. One in four black men under 50 voted for Trump. Roughly 45 percent of Latinos voted for Trump. Voters without a college degree supported President Trump by 13 points.

These Americans have even less in common with the progressive bureaucrats ruling them than America’s founders did with their British overlords at the time of the first American revolution. Sure, it could take up to six weeks to travel across the Atlantic in the 1770s, but at least the English spoke the same language as their subjects, structured their families in similar ways and worshipped the same God. Today, our bureaucrats mock religion and are so morally bankrupt that it is oftentimes impossible to reason with them.

The only legitimate option is to defeat them. Like our founding fathers, we must be victorious.

The good news is that we are well on our way. Right now, President Trump’s executive orders and decisive actions are systematically dismantling the deep state’s hard power. On his first day in office, he terminated all remote work arrangements for federal employees. Then, he introduced an unprecedented, deferred resignation program which convinced more than 75,000 unelected bureaucrats to resign their posts. And last month he signed a new executive order requiring all federal agencies to fire at least four people for every one person they hire. Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DoGE) incredible work has undermined the regime’s soft power by exposing its waste and corruption unlike ever before.

Make no mistake, these have only been the opening skirmishes in what will be a long fight. Though President Trump’s has already delivered a major blow, the deep state remains powerful. Slowly but surely, it is forming its counteroffensive. Corrupt federal judges are blocking the President’s executive orders. Colleges and universities are disguising their DEI programs to prevent losing federal funding. Countless bureaucrats are laying low in federal agencies, waiting for the opportunity to upend the people’s agenda. Even as fewer and fewer people are tuning in, the mainstream media is still doing everything it can to disparage Trump.

Confronting such a force, there is no room for complacency. Patrick Henry understood this. In his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, he reminded his fellow patriots of the need for urgent action against the enemy, saying: “They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger?”

We must heed his words and ask the same question today. When shall the American people be stronger? When will the American people have a better chance to dismantle the deep state and restore their rights? When will they get another opportunity to rescue the Republic our ancestors fought and died for?

They may not get another opportunity. There is no better time than now.

We are living in the Second American Revolution. We are stronger than we’ve ever been, and we must use every moral lever of power at our disposal to restore our founding principles, recover the basic norms of Western civilization (such as the notion that men and women are different), and revive the traditional institutions of American life by restoring their original purpose.

Despite the left’s fearmongering, none of this requires violence. But it does require us to remember the promise of Patrick Henry that “millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.”

Kevin Roberts is the President of The Heritage Foundation.