EDMOND
Two weeks we published an article detailing Edmond Pastor Paul Blair’s call for a “peaceful divorce” from Washington DC. In that article we republished, with permission, the entirety of Pastor Blair’s “Declaration 4 Liberty”, which lays out the reasoning as well as a detailed plan for peaceful secession.
For that article, we met with Pastor Blair in his office at Fairview Baptist Church of Edmond for two hours to discuss the impetus for his plan, the challenges involved with it, as well as the resistance to it from some in conservative circles.
Rather than try and summarize those two hours spent with Blair, we figured we would let him speak in his own words. We his permission, we are publishing some of the most salient points from that interview below.
As we stop to observe the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, where the Pilgrims celebrated their own secession from King James I, it is our hope that this interview will stir some thoughtful conversations on the state of our Republic, and which avenue would be best served to right the ship of state that we are all passengers on.
For as Pastor Blair so poignantly put it, America is the Titanic, we have hit the iceberg, and we are going down. The only question is are we going to take the steps necessary preserve our freedoms and liberties for the next generation, or are we simply going back to our stateroom and pretend that everything will be fine?
IL: What was the impetus for this idea?
PB: Well, it’s an idea that my co-pastor, Dan Fisher, and I have discussed for some time. However, there have been a couple of tipping points over the past year plus that led us both to believe that it was time to discuss it in more than just theoretical terms…that it was time to put a plan of action together.
But before I mention those, let me say this: both Dan and I deeply love America. We love our history, the freedoms that we have been blessed with, and the heritage that our Founding Fathers passed down to us. However, the America we all grew up with and loved, the “Norman Rockwell” America, no longer exists…and that’s by design.
The global socialists have made it absolutely clear that they will have the Great Reset, which is nothing more than global communism. They aren’t even hiding it anymore. They proudly boast that by 2030 we will own nothing and will have no rights except what those in power grant to us.
During the Trump Administration, we had a President that stood up to these tyrants and said, “not on my watch.” Well, little did we all know at the time that they had a plan to get him out of the way. Create a manmade “catastrophe” and use it to steal the 2020 Election so they could install their puppet into the White House in order to bring the United States back in line with their stated goals.
And that’s exactly what they did. We would be fools at this point to ignore them.
There were three particular events that signaled to me, and to anyone paying attention, that D.C. had completely sold us out to the Great Reset.
The first was at a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a conservative think tank, that I attended in D.C. last year. A well-respected, seasoned conservative attorney, who I will not name here, who has argued – and won – dozens of cases before the Supreme Court, stated, “The courts don’t really care about the Constitution says. They are more concerned with following legal precedent so as to not rock the boat.” If the courts, who are duty-bound to uphold the Constitution when Congress or the White House run afoul of it, no longer care to enforce it, we have a huge problem.
The second was similar to this, when the Supreme Court refused to even hear the lawsuit over election fraud that the State of Texas brought against Georgia, even though Article 3 of the Constitution gives SCOTUS original jurisdiction over cases between states. They literally refused to carry out their constitutional duty to hear the case.
The third was more recent, after the GOP swept the Virginia elections for Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General. Back in 1994 after the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, took control of the House and Senate President Clinton wised up and made a strong move to the center, ditching many of his far-left policies. As a result, the last 4 years of the Clinton Administration were relatively tame as compared to what we have now.
You would think that the elections in Virginia would signal to this current administration that they needed to moderate their Marxist ideology and move back to the center if they want to stay in power. Instead, they have doubled down and are moving even further left, shoving through the Green New Deal disguised as an Infrastructure Bill. That tells me that they don’t fear the ’22 midterms either because A) they’ve got those already rigged to win, or B) they know that by then the Great Reset will be fully underway with America in full compliance.
That tells me that we’re out of time. We now have to decide, as conservative states, whether we are going to plunge ourselves and our children into global communism – from which there will be no escape – or if were going to take the action necessary preserve liberty and freedom for as many of the states as want to join us.
There is no other choice. I wish there was…but only a fool would look at everything happening and say, “Oh, things are going to be fine.” The Bible tells us that everyone but Noah’s family was acting exactly like that, all the way up until God shut the door of the Ark and rain started to fall. At that point, it was too late. We cannot wait until then. For our children’s and grandchildren’s sake we have to build our own ark of liberty now.
IL: There are those who say that the notion of secession is “unpatriotic. That we should work to save the Union that we have. How do you address that?
PB: We have to ask what exactly are we loyal to. We have two documents that have enumerated and defended the God-given rights we have enjoyed as Americans: The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence is our charter document. It lays out the unalienable Biblical principles under which we as Americans have agreed to bind ourselves to each other in a civil compact. It also lays out the justifications for seceding from Great Britain, which serves as a guideline for if and when such a measures should be used in the future.
The Constitution is merely our operating agreement…and it’s not even our original one. For the first 10 years we operated under the Articles of Confederation. Then even after the Constitution was drawn up, it had to be amended 10 times in order for the people to ratify it. It has since been amended 17 additional times. Changing the operating agreement is not unheard of. Businesses do it all the time when the parties involved agree that the current operating agreement no longer serves their best interest.
In fact, the Declaration of Independence essentially states this exact same point when it says, “Whenever ANY form of government (including the current administrative bureaucratic one in DC) becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Our Founders were giving us permission to change our form of government, or our operating agreement, when we as a people deemed that it was no longer sufficient to “ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” which is what the current Constitution was supposed to do. In fact, I would argue that our Founders would have expected us to change our operating agreement if it got to the point where our God-given liberties were being trampled upon by a tyrannical central government. I think they would have been shocked that we waited this long to even consider it.
I’ve said many times that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. There is absolutely no reason why we as Oklahomans, or any other state for that matter, have to have our livelihoods destroyed and liberties taken simply because 8 states ran such corrupt elections that it ended up with an illegitimate President who is determined to sell us into global slavery.
IL: What about the legalities of this endeavor? There are legal scholars that say this isn’t possible.
PB: We celebrate secession twice a year, every year. First on the 4th of July, and second on Thanksgiving. This is nothing new. What our Founders did by signing the Declaration of Independence was illegal, according to the King’s laws. The truth is that unjust laws are not laws. Even going back to English Common Law, it has been long held that any laws or actions by kings/rulers/presidents that violate the principles of law upon which a nation is founded lack the force of law, and are therefore void.
If you read the list of offenses in the Declaration of Independence, all of King George’s actions were technically lawful simply because he was King. However, they violated the principles of law upon which all of English law was founded. As such, our Founders were legally and morally justified in breaking the King’s law by seceding and declaring independence.
It is clear that the intention of those in power in Washington D.C. are repugnant to the principles of liberty that serve as our foundation. Just as our Founders believed that, “when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.”
Here’s just a few examples, in addition to the ones I mentioned earlier, of the abuses and usurpations of the Federal Government:
- Commanding General Milley clearly violated his oath to secure and defend the US Constitution committing treason, with no consequences.
- While actual terrorists burned cities across America with no consequence, American citizens lured into the Capital on January 6 have been deprived of their “Constitutionally guaranteed” rights rotting in jail.
- We have witnessed our unalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness be deprived with illegal COVID mandates and a President who is losing patience with his subjects for not receiving an experimental genetic experiment.
- We are seeing the Speaker establish a modern-day Praetorian guard across America opening Offices of the Capitol Police across these United States for some imagined homegrown terrorists while our southern border is being invaded and a true terrorist regime had been established by this government in Afghanistan.
I could go on, but you get the point. The offenses to liberty will only grow and become more atrocious as the Great Reset is implemented.
IL: How do you foresee this happening? Do you think it will inevitably lead to a kinetic event?
PB: This can absolutely be a peaceful event. Look at Brexit. Great Britain issued a “certificate of divorce”, so to speak, to the European Union and left without a single shot fired. We can absolutely do the same. In fact, we are already perfectly positioned to do just that.
Oklahoma has our own legislature, Governor, State Supreme Court and Court system, military, and abundant natural resources…everything that would be required to become a separate entity from the United States. The only thing we would need is our own currency, which would be fairly easy to establish and could be backed by our oil and natural gas resources and issued via blockchain technology so that the money would be owned by the people and not by central banks.
Right now, Oklahoma alone would have the 54th largest economy in the world. We have a GDP of $202B annually. We currently send $30B to Washington D.C. every year in Federal Taxes. Imagine how well we could take care of our own people, to include the elderly, those needing disability payments, disabled veterans, etc. if we simply cut the cord with D.C. and kept the $30B for ourselves. Now imagine if the 28 conservative and conservative-leaning states all did that at the same time. The D.C. power establishment would collapse almost overnight, leaving the remaining 22 states to fend for themselves.
Now, there’s no question that it would be rough initially. The stock market would collapse. There would be a reset. However, the markets would quickly skyrocket under true economic freedom without the EPA, DOE, IRS, CDC, FDA, and the rest of the bureaucratic albatross strangling us to death.
We could then band together with our fellow conservative states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, Kansas, Arkansas, Louisiana, etc. to form a federation of independent states that would compact together to provide for the common defense, interstate commerce, international’s trade, and the like.
The United States as we know it today IS the Titanic. We have hit the iceberg. We ARE going down. The Great Reset won. However, a Phoenix can rise from the ashes.
The question is will we do the comfortable thing, deny the obvious facts, and go back to our staterooms because the deck is too cold, or will we get on the lifeboats of Free Sovereign States (like Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and others) and secure liberty for another generation in those states who want it?
