Wielding Thor's Hammer

President Trump is mightily swinging Mjolnir in an effort to reclaim private liberty - for us all.

DEI was never about diversity, equity, or inclusion - but you knew that.

It is a good illustration that just because we live in a free society, it does not mean pockets of communism and authoritarianism do not exist. If you look closely, you will likely notice some pockets around us in private and public organizations and one thing I have noticed about communism is how it tends to exist under the radar inside a free society.

I seriously doubt anything more than 1-2% of the inside of any "communist" movement are true believers. Intellects like Gustave Le Bon from the 1800’s and Dietrich Bonhoeffer from the 1900’s, noted that there are always grifters who graft themselves to any "movement" that might yield profit, status, protection, or power (or all four) for them. The shore dwellers dive in and catch a ride on the current to get to their destination and when that river runs dry, they hike to the next one and jump back in.

I’ve been reading a lot about our early colonial history and have decided that there is much to learn from the first wave of settlers. We generally tend to think of these people on the Mayflower around Thanksgiving time in November and then not at all until the next year, but there are so many parallels between their means of governance in the 1600’s and ours today in 2025.

I think the first Puritans in America were perhaps the first religious communitarians.

Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the role of community in shaping individual identity and values, prioritizing collective responsibilities and shared goals over excessive individualism. It advocates for a balance between personal rights and the common good, promoting policies that strengthen social bonds and civic engagement).

When Obama was called a socialist, many of his acolytes in the media defended him by claiming he was just a communitarian.

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, one assumes – because the only differences are the scale and the degree of commitment to the ideology. They both end up in the same place.

The first Puritan settlers believed in liberty, but they also leaned heavily into authoritarian control based on the religious beliefs they brought over with them from their strict Calvinist (not the one with Hobbes) homes in East Anglia. To them, the concept of “liberty” meant public liberty - liberty for the community - rather than private liberty – liberty for the individual. That way, when needed or desired, the individual could be punished to preserve liberty for the community.

Authoritarianism thrives inside some organizations – even in free republican democracy and especially in a government bureaucracy. That is made possible because such bureaucracies function the same way in a communist and a capitalist socioeconomic system – the only differences are the severity of punishment for failing to follow procedures, orders and dictates. It is a fact that we will put up with affronts and poor service from the IRS or the DMV or accept the decisions of the EPA with far less resistance than we would a contractor, a grocery store or just about any private institution.

Given the quasi-protected nature of a bureaucracy, in a free, capitalist culture these pockets of authoritarian communist cliques often adopt the old Puritan idea of liberty – mostly because they know that is about as far as they will be allowed to push it before the hammer comes down.

Jefferson and Madison, 150 years or so after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, began designing a government that balanced public and private liberty based on the concept that in a learned, religious, and civil society when private liberty was maximized, public liberty would follow – but they, especially Madison, also warned us in the Federalist Papers (#10 and #51) that since men were no angels, proper precautions were needed to prevent government from encroaching on both public and private liberty. Jefferson continued his warnings about the “forehorse of public debt” and how misuse of government (as in DEI and other “programs” that are really ideologies) would begin the war of all against all.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that President Trump’s first six months of his second term has seen so much success and yet has garnered so little fanfare and drawn criticism from some in his party for not moving faster or doing things the way they want. The fact is that he is now wielding the equivalent of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, a battle with an entrenched puritanical communitarian bureaucracy which is fighting back with malicious compliance and lawsuits.

We should pray that Trump continues to be worthy to wield Mjolnir because that is the only way we begin to maximize our private liberty again.