They’re Coming for Your Birthright: Citizenship as Spectacle, Transaction, or Privilege
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear… If the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”—President Harry S. Truman (August 8, 1950)
Let us be very clear.
The Constitution is not a suggestion or a negotiating tactic. It is not optional.
Government officials do not get to pick and choose which laws they will obey.
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land: a binding contract between “we the people” of the United States and those we hire to govern. It spells out our expectations for transparency and accountability, limits the government’s authority, affirms the purpose of government as protecter of liberty and property, and reinforces that we are the masters and government agents are the servants.
Thus, any decision by a government official to suspend the rights enshrined in the Constitution should not be undertaken lightly or for political gain or expedience, nor can it be done without following the strict parameters laid out by its creators and the courts.
Bottom line: any attempt to unilaterally override any aspect of the Constitution should alarm every American, regardless of party affiliation.
Which brings us to the Trump Administration’s ongoing attempts to weaponize concerns about national security in order to wage war on the rights enshrined in the Constitution.
We have been inundated with executive orders issued by President Trump purporting to protect national security interests by gutting free speech, eroding equal rights protections, sidestepping the separation of powers, and pushing us ever closer to martial law and outright dictatorship.
Behind the façade of national security lies a more insidious threat: a permanent shadow government—the Deep State—using every “emergency” to tighten its grip and expand unchecked executive authority.
Trump’s most effective ploy to seize power has been his use of illegal immigration to stoke fear and chill dissent. He has used it as a justification to do away with due process, expand the police state, deepen military involvement in domestic policing, and intimidate the nation into compliance.
Even his bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is just another Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.
This is not about protecting America—it’s about redefining America from the top down.
That redefinition is already underway.
The Trump Administration has floated plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and is considering a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship.”
These proposals are not just absurd—they’re obscene. They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.
This governing by-way-of performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. And it’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.
It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.
We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.
It’s a contradiction: although the Trump Administration is so concerned about falling birth rates that it is prepared to offer financial incentives for childbirth (for example, a $5,000 “baby bonus” and expanded child tax credit), it continues to demonize birthright citizenship for the one population segment that is actually having babi
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
