1941: FDR's Four-Pronged Attack on American Freedom

11 months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt launched an infamous sneak attack, on America.

The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Monday, January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:

- Freedom of speech and expression

- Freedom of worship

- Freedom from want

- Freedom from fear

The list sounds good. But a lot of the things that come out of the mouths of leftist politicians sound good, at first. In reality, Roosevelt’s intention was to gift America with a Pandora’s box of big government evils.

(If you already know all about FDR’s “4 Freedoms” and why they were a poison pill for America, skip ahead to “Why This Is Important”.)

The Gift or Grift?

The “rights” that leftists want to give us are poison pills.

“Freedom from fear”? Has that come to mean a “war on terror” that leftists use as a pretext to take away our freedoms? Government regulators use your “protection” as an excuse to take control of you. They take your freedom away to "protect" your freedom. Just as they take away your privacy, by illegally spying on your personal communications (as Edward Snowden revealed), to "protect" your privacy.

The government and media produce an endless stream of “emergencies” and “crises”. They then claim that government control of us is the only alternative to societal chaos (that’s a lie, as we show in the book Control versus Freedom, free to read on our website).

“Freedom from want”?  This “freedom” foreshadows the leftist UN list of “Human Rights” that we discuss in  “You Have a Right to ______” (Leftists fill in the blank). But the truth is that any government that is powerful enough to give you what you want, is powerful enough to take what you have.

Did FDR’s socialist New Deal programs end “want”? If so, why was LBJ’s socialist War on Poverty needed? Indeed, in spite of all the big-and-ever-bigger government that has happened to America in the last one hundred years to end want, in 2024 Babylon Bee can still joke, “The ruling class seems unconcerned that the poors can't afford food: Let them eat crickets!”

If want has lessened, it is because free enterprise worked. That’s the enterprise system that leftists want to replace with government control.

Isn’t it better for the people of a country to voluntarily cooperate to produce and exchange the things they want and need, than to depend on a promise that the government regulators will give things to them?

“Freedom of worship”? Does that include the leftists forcibly replacing Christianity with a religion of nature worship and leftist wokeism? If leftists love freedom of religion, then why does the leftist media refuse to report the massive, widespread persecution of Christians by communist governments in China, Laos, Vietnam, and North Korea? And persecution and enslavement of Christians by Muslims, as we report on in “Leftist Untruth #18: ‘The Left Opposes Slavery’”? The truth is that leftists want less freedom and less religion. Unless you count wokeism as a religion.

“Freedom of speech and expression”? The U.S. government, in collusion with leftist-controlled social media, have a far-reaching program to censor, deplatform, and otherwise silence and punish the people who speak or protest to oppose the regime. That is of course the opposite of freedom.

Was the Bill of Rights Wrong?

How could that even be possible? But what if the Bill of Rights really was wrong about some things? Let’s have a look.

Here in the 21^st century, the Bill of Rights is more deeply venerated by Americans than the Constitution itself is, and for some good reasons. The intentions of the people who wrote, proposed, and argued for the Bill of Rights were noble and very American. But we all know where good intentions sometimes lead. Let’s look at some not so pleasant realities about the Bill of Rights, things few Americans know or think about.

The Bill of Rights wasn't really American. Not natively. The British had a Bill of Rights about a hundred years before the U.S. Constitutional Convention. That the Brits had a Bill of Rights in the 1600s didn’t entirely prevent the British people from being oppressed and exploited by the king and the government.

The powers of the U.S. government were enumerated and limited in the Constitution, and the rest of the rights were supposed to belong to the states and the people. And that principle of limited U.S. government powers was reiterated in the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which stressed that the powers not specifically delegated to the United States government would, by default, always be retained by the states or the individual citizens – NOT the federal government. However, the Bill of Rights itself created a problem with that.

The Bill of Rights gave some rights to groups of people. The groups were neither individuals nor states. The groups given special rights in the First Amendment were the press and the people who worshipped one religion or another. By giving rights to groups, the Bill of Rights opened the door to giving rights to factions. And to giving special “Civil Rights” to various groups. And that, of course, led to many of the disastrous problems that America faces now. In the 21^st century, the number of groups who demand and get special rights from the government is growing exponentially. The creation of those “rights” is used by leftists to gain power by promising ever more rights, and it threatens to rip America apart.

Even before the Civil Rights of the 1950s and ‘60s, the U.S, government had, following the lead of communists in other countries, given special rights to the people in labor unions. Such as the right to “strike”. I.e. a right for people in the union to not be fired even if they refused to work. The labor unions turned into the illegitimate offspring of leftism and organized crime. Marxism and the Mafia, whose public face was that of the mobbed up gangster and union president Jimmy Hoffa. (Trivia question: Where is he buried?)

The founders had feared the growth and power of “factions”. And the Bill of Rights opened the door of government by a crack, to disastrous results.

The Bill of Rights was intended to give us protection from federal government oppression, but it seems that in the long run it failed. In the Covid crackdown and lockdown, the government rulers — from the elected President and Congress to the unelected administrative CDC bureaucrats, to city mayors and state governors and police — proved that they can run roughshod all over citizens’ "rights" whenever the government wants, and nothing can be done to stop the government regulators or hold them accountable.

In 2024, is the Bill of Rights just meaningless words? It seems that, with very few exceptions, when push comes to shove, the government regulators can push and shove you all they want to, and nothing will stop them and no one will punish them.

Perhaps, in the end, the government can’t give you freedom, or rights. Government regulators can’t produce freedom, they can only take it away. Government doesn’t produce rights for the people any more than they produce goods for the economy. The truth is that government regulators consume goods and produce government. That’s all they do. The only power that the government regulators really have is the power to constrain you. To force you to do things and to prevent you from doing things.

  Conclusion: Why This is Important!

The "four freedoms" of neoliberalism — freedom of movement for people, goods, services, and capital — should be replaced by the "four regulations".

Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy (2020)

The word ‘neoliberalism’, as used in the quotation, means classical liberalism. I.e. Small government and free enterprise (which is what ‘liberalism’ meant before FDR and the other leftists reversed the meaning in 1946, as we discuss elsewhere). So, by 2020, leftists were openly and publicly saying that our freedoms should be replaced by government regulations. And they are doing it. And it’s only going to get worse. The leftists won’t stop; they will have to be stopped.

Where Does This Fit In?

The story of how FDR’s “Four Freedoms” were an assault on the freedom of Americans is one part of a larger work, “Anti-Leftism”.

You can see the entire in-progress outline of Anti-Leftism at RightfulFreedom.com, if you’re interested. (Be warned, we may ask you to participate in Rightful Freedom.)

And at the end of Anti-Leftism, we have a proposal for what we, the right, might do to defeat the Leftists and take back our freedoms and our country. The Freedom Proposal.