Who's That Candidate News and Opinion

A Declaration of Liberty for the 21st Century

Patrick Peterson, PhD — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 12:33:57 +0000

(NOTE to Readers: This article was first published August 17, 2024, before the 2024 election. Although President Trump’s victory was a step in the right direction, many obstacles to liberty still exist in the United States; there is enormous fraud, widespread misinterpretation of the US Constitution, and many in Washington DC playing power politics behind the scenes to maintain their elicit fiefdoms. Stay vigilant!).

A Declaration of Liberty for the 21st Century
By Patrick Peterson, Ph.D.

“When in the course of human events…” – Thomas Jefferson, 1776

When governing institutions assume excessive powers and authorities, usurping the natural rights of humanity, it becomes necessary to declare their illegal and immoral violations, and to begin the necessary steps either to reform or dissolve such institutions, to align with fundamental principles of human rights as endowed by our Creator.

We affirm the following truths of our social arrangement: that all men and women are created with inherently equal and maximal rights; that the sole purpose of any governing institution is to uphold and defend these rights; and that government, even if ostensibly managed by democratically elected representatives of the people, has no inherent powers or rights, and the sole moral and legal authority for governance is derived only through the informed consent of the governed, the contractual validity of which depends entirely on the extent to which government promotes and defends the essential liberties of humanity.

Democracy by itself is not (and cannot be) the proof of a just society. Without the constraints of Law, majorities will trample minorities; or worse, a tiny influential elite will manipulate the system to empower government at the expense of everyone’s rights. Federal and state constitutions exist solely for the purpose of defining and limiting the power of government, so that maximal and equal human rights can be maintained without the growth and encroachment of government. Yet despite this clear framework, codified explicitly in the Bill of Rights and especially in the 9th and 10th Amendments, the US Constitution has repeatedly been misinterpreted as allowing for an outrageously expansive central government that intrudes upon and regulates almost every facet of individual life experience, including the food we may produce and eat, the goods we are allowed to exchange, what devices we may operate, etc. ad nauseum down to the level of monitoring, recording, and essentially spying on our every action, utterance, and transaction.

We believe and assert that human beings are inherently gifted with powers of self-direction, creativity, self-management, and the social abilities to form voluntarily all necessary and desired friendships and contractual alliances to meet our needs and to promote our creativity, ingenuity, and industry. All men and women have a right to ownership of the fruits of our alliances, labor, and industry, without excessive and burdensome regulation and taxation. No governing institution has either the right or the responsibility to attempt to define or provide for the nourishment or happiness of humanity, much less regulate human behavior for elaborate schemes of elite minorities. When government exceeds its limited role, as to engage in vast expenditures and grandiose social engineering, we must loudly oppose such tyrannical schemes as fundamentally abusive of human rights (and illegal per the 9th and 10th Amendments): It is a federal government far exceeding its precisely limited roles as dictated by our Constitution.

It must be understood that human rights are inherently as expansive, comprehensive, and maximal as conceptually possible, limited only by the requirement that rights must be equally shared; and as such the only upper limit on human rights is that no one shall infringe upon, or diminish the rights of another. Government has no just purpose other than to secure and defend this social order of maximal and equal rights.

Misinformation about human rights has unfortunately been common during the past century. Sometimes our beliefs about human needs and desires are confused with rights. There can be no right to goods and services that place demands and burdens on another (which would necessarily reduce another’s rights and thus violate the principle that rights are equal and maximal). And so for example, there is no “right” to health care, education, paid work, or a minimal income. Any attempts by government to provide such goods or services are de facto a violation of human rights, as government has no actual wealth or productivity that isn’t confiscated from someone; and as such government cannot provide goods and services without essentially forcing people involuntarily to provide such goods and services.

Thomas Paine once wrote that “government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.” This wasn’t merely an expression of frustration with the British government of his day; he was expressing a fundamental truth of humanity. Government is necessary solely because of the flaws of human kind, the tendencies of any individual to try to gain some advantage over others, to have in effect “more rights than you.” Government can thus serve as an arbiter and manager of the framework to ensure rights are respected. But over time the very existence of any form of government can grow cancerous. The privilege of governing can breed a sense that the people would be better managed if only the government had more and more power, influence, surveillance, etc. Ambitious individuals imagine government can and should fund vast schemes of public works; yet such ambitions intrinsically burden the shoulders of a society who never consent to any such schemes. Meanwhile, citizens in pursuit of their own personal spheres of happiness can easily ignore and miss the growing encroachment of government well beyond its intended boundaries.

Human beings are disposed to patterns of habit, and we tend to give established institutions the benefit of the doubt as to the legitimacy of their practices. Most people are enormously generous and willing to assist their fellow citizens a great deal, such that a coerced generosity may for a time go almost unnoticed or at least tolerated in the interest of just “getting on with life.” We admire Americans’ ability to bear remarkable involuntary burdens. Slights and infringements upon our liberties may be sustained for a considerable time, perhaps generations, before we eventually pay attention to public affairs sufficiently to begin recognizing despotism in any one of its many forms. Such focus on our personal affairs should never be mistaken for informed consent to tyranny.

Eventually all people reach their limits of tolerance, when the proclamations and behaviors of public institutions have sufficiently metastasized to unrecognizable and grotesque forms, indicating a vast pattern of abuses and violations so prevalent and regular that we can no longer ignore or delay a rigorous response. The American people have been very patient with our governing classes, but our patience is rapidly shrinking toward a gaunt and skeletal minimum. As with Great Britain in 1776, we suffer today “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations” inflicted by federal and state governments, often in unhealthy alliance with globalist corporations or other dubious non-governmental organizations.

Our supposedly elected representatives behave as though bribed or blackmailed by interests inconsistent with American history and principles, even against human nature itself. Our so-called leaders have reached a moral nadir, where “public service” is merely a euphemism for amassing wealth from shady sources and endeavors. It is remarkable that so many elected officials manage enormous growth of their personal wealth while earning only modest salaries in office. More important are the vast sums of wealth the government funnels to special interest projects in the name of public interest or national security, efforts and expenditures that not only fail to promote and defend liberty but directly oppose it. The corruption of government is an almost universally recognized truth, but the entire structures and systems of government seem deliberately designed to obscure any precise identification of crimes: The exact who/what/when/where of criminality remains obscure despite the public’s clear awareness that overall it is a cauldron of criminality.

Worse than the criminality itself is the implication that government is not actually controlled by or even much influenced by the elected officials. In the distant past, it might have been considered a wild surmise to think that the “ship of state” was largely directed by shadowy figures acting in secrecy; today this hypothesis is widely considered plausible and perhaps even probable. Needless to say, we cannot successfully limit government to its proper and legal role when we don’t even know who or what the government is and what it is actually doing in its entirety.

The veil of secrecy that cloaks much of the who/what/when/where of government activity represents its greatest threat to human rights, also imposing the question of whether the Republic can still be considered a Republic. In the 20th century we made the grotesque error of creating and empowering a police state, by creating the FBI and CIA and enabling them to function largely in secret and with minimal to no oversight. Other federal agencies have expanded to include their own policing powers and veils of secrecy. The emerging miasma of “federal government as police state” now deploys in the 21st century the worst elements of 21st century technology: mass surveillance and data collection, electronic media for spreading propaganda and disinformation, and artificial intelligence employed in the service of such surveillance and disinformation. Political harassment, imprisonment, assassination, and even the overthrow of elected government constitute staple skills of our national (now international) police state. The transformation of federal government into police state has turned the more “ordinary” government violations against the maximality and equality of human rights into full-blown crimes against humanity.

Against this backdrop of a globally ambitious police state, the various American state governments have sadly tended toward their own versions of megalomania, eager to claim “me too” authority for social manipulation. Governors were quick to grab “emergency powers” during the much over-hyped medical scare known as “Covid-19.” They declared that fundamental human rights to gather for politics, worship, education, or commerce were illegal, even directing police to shut down churches, businesses, and playgrounds. Citizens were required to follow health edicts of dubious evidence or merit: schools were closed, facial masks and vaccines were mandated, medical therapies were banned or discouraged, hospitals locked patients up and refused to allow visitors, medical doctors who took personal initiative to find solutions were threatened, and many businesses went belly-up from the alleged “crisis.” In summation, this whole episode constituted the largest-scale program of human rights abuses in the history of the United States. While not all of the debacle was perpetrated by government, all of it stemmed from a massive and illegal abuse of power, largely by state governors and often with the full compliance of sycophantic state legislatures. We are still recovering from the ensuing carnage – the destruction of small businesses, the mental illness of children, the physical side effects of dubious mainstream medical advice, and the untold damage to our civil life as a Republic of free men and women.

Government has for a long time largely taken over the “education” of our children, and in doing so more recently promotes the agenda of a willful minority espousing unwanted ideologies, coaxing our children to believe not in God or even themselves, but rather to pursue the needs and wishes of government and the collective. When children in government-directed schools are no longer instructed about the history and civics of America but instead the ideology of Marxism; or that the color of our skin is more important than the content of our character; or that our biological reality must be subordinate to the fantasies of transhumanists; or that the imagery and prayers of faith are somehow offensive or even hateful: then it is past time to abandon such “education” as propaganda, disinformation, and indoctrination. Government control over childhood development is a recipe for totalitarian dystopia, and we are unfortunately well along this path of destruction.

Government taxes the American population punitively and unfairly, in a system of laws and regulations so convoluted that an enormous private industry exists solely to interpret and advise citizens and businesses as to how to comply. Worse is the complexity and obfuscation by which governments account for their seizure, and the indifference by which they freely spend and frequently waste the resources. At the federal level, the spigot of dollars to fund the endless appetite of Leviathan can never be turned off; it is an unending flow from the masters of the Federal Reserve, requiring an army of individuals permanently collecting data and reassessing schemes for defining how much money actually exists, how much prices have risen, how much less purchasing power each dollar allows, and how the entire monetary tower of Babel can be maintained and forever expanded. Lost in all of that is any hint of respect for the individual American citizen, who ultimately pays for every whim and indulgence of this monstrous (and mostly unconstitutional) enterprise masquerading as the US federal government.

As free citizens of the United States of America, I urge my fellow Americans to stand with me and with all of us who respect the principles of human rights for which our nation was founded. Although much has been lost, our Constitution when correctly understood still codifies a Republic based on the principle of maximal and equal rights, as I have described in this Declaration. What is needed is for men and women to actually follow the Law, and therefore to begin to take steps to dismantle all the illegal structures and practices of our federal and state governments that are inconsistent with the principle of maximal and equal rights, and therefore reform and re-establish our Republic for a better future, a future that recognizes and respects equal and maximal liberty and justice for all.

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The New Culture War

Patrick Peterson, PhD — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 16:46:41 +0000

The New Culture War

©️Patrick Peterson, Ph.D.

Dec 28, 2024

The historian Yuval Noah Harari has written a thought-provoking book called “Sapiens” which makes certain assumptions about the early history of humanity as a biological species. The central defining feature of our species Sapiens, says Harari, is that we are not only capable of inventing and believing fiction, but that the entire life and history of Sapiens is based on fiction.

Now Harari himself used the word fiction, so that’s not my read. That’s how he describes the human animal. Others might have followed a similar train of thought and used the word “imagination,” but Yuval specifically emphasizes fiction.

Harari’s larger point is that during the several tens of thousands of years that humanity has been fruitful and multiplying, our life, culture, and history revolve entirely around our ability to believe falsehoods, and to be even quite passionate and committed to falsehoods. But this remarkable characteristic somehow abruptly changes when Sapiens discovers science and technology, and therefore becomes capable of transitioning into Sapiens 2.0, or what Harari honors with the name “Homo Deus” as the title of Harari’s follow-up book. The phrase “Homo Deus” translates from Latin into English as something close to “Man God,” or “Human God.”

There are numerous holes in Harari’s imaginative history, but one does get the feeling that if all human belief is fiction, then why not just invent a clever narrative story around that? It’s all fiction anyway, so Yuval’s own fiction must be as good as the next person’s faith-fantasy. But Harari wants to assert that science and technology represent real truth, despite his foundational belief that every little old Sapiens is trapped in a pure fantasy world of fictional beliefs. He side-steps all of this, as the ultimate goal of Harari’s particular fantasy-truth is to envision the next step for humanity, the “Man God,” as thoroughly distinct from Sapiens. And so for Yuval there is no logical contradiction to say that Sapiens the species relies solely on fiction while the new Man God relies only on the truth of science and technology.

This might have remained a quirky infotainment side topic to mull over with your morning coffee. But Harari’s views just happened to fit in nicely with a number of political trends that have swept over us in recent years. Yuval became the favorite in-house guru for the World Economic Forum, the trendy club for billionaires, megalomaniacs, and cognitively deficient yet ambitious politicians. Sapiens (the book) is of course thoroughly atheist, in total acceptance of biology as a form of physics without a Creator. It’s amazing how atheists (at least the megalomaniacal atheists) are inevitably drawn though to grandiose dreams about a future trans-human Homo Deus. No matter how much they reject belief in God, they inevitably pursue re-creating God in some other way. Traces of Homo Deus fantasies can be found in much of our recent history, including the covid-19 episode, the ensuing government abuses of power, the dubious vaccines, and above all the endless gaslighting from government and mainstream media. When everything is fiction anyway, why can’t the President of the United States be a senile puppet? Why not even install the puppet President with a fraudulent election? While we are at it, let’s label certain kinds of vandalism and looting an expression of justice. Choose your pronouns, and above all become “unburdened by what has been” (Kamala Harris campaign slogan). Reality is after all whatever the Man God declares reality to be. Or so the new illogic appears to go, driven by this strange new culture war to convince us that fact is fiction and the preferred fiction a new kind of truth.

Whether intentional or not, Harari’s narrative defines this new culture war. It is not about conservatives versus liberals, and not even strictly theism versus atheism. This new culture war pits tradition versus trans-humanism. Reality and objective history go head-to-head against a rewriting of history, or at least a reinterpretation of it. In public discourse, it’s discovering the truth versus inventing the truth. While Donald Trump’s election in November 2024 represents a battle won by the realists, the war is far from over. Democrats and RINOs will no doubt reinvent themselves (what else?) in further homage to Homo Deus.

Perhaps surprisingly, there are parallel themes of this culture war found in theological history. The medieval theologian Scotus held that morality comes from God’s will and that everything in reality is in a sense the arbitrary choice of God, whether intelligible to us or not. Scotus thought of God as essentially will and power. While the followers of Homo Deus are not strictly theists, they parallel this thought in accepting the concept that will and choice define what is true. A contrasting theological view comes from Thomas Aquinas, who emphasized the Logos, or “Word of God” as a logical organizing principle of God’s being. Ironically for Harari, it is Aquinas’ view of God as intelligible, adopted by the Roman Catholic Church, that led to the rise and development of scientific thought in Europe. In this European Catholic tradition there is no contradiction between belief in God and the effort to better understand nature and reality through science. God is intelligible and his creation is intelligible.

I write these words just days before we enter the year 2025. It is remarkable that humanity is still in the throes of these ancient debates, over what is real and what is fictitious, and over just how far can or should humanity go in the pursuit of god-like powers and roles. But whatever the true nature of reality, I am confident we cannot just arbitrarily choose whatever reality we fantasize. Some things will remain impossible; some things will remain as bad choices, even if possible; and some truths will be worth fighting for and upholding, whatever opposition they face.

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Yes, it’s about the kids

Who's That Candidate — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:39:19 +0000

Replay of the videos from the event on October 28, 2023 in Mt Sterling.

First session, Jon Schrock.

Second session, Dr Pesta part one.

Third session, Dr Pesta part two.

Final session, Brother Greg and Q&A session.

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Voices for Liberty video

Who's That Candidate — Tue, 30 May 2023 00:57:23 +0000

Here is a replay of the event Voices for Liberty that was held Saturday, May 27, 2023, in Lexington, Kentucky. Direct link: https://rumble.com/v2qmsw4-voices-for-liberty-replay.html

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KET Provides Soviet-Style “Propaganda Night” for Incumbent Secretary of State Michael Adams

Patrick Peterson, PhD — Tue, 09 May 2023 04:46:34 +0000

On Monday, May 8, 2023, just 8 days from the primary election, Kentucky’s public television network KET put on a Soviet-style primetime softball interview of the incumbent Secretary of State Michael Adams. Most likely at Adams’ request, no debate invitation was offered to the other candidates running against Adams in the Republican primary. KET thus effectively functioned for the night as part of Adams’ re-election team, providing a free platform for Adams and creating the illusion that Adams actually has no credible opposition. Why is KET bending over backwards to support Adams’ re-election? We can only speculate, but the behavior of KET conjures echoes of old Soviet-era state-run media helping to run sham elections for apparatchiks in the old USSR. Curiously Adams fits the part rather well – a mostly unlikeable bureaucrat who has made no other effort to actually campaign or reach out to Kentucky voters at all. And like the old Soviet politburo, Adams seems smugly confident of his re-election, perhaps because it’s already rigged in his favor? We can only speculate, but if KET is comfortable playing the role of a state-run propaganda tool, we wonder just how far down the Soviet-style path Kentucky’s government and media have already traveled.

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Re-establishing Liberty and Integrity in Kentucky

Patrick Peterson, PhD — Wed, 03 May 2023 20:39:20 +0000

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” – Benjamin Franklin

As we start a new month here in Kentucky, with an eye toward the 2023 statewide primary elections May 16, we are reminded that the major party bosses do not prioritize the most natural and humane concerns of our era, that of the need for re-establishing a covenant of liberty, honesty, and integrity between God, government, and society. As outlined in my earlier articles, our nation is mired in a cesspool of public dishonesty, whereby gaslighting is government’s primary tool, and corporate-government “partnerships” replace the free market with fascist attempts to manipulate your every thought, want, and need. Nowhere was the new fascism better illustrated than with the April 24 “cancellation” of Tucker Carlson from Fox News. It doesn’t matter that Carlson’s dismissal was an incredibly bad business decision, or that the move showed enormous contempt of their customer base. No, what matters is maintaining the corporate uni-media in lockstep with the Federal uni-party government, continuing to censor the important topics or our era and to suppress what is most natural and humane in America.

As Carlson stated April 26, “the undeniably big topics – the ones that will define our future – get virtually no (public) discussion at all: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, natural resources.” He added further that “both political parties and their donors have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation…” That is, they collude to shut down public discussion about what is natural, humane, and important to you.

The Who’s That Candidate project aims to offer an alternative course that rejects the fascism, tribalism, and transhumanism promoted by the new fascism of the Democrats and RINOs. The course we advocate aims to re-establish liberty and integrity as the defining relationship between government and society. Our policy pillars outline how integrity must be the foundation for governance, how a sensible and empowering approach to education is necessary, and how a more fair and limited set of tax laws must reign in governmental power. Together, the pillars can guide us on getting government permanently out of the business of corrupt partnerships with big corporations, stopping the outsourcing of our elections, and introducing real transparency and accountability to Kentucky government. Securing a broadly interpreted set of individual rights must always be the first and only priority of government, and our pillars provide a roadmap for how to do exactly that under both the US and Kentucky Constitutions.

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March 11th Who’s That Candidate presentation

Who's That Candidate — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:58:19 +0000

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A Discussion of Election Integrity Issues, with Steve Knipper.

Who's That Candidate — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 11:37:00 +0000

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Interview with Clyde Zoph

Who's That Candidate — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 17:11:26 +0000

A one-on-one with Clyde Zoph, founder and chairman of Who’s That Candidate. Alternate video link https://rumble.com/v2cjsg8-interview-with-clyde-zoph.html

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Don’t feed the RINOs

Who's That Candidate — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 23:52:27 +0000

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