When you join us tomorrow at 11 a.m. in Concord at the State House to protest the governor’s no-longer State of Emergency at his inauguration, which is happening inside the State House around noon, we want you to know how important it is to continue to use the effective political channels that our Founders set up for us to fight back against the governor’s usurpation of power.
We want to thank Andrew J. Manuse for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
you want us to consider, please submit it to skip@ or steve@granitegrok.com.
Please join us tomorrow in Concord!
I’m writing today with a significant interest in reuniting our movement and our purpose, which is to restore our Republic and liberty. I’m also writing to state a few thoughts for all of you to consider as we continue to work toward that goal.
Many of you reading this believe we have been too aggressive with our public stance for liberty amid a presumed health crisis, while another significant number of you don’t believe we’ve been aggressive enough and have therefore diverged off into other efforts to pave your own way.
Thankfully, there are some of you who believe we’ve gotten it right, and you have no idea how much I appreciate you! As always, I applaud individuals standing up and working within the civil processes we have established to advance what they believe in, and I support anyone who wants to do that differently than we do, within reason.
As chairman, I want to explain that the methods we’ve chosen to follow and the methods we have publicly opposed are directly related to our attempt to work within this process, by holding protest rallies at the proper venues, by holding educational forums with facts about the current crisis that everyone needs to consider, by publishing opinion editorials and sending out press releases with our rationale, by giving you a place to publicly tell your story about how the governor’s orders are impacting you, and by organizing elected candidates to pass legislation that prevents future abuses of power like we’re now seeing from our governor.
Through these efforts, we hope that the Rule of Law is restored, which necessarily removes government from the interworking of our day-to-day lives and businesses. This liberty protects the minority and gives us the best chance of rebuilding our economy and our community on our own.
As a Christian man and leader of this organization, I have done my best to strike the right balance between loving my enemy and speaking the truth to power in a way that will positively impact the outcome toward the rule of law and liberty.
Jesus himself called Herod (the king of his region) a “fox,” which was an accurate term with significant derogatory meaning to the culture of his day, and one that could be applied to Gov. Sununu as well, who is crushing businesses, lives, and livelihoods by persisting in the lawlessness of one-man rule.
No man (or woman) has all the answers, which is why our State was set up with a Legislature of elected policymakers to decide—along with you in an in-person, public process—how to best manage our government’s response to crises. The problem is that through deception and fear and typical political party allegiances, this governor has taken the power from the Legislature we elected to set policy.
He has confounded the Media and many of the people of this state. We are not reaching the public with the gravity of our situation because of it. This—I know—is the most frustrating aspect of our fight. But we have to keep fighting until there is no breath left in us—until our dying day.
As long as 10 months of our suffering under autocratic rule may seem to all of us in our fast-paced, fast-food culture, it is still nowhere near as long as our Founders endured as they attempted to redress grievances with the King of England and restore liberty in the colonies, long before any war broke out. (And let me be clear: We do not want violence! It’s not good for anyone involved and would devastate any chance of liberty that we have.)
Our current fight has gone on nowhere near as long as our predecessors peacefully fought back against the globalists who made their last attempt against our liberty 100 years ago. This isn’t easy. It requires us to be steadfast.
And it requires faith; yes, in God, who is our true King and who is now calling us as a nation to repent. We’re fighting against the weapons of deception and fear that Gov. Sununu and his globalist allies have used against us to sway even some of the most liberty-minded among us into a panic-like state, and a panicked public is very easy to manipulate and control.
There are many months, if not years, of peaceful efforts that we must undergo to attempt to fix this, and it starts with you lovingly explaining the truth you know about this virus and about the governor’s overreach to all of our elected officials as well as our family, friends, and neighbors, repeatedly, over and over again, ad nauseam, without ceasing, steadfastly, for as long as it takes to get them to wake up.
We plan to do more work in this area, but please don’t forget to listen to and share our seminar from late November, which includes a lot of the truth that has been hidden, for the most part, from the public. You may also consider reading the Federalist Papers and other philosophical sources, which explain to a large degree why we have a separation of powers and not a king who decides what the law is, enforces it and adjudicates it.
Our governor and our Legislature have forgotten about this truth also, so please remind them. We intend to continue to push back, to continue to educate, and to continue to gather together for protest, but also for worship and prayer, until we restore our freedom or we die trying.
At the same time, I think it’s important for me to explain why we are so opposed to efforts that are MORE aggressive than what we’ve done, because in large part these efforts have been counterproductive and are now hurting our cause.
While I have personally attempted to stop protests at the governor’s house more than a dozen times, and I have issued a public statement opposing these protests when it became clear I could no longer stop people from doing it, I am now writing to explain to this list of supporters directly that I oppose this tactic and I believe it is counterproductive.
And in so writing, I am personally asking the people responsible and the people participating to STOP PROTESTING AT THE GOVERNOR’S HOUSE.
Whether it is your intention or not, you are creating sympathy for the governor and his family, which is undermining our ability to bring the truth to the population at large and systematically oppose the governor’s unlawful positions and unscientific basis for having them. The governor has an office at the State House, and the State House is the place to protest his official actions as governor. The governor’s home is a private residence in a private neighborhood. When you protest there, you are aggressing against his wife, children and neighbors and their children, who have absolutely nothing to do with the governor’s actions.
The public does not look kindly on this and largely agree with me that these actions are wrong.
Because of these actions, you have muddied the waters of everything we are trying to accomplish and have turned people against listening to our point of view. If you stop now, there is a chance that we can rebuild the public trust as a movement and devote our energy to changing hearts and minds, which is the only way we will win.
Tomorrow, we will protest the governor in the proper venue, and we persist in asking you to bring pots and pans to make noise, megaphones so the governor can hear you, and protest signs so everyone in attendance can see why you’re there.
We feel that a nonviolent protest at the State House is the best way to rally opposition toward the governor’s policies and influence the government. Even this proper venue has its risks. The governor has unlawfully threatened us from the very beginning with arrest and prosecution for violating his emergency orders and gathering to protest, and he even ordered State House officials to post warnings on the grounds of the State House.
Today, the government is threatening to use unrelated statutes to prosecute protesters who are just exercising their constitutional rights to assemble and seek a redress of grievances through protected speech. Peaceful, civil disobedience in protest and day-to-day actions ignoring the governor’s unlawful orders are the best methods that we have to push back against arbitrary and unjust government force.
We do not do so without risk, but it is at our risk that we advance the cause of liberty, as it has always been. As Thomas Jefferson reminded us during the early days of his success, “When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” Today we also live within a tyranny of fear that the government has used to bolster its own power. We stand up against this, and united in truth and love, we can make a difference to revive the liberty we once had as well as our due deference to Almighty God.
Sincerely,
Andrew J. Manuse
Chairman, RebuildNH / ReopenNH
Please be at the State House tomorrow at 11 a.m. to express your opposition to the governor’s policies using the appropriate public forum.
