By Kary Love
Patrick Henry was the American Spartacus, his “give me liberty or give me death speech,” rejecting perpetual slavery under his own government, the English Empire, ignited resistance in the hearts and minds of Americans. Henry later turned down the offer to be a representative writing the Constitution of the United States saying, “I smell a rat.”
When the Constitution emerged, Henry threatened to organize a new revolution unless a Bill of Rights, securing the peoples’ rights against their own government’s possible tyranny was adopted. Henry rightfully suspected that the Constitution, written by a secret cabal in Philadelphia, was a reactionary move by the 1% of the time seeking to defeat the incredible advance of “equal justice for all” that the Revolution had made against abusive government in all history, including by the English Empire of Geo III in America, igniting the Revolution.
Patrick Henry knew that laws were like “spider’s webs [which] could catch…the weak and the poor, but easily be broken by the mighty and rich.” The American Constitution would be no exception.
Because America was highly divided after the tumult of the Whiskey Rebellion, Pat Henry was asked by his friend George Washington to join the federal government and offered Henry a seat in the US Senate. Although only two members of the Whiskey Boys had been convicted, and Washington pardoned them both, even Washington had become the target of mass citizen protest against Washington for suppressing the very type of citizen protest Washington had led before the Revolutionary War.
Washington had ordered 13,000 state militia drafted into federal service to march against the Whiskey Rebels, who had risen against disproportionately heavy taxes on farmers west of the Appalachians. It was Patrick Henry’s nightmare come true.
As Henry had predicted at the Virginia State Convention considering adoption of the Constitution over Henry’s objections, the Constitution had replaced they tyranny of the British King with the tyranny of the President. As the federalized troops approached Pittsburgh the rebels vanished. The federalized troops captured 20 but the rest had disappeared home or into the forest.
Patrick Henry had warned that granting too much power “over the sword and the purse” to the federal government endangered the people at the hands over their own military. Because he was becoming infirm as his years advanced, Henry declined to run for office even as Washington and Adam’s “Federalist Party” lost public support in large part due to their support for enlarged federal government power including suppression of free speech rights and actions against immigrants in their “Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.”
The people rejected the authoritarian laws and actions of the Federalist Party. Popular demand that Patrick Henry be president to curb these excesses was so great that in the election following Washington stepping down after two terms, and despite Henry’s statements he would neither run nor serve, Henry finished fourth in the presidential election where Adams was elected President, Thomas Jefferson vice president. Adams continued the authoritarian ways and in the next election Jefferson won and the Federalist Party disappeared into the dust bin, its authoritarian efforts rejected by a free people.
Since that time, the power of the federal government, as Henry predicted, has metastasized with almost every president, Congress and Supreme Court fulfilling Henry’s prophesy by usurping powers not delegated to it by the Constitution. Today we see the rise of the 16th largest Army in the world, ICE with its $45 Billion budget being raised and deployed inside the United States.
We now see a standing army in times of peace, deployed domestically, not against any foreign enemy or threat, but to be used inside America, subject to no orders but those of a President unconstrained by and above the law according to the Supreme Court. Given the recent Presidential immunity ruling, the President now could “shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York” with impunity. Or order ICE to do it.
ICE agents, too, have immunity from law. Bad enough, but making it worse: in May 2025 Mr. Trump was asked if he had a duty to uphold the Constitution and he replied: “I don’t know.” An insult to every American who served the nation from the Revolution to now, by a man holding a job under the Constitution which states the job is “faithful execution of the laws,” and the Constitution is the “supreme law.” The Constitution is also a compact with “We the People,” and those who take a job under it breach that compact with answers such as that given by Mr. Trump.
The rallying cry of the American Revolution, arising from the deployment of English Army Redcoats, once resonated with Americans: “no standing armies in times of peace.” Having learned the horror, abuse, lawlessness, and brutality that resulted when their own government turned loose the army against them, the American Patriots of the Revolutionary generation sought to free their descendants from such danger.
The Constitution limits Congress’s power to raise armies to two years. It now skirts that limit by simply renewing a “National Defense Authorization Act” every two years, war or peace. And to induce support by the people the US Government has found convenient to proclaim “Forever Wars” necessary because the people of other nations “hate us for our freedoms.” No longer, however, will the “Forever Wars” be fought over there. Now they will be, and are being, fought here at home.
Once ICE is raised, armed and deployed in the “battlefield,” like every group of people, it will seek to ensure its power and continued existence, for its own benefit. Starting with substantial “recruitment bonuses,” and high pay as the rest of the economy falters under tariff taxes and uncertainty as Presidential decrees bombard business and markets, ICE will seek to use its power to benefit its members. As a “standing army” in America, it will dwarf local police departments, use its funds to “federalize” them (if not poach their members) and as it grows more muscular and extensive, it will morph into the hated Redcoats as surely as rot spreads on decaying trees.
The masked ICE kidnappings and harsh tactics already witnessed are but the earliest manifestations. Once all the “illegal” immigrants are gone, and the birthright citizens who had the “wrong” parents are gone, ICE will look elsewhere for the so-called “worst of the worst” to kidnap, incarcerate and detain.
A Frankenstein monster, it must be fed. It eats and grows only so long as there exist “suspect persons” to detain. When they run out of the “vermin” now sought, they will find others upon whom to inflict their violence and from whom to take freedom. “First they came for the immigrants, but I did not speak because I was not an immigrant. Then they came for those whose birthrights citizenship was defective due to their parents ‘illegal’ entry, and I did not speak because I was not such. Then they came for those who spoke on behalf to the ‘illegals’ and I did not speak because I was not one. Then they came for whomever the President declared “enemies of the state,” and there was no one left to speak.
History is resonating. Alligator Alcatraz is beckoning. Standing armies in times of peace are being deployed into your community. Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death” speech resonated with true American Patriots. The speech was made on March 23, 1775, in support of three Resolutions of the Second Revolutionary Convention of Virginia.
The first resolution proclaimed that a free people “would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country (the English Empire) to keep among us for the purpose of our defense any standing army of mercenary forces, always subversive of the quiet (peace) and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and would obviate the pretext of taxing us for their support.”
Ultimately, the people will be taxed to keep ICE deployed, to pay for their own kidnapping and detention, as the need for newer detainees results from “successful” removal of the first targets. Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk wrote in Vanity Fair about her shocking arrest by ICE and 45 days in a South Louisiana processing facility. She wrote:
“Suddenly, I was thrust into a nightmare. Thousands of questions crept up in the hours that passed. It felt like an eternity as my shackled body was jostled from one location to another. Who were these people? Had I been a good enough person if today was my final day? I was relieved to have finished filing my taxes…”
If taxes are the price we pay for “civilization,” is kidnapping by government agents paid with those taxes acceptable?
Patrick Henry warned, prophetically, that standing armies would be turned on the people. History is resonating. Are we not Americans? Are we not bound to resist, pledging our lives and our sacred honor to preserve the Republic won by generations refusing to acquiesce to such tyranny? Are we not duty bound to proclaim when asked “where is Spartacus” to say: “I am Spartacus!” I am Patrick Henry!
You are an American, you are “we the people” of the Constitution, your country needs you, and you can stand with Patrick Henry and the Constitution.
Kary Love, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Michigan attorney who has defended nuclear resisters in court for decades.
This article was sent to peacevoiceeditors on August 20, 2025, by Tom Hastings on behalf of Kary Love.