Don’t Tread on Me (2010) Movie Review

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure”—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith, quoted in Padover’s Jefferson On Democracy

While some may not agree with everything in this film (Obama won’t, of course), this is a good overview of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by advocates of freedom and liberty.

Guests include Infowars talk show host Alex Jones, Sheriff Richard Mack and Michael Badnarik who may be remembered when he remarked on mandatory vaccines during his presidential campaign, “You bring your syringe, I’ll bring my .45. We’ll see who leaves the bigger hole.”

There are interviews with State Representatives from Missouri and Oklahoma and various advocacy groups interlaced with clips from old educational and entertainment films. You get a full list of guests by selecting “Guests” at the main menu and some added commentary left out of the film.

The guests present many non-violent solutions to problems that we face concerning “socialist” infiltration into our society including “tax escrow accounts.”

Constitutional scholar Dr. Edwin Vieira gives a good over view of several topics including the militia and how a State can build one.

This film is worth getting a hold of to show your family, friends and neighbors in hopes of getting them to study the Constitution further.

Don't Tread on Me: Rise of the Republic DVD
By Ellen

Don't Tread on Me: Rise of the Republic is a newly released movie created by William Lewis and Gary Franchi.  It takes a look at the 9th and 10th Amendments, what they mean, and how they were intended to protect us from a tyrannical government.

In case you're not familiar with the Amendments:

9th: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

10th: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Don't Tread on Me: Rise of the Republic looks at how our government is taking powers from the people and the States and calling them their own where there is no constitutional basis for them to do so. It takes a look at various offenses to the 9th and 10th Amendments including the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, recent bailouts and the health care bilol.  It also discusses the USA Patriot Acts, the John Warner Defense Act, the Military Commisions Act and the Real ID Rider that was attached to an appropriations bill.

Don't Tread on Me: Rise of the Republic will also take a look at gun ownership and the commerce clause.  It will also help you brush up on your knowledge of how the government works and what the language in our Bill of Rights and Constitution means. It explains why we live in a Constitutional Republic and not a pure Democracy.

Best of all, Don't Tread on Me: Rise of the Republic tells you what you can do to be part of the change that needs to happen in our government. It will also educate you so you can understand what needs to be done and so you can see how some of the things going on in our government violate our rights as given by the Bill of Rights.

If you didn't know what your 9th & 10th Amendment rights were before you read this, you need to watch this DVD and understand what's going on.  If you did know your 9th & 10th Amendment rights, you need to watch this DVD to find out what you can do to make a difference.

One of my favorite quotes from the movie is by Alex Jones: "I am not your property. I am not your slave."

Don't Tread On Me - A Leftist Review
By Regan Straley

I am 100% behind efforts by state legislators across the country to reassert their constitutionally-protected rights in the struggle against the federal government's gross overreach into the lives and pocketbooks of their constituents. Joining more than 30 other states, Pennsylvania has the beginnings of its own state sovereignty legislation buried somewhere in committee, H.R. 95, introduced last year by former gubernatorial hopeful Rep. Sam Rohrer (R-Berks) and Sen. Mike Folmer (R-Lebanon), a resolution serving notice to the federal government that its many and sundry mandates on the state, be they funded or unfunded, are unconstitutional and will be met with stiff resistance.

I, nevertheless, approached the new documentary "Don't Tread on Me: Rise of the Republic" with some trepidation. Because the patriot, constitutionalist, and 10th Amendment revival movements have consistently mischaracterized the Obama Administration and Democrat-controlled Congress as "progressive," "green," "socialist," or "liberal" by turns (as if all those terms have the same definition), I feared the film would just end up being an all-out verbal vilification of what our corporate media and its mesmerized audience like to refer to as "the left." That's a label many patriots would probably attempt to pin on me, if they knew my personal opinion on many issues, but which I respectfully decline, thank you.

To my pleasant surprise, however, the makers of "Don't Tread on Me" squander very little time and energy on political partisanship and ideological finger-pointing. With the exception of a brief and predictable foray into Obama's communist predilections, in which they ignore the fact that our current president registers no higher on the Totalitarian-O'Meter than any of his recent predecessors, William Lewis and Gary Franchi manage to stay focused on a mostly apolitical exploration of what the U.S. Constitution clearly and unequivocally says about the role of the federal government in relation to the states.

The primary premise is that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are confirmation that the federal government is a creation of the states and, most importantly, of the Founders' stated intent that it be a servant of the states. Whether or not one agrees with the philosophy or practical wisdom behind this arrangement, I think most of us would have to concede that, incrementally over the course of the last 229 years and without a single Constitutional amendment authorizing it, those roles have been almost completely reversed.

There is a virtually bottomless pool of reasonable arguments why centralized federal dominance is preferable to a decentralized system of state sovereignty. Among the most topical would be the Texas State Board of Education's current effort to drag, like a pregnant and barefoot wife, its public school curriculum back into the Paleolithic era with textbooks that ignore or gloss over matters that don't validate the zeitgeist of "patriotic capitalist Caucasian Christians." I'm not saying that there are absolutely no circumstances whatsoever under which a state should be forced to comply with certain fundamental standards of fairness and justice, particularly in the areas of education and civil rights, but the U.S. federal government has unquestionably turned what should be exceptional actions of last resort into routine, institutionalized, and wholesale violations of its own Constitutional charter.

For the federal government to suspend the principles of its own Constitution every time a state wants to implement a stupid policy (which is probably every day) strikes me as having some pretty dangerous and far-reaching ramifications which, in the end, we'll all be sorry we invited upon ourselves. But then, America is well beyond that point, now. The U.S. government, having turned its constitutional responsibility for creating currency and monetary policy over to a profit-driven private corporation (the Federal Reserve), given itself blanket authority to borrow from that corporation at will, and established a tax on compensation for labor to pay the interest on the debt, is now in a financial position to bribe and extort state governments into relinquishing their rights on any and all issues, notwithstanding extreme cases of defiance like the Texas State Board of Education.

It's in response to this quandary, in which the federal government is able to dangle the dope in front of financially-addicted state governments in order to get what it wants from them, that "Don't Tread on Me" makes one of its most compelling proposals. It's not exactly a new idea, but a number of states are considering something known as Federal Income Tax Escrow Funds. Such funds would give states, in response to any federal sanctions imposed on them for failing to comply with unconstitutional federal mandates, the ability to withhold and spend as it sees fit the tax revenue they collect on behalf of the IRS. I don't know how doable it is from a legal or administrative perspective, but it sounds like a great way to level the playing field between the omnipotent central planners in Washington and hapless public servants on the state and local level.

Whatever the pitfalls and inefficiencies of state sovereignty (and there are many), none of them, in my opinion, comes close to the perils of power concentrated in too few hands. That belief stems largely from what might be a naive faith on my part that citizens on the state and local level are generally capable of making responsible (though not necessarily consistent with my opinion) policy decisions without the constant coercive prodding and oversight of distant rulers. Call me a dreamer.

The point is moot to me anyway. Even if I didn't believe in state sovereignty, the U.S. Constitution makes no bones about the supremacy of state governments over the federal government. Americans are free to change the Constitution in this regard if they don't like it. But simply ignoring it means we essentially don't have a functional Constitution, in which case we don't have a Republic. And if we don't have a Republic, which is a system of government that protects all of its citizens from the arbitrary exercise of privileged power, then we have anarchy, whether its nature be Hitlerian, Mad Maxian, or anything in between.

Except for its token comparison of Obama to the Red Menace of yore, a little too much credibility afforded a Tea Party movement that has fallen hopelessly into the hands of opportunistic Republicans, and the rather unnerving glint in the eyes of some of the characters when they talk about the discharge of small arms in self-defense, "Don't Tread on Me" is a thought-provoking, well-reasoned, and informative film.

It's a shame it had to succumb to the easy temptation, however cursorily, to alienate people who regard themselves as progressives. We may not be very vocal, but there are plenty of us out here who at least sympathize with, and some like me who fully support, state sovereignty and the localization of government. The patriot movement's exclusivity in that respect seems pretty counter-productive to me. But, hey, what are you going to do? That's the way politics is these days. I'd still recommend this film to people of all political persuasions who aren't afraid of information that might challenge their belief systems.