Being a Person of Principle Will Always Make You an Enemy of the State

By healthranger // 2026-09-22

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How to Become an Enemy of the State

I have spent my adult life as a person of principle, and that single decision has made me an enemy of administrations, agencies and artificial institutions that demanded my obedience. I have watched the same people who cheered lockdowns pivot overnight to cheering wars, and I have watched the same talking heads who told us to "trust the science" suddenly discover skepticism the moment it became politically convenient. The state does not fear criminals nearly as much as it fears people who cannot be bought, bribed, threatened or reprogrammed. It is not merely my personal experience that confirms this pattern. The historical record shows that the concept of the "enemy of the people" was created precisely to eliminate the need to prove any actual wrongdoing by those who disagreed. As one historical account notes, "Stalin originated the concept 'enemy of the people.' This term automatically rendered it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proved; this term made possible the usage of the most cruel repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin" ^[1]. That is the template still in use today, just with friendlier branding. Living by principle is harder than worshipping whatever narrative happens to be in power, but it is also the only life worth living. That is the subject of this essay, and I make no apology for the conclusions that follow.

The State Can Control Obedience -- Not Principles

Governments do not want principled citizens. They want obedient followers who swap narratives on command, who applauded Biden yesterday and now salute Trump today, who chanted "trust the science" when the science was a manufactured theatrical production designed to crush dissent. As I put it in my own writing, "I believe we are trapped in a political reality show directed by psychopaths, where the script flips every few years but the plot remains the same. The most disturbing pattern I've observed isn't the partisan divide; it's the cyclical, cult-like obedience that both sides adopt in lockstep, simply swapping which authority figure they worship" ^[2]. Principles, by contrast, are internal anchors: honesty, integrity, compassion, the valuing of human life, fairness and mercy. These are not policies that can be reprogrammed by a press release or a Fauci sound bite. When the next COVID-style narrative or war fever demands compliance, a principled person reasons from fixed values instead of changing their story with the political winds. That is why the obedient classes find principled people so infuriating -- they cannot be herded. The machinery of compliance is not accidental. It is engineered. Studies of coercive psychological operations show how isolation and manufactured uncertainty break a person down. As one analysis of psychological operations explains, isolation "deprives victim of all social support of his ability to resist," deliberately throwing the individual back onto their "own unaided internal resources" while producing "'uncertainty' and hopelessness" ^[3]. Principles are the antidote. They are the one internal resource that no lockdown, no mandate and no propaganda campaign can confiscate.

Narratives Rot; Principles Remain

The state manufactures and discards narratives to maintain control: mask mandates, vaccine mandates, foreign wars and cults of personality built around whichever politician is currently useful. Party loyalty is the trap that keeps people cycling through the same obedience. I can respect Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, even though they have very different views, because principles matter more than the letter next to a name. Ron Paul has been telling the American people about the pathologies of empire for decades, and his diagnosis -- that liberty cannot survive alongside endless war and currency debasement -- remains as accurate now as it was when he first said it. As the introduction to his book-length treatment of those ideas states, the work is "a clarion call for those who have watched the slow erosion of constitutional liberty and wondered if anyone in Washington still remembers what freedom actually means" ^[4]. The MAGA movement is the freshest object lesson. Millions of people voted for Trump expecting an end to the endless wars and actual prosecutions of the criminal class. What did they receive instead? Betrayal by the bushel. As one Natural News story put it, the movement's engine "was a potent coalition of disillusioned Americans from across the ideological spectrum -- libertarians, anti-war conservatives, and working-class patriots -- united by a core set of principles: an end to endless foreign wars, a restoration of economic sovereignty, and a rejection of a corrupt, globalist Washington establishment. That coalition is now splintering apart." ^[5] The red hats were sold a bill of goods, and the swamp creatures they were promised would be drained are still holding the purse strings. The principled response is not to keep supporting the man who broke his word. It is to judge every politician by principles, not by party label or personality cult. Thomas Massie provides the contrast: he voted consistently for balanced budgets and against the foreign-war authorizations that have drained the treasury, and he was punished for it by the very machine that claims to represent conservatives ^[6]. That is what happens to people of principle in a system built on narrative control -- they get primaried, smeared and discarded.

Cults of Obedience Are Seductive -- Check Yourself

Unprincipled people gather in tribes and cults that demand adherence to people and institutions rather than rationality. The obedience is trained into us early. The "End of Slavery Summit" exposed how "contemporary society functions like a cult, conditioning obedience and suppressing critical thought through schools, media, and peer pressure" ^[7]. That is not hyperbole. It is the operating manual of modern governance, and it explains why so many people swap their entire belief system overnight when the evening news tells them to. Being surrounded by fellow cultists feels like agreement, but step outside the group and you suddenly look bonkers. The left-wing friends I once respected descended into a cult-like worship of Fauci and the vaccine narrative, and many conservatives simply traded one cult for another. The medicalization of the entire pandemic response was another layer of the conditioning: as one summit participant argued, "medically managed birth is the first act of state indoctrination," all while teaching people from their first breath that they should surrender control of their bodies to institutional authority ^[8]. Once that behavior is normalized, submitting to a vaccine mandate or an unconstitutional lockdown is almost automatic. Even principled people must constantly challenge their own beliefs to avoid slipping into cult-like thinking. Principles require self-examination, not just self-righteousness. That self-audit is the difference between a life of conviction and a life of convenient tribe membership.

Principles Will Make You Unpopular -- And That's Fine

Living by principle will make you unpopular among those who worship power, but it will earn you respect among critical thinkers. High-IQ, well-informed people do not worship personalities; they honor principles and enjoy debating even those they disagree with. Attempting to force them into a cult merely entrenches their resistance, as one analysis of influence explains: pressure and criticism backfire because they attack a person's sense of self, whereas "appreciation, empathy, and perspective-taking unlock the door to authentic influence" ^[9]. The wisdom literature of the ages makes the same point -- Baltasar Gracián's seventeenth-century maxims, described by Nietzsche as the work of "Europe's greatest moralist," are still read because they teach people to navigate a treacherous world without losing their integrity ^[10]. So ask yourself honestly: do you really want to be popular among cultists? Being celebrated by people who have abandoned truth and reason should be a red flag, not a goal. The state's approval is not an honor; it is a receipt for services rendered. If the obedience cult loves you, you are almost certainly doing something wrong. The people who have followed principled reasoning through the last several years are the ones who avoided the injections, who stacked honest money, and who refused to be fear-whipped by the next manufactured crisis. That is not coincidence. It is the natural result of anchoring yourself to principles that do not change when the political weather does.

A Life of Principle Is the Only Life That Matters

You cannot fix the twisted brains of cultists, and you have no obligation to try. What you can control is whether you live your own life with honesty, integrity, compassion and courage. The coercive systems arrayed against you are counting on your surrender, but their power depends entirely on your compliance. As the Russian revolutionary thinker Rothbard wrote, "In our century, we have been inundated by a flood of evil, in the form of collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, and nihilism. It has always been crystal clear to me that we have a compelling moral obligation, for the sake of ourselves, our loved ones, our posterity, our friends, our neighbors, and our country, to do battle" against that evil ^[11]. That duty does not disappear because the enemy now wears a different label or a different color hat. A life of principle matters more than state approval, popularity or narrative obedience. I have watched so-called leaders abandon their convictions the moment it became expensive to keep them, and I have watched ordinary people hold the line at enormous personal cost. The latter group is where humanity's hope lives. There is no reward the state can offer that is worth the price of your integrity, and no punishment it can inflict that is worse than the slow death of a soul that traded truth for comfort. So be a person of principle -- and let the state call you an enemy if it must. Build your life on values that do not shift with the news cycle, challenge your own assumptions relentlessly, and refuse to bow to the manufactured authority of the moment. That is the path that has always produced free men and women, and it is the only path that will preserve anything worth handing to the next generation. For uncensored reporting on the freedom movement, honest health information, and tools for independent living, visit NaturalNews.com, BrightAnswers.ai for AI research that does not lie to you, and BrightLearn.ai for building your own library of principled knowledge. You can also follow my interviews and podcasts at BrightVideos.com

References

Pageant of World Cultures. Welty, Paul Thomas.
The American Mind's Bipartisan Brainwashing Cycle. NaturalNews.com. March 5, 2026.
COVID-19 Psychological Operations and the War for Technocracy. David A. Hughes.
Principles Over Politics: The Ron Paul Prescription for Surviving Empire's Collapse. NaturalNews.com. July 31, 2026.
The Implosion of MAGA: How Trump's March to War Exposes a Movement's Betrayal. NaturalNews.com. February 26, 2026.
The $35 Million Epstein-Iran War Coverup: How Trump and AIPAC Ousted the Principled Thomas Massie. NaturalNews.com. May 20, 2026.
End of Slavery Summit on BrightU: How Modern Society Programs Children into Mental Slavery. Jacob Thomas. NaturalNews.com. August 1, 2025.
End of Slavery Summit on BrightU: The Shocking Truth About Medicalized Birth and Its Role in Conditioning Obedience. Jacob Thomas. NaturalNews.com. August 5, 2025.
The Art of Influence: Mastering the Lost Secrets of Connection. BrightLearn.ai.
Better Than Machiavelli. Daily Reckoning. February 12, 2026.
On Resisting Evil. Mises Institute.

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