Dear Governor Polis,

I write to you today on a matter of the gravest concern, especially to anybody who thinks the rule of law is important to a civilized society. 

I'm sure you've been paying close attention to the goings-on across your beleaguered nation in the last few years. I wouldn't want to be so presumptuous as to try to determine whether you should have seen this coming, nor even if you might see any parallel between these events and the incarceration of my friend Eric Brandt, currently being held. There are those of us, however, who are entirely unsurprised, and for whom the parallel is crystal clear.

No matter, since I'm publishing this as an open letter for others to read as well as submitting it for your perusal, I might as well join the dots.

The US was founded on some of the most noble principles ever conceived by the mind of man. When John Hancock put his John Hancock to that auspicious document in the then Pennsylvania State Capitol, signalling the birth of the Grand Experiment, it set a new standard for liberty, and lit a beacon for the world to see. Here in the UK, We'd tried some years prior, but it transpired the people here simply weren't ready to step into a world of liberty. The raising of Cromwell to the Lord Protectorate and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy always seemed to me to be the most heinous act of self-immolation ever inflicted on a society, and a spit in the face to all the people who'd sacrificed their lives and their families on the altar of freedom. All it would have taken is a little more courage for what was then the most powerful nation on Earth to achieve what had previously been a pipe dream.

In the fifteen years following that momentous day in the City of Brotherly Love, as I'm sure you're aware, the details of future liberty were carefully teased out of principles promulgated by some of the finest and most progressive minds of the time, many of them informed by prior experiences in Britain and France. 

Among these details are, to my mind, the only set of principles sufficiently universal to fulfill the tenet of Rawls' Veil of Ignorance. I'm sure somebody as learned as yourself will be fully aware of Rawls' work, but I'll expose it briefly for onlookers.

Rawls enjoins us, in the interest of total fairness, to think about the kind of society we'd like to live in if we were making the choice without having any understanding of what echelon of society we would be placed in. If there were a chance we'd be a pauper, would we choose a society with a high degree of disparity in distribution of resources, for example? It's such a simple idea that even children get it, as a simple and oft-conducted experiment shows readily. Ask a child to divide a cake between eight people. He can divide it any way he likes, but he gets to choose last. The child will divide the cake evenly every time, and twice on a Tuesday.

I'm speaking, of course, of the Bill of Rights. These are the ideas which, to somebody really interested in the freedom from tyranny enshrined in Jefferson's famous Dear John, are the really important ones; the ideas which warrant the blurb; which bring to mind the impression of a shining city on a hill where all can live in peace and harmony. A place where every human is a human. Where everybody can expect the same treatment under the law.

To a non-American like myself, the notion the power of government is curtailed by the ultimate law of the land is a powerful one, savage in its potency, yet still there is a problem. 

I've encountered quite a few US veterans in my travels, and had many discussions with them about that oath. What's been the feature of many of those conversations is the disconnect between the taking of the oath and the understanding of what the oath actually means in the real world. Not a few of these veterans who turned to social activism have described to me the journey between taking the oath and grasping its implications. To a first approximation, none of them understood the oath when they were taking it. Most often, they learned the true meaning of that oath when they were overseas, serving their country, and realized the very actions they were engaged in under orders from their government ran counter to the notions contained in that oath, and that they were violating it in the name of serving it. That realization underpins a lot of the thinking behind such activism by veterans. It's not difficult for any thinking person looking at the situation objectively.

Many, on returning from the theater, recognized what those who haven't served often do not; that, to many, the tenets enshrined in the Bill of Rights are just words; that the highest law of the land was routinely being violated by those purporting to serve and uphold it; that state-liveried criminals were running rampant, even to the point of committing murder and, more importantly, facing no consequences for their actions.

Eric Brandt served his country. More importantly, he served, and continues to serve, those noble ideas laid down in the constitution. He swore an oath to uphold and defend them against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Some, it would appear, are more serious about the oath than others. I'm fairly sure you took a similar oath, though my cursory research has failed to reveal the text of it.

The very first article such an oath is designed to defend is the right to self-determination or, in modern parlance, bodily autonomy. The most fundamental manifestation of this right is the to speak one's mind. As George Orwell remind us so succinctly, if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. Whether you agree with the content of what Eric Brandt has to say or not, his right to say it sacrosanct. What's most distressing about his treatment is it is precisely because of his defense of this specific right, and the offense taken by some of those at whom his defense is directed, and only because it continues to be violated, that has led to an escalating series of just these kinds of violation.

Any objective observer looking on with an open mind, free of bias, must conclude that the most dangerous enemies to those noble principles are state actors. In other words, the biggest threat to liberty isn't some foreign enemy, it's the enemy within, in the form of ill-educated law enforcement, who routinely lie, threaten, intimidate, coerce and otherwise run roughshod over the people they're sworn to protect. It's impossible not to see that liberty is something they feel free to take away on whim and, given the judiciary's unswerving acceptance of their actions, they're clearly correct.

Eric is not a violent man - far from it. He is vehement and vociferous, because he's passionate about the cause to whose mast he's nailed his colors (more accurately, the cause to whose mast the government nailed his colors in the form of the required oath), and because he recognizes that such a cause is a hill worth metaphorically dying on in the face of tyranny and over-reach. 

Let's be clear here: Eric has broken no law. Spurious charges have time and again been manufactured out of whole cloth and the vagaries of language and law that those erecting the charges lack the wherewithal to interpret correctly and, as such, are entirely without substance or merit. Some of the things he's said have been, to my mind, beyond the pale, but at no point has he ever said anything that meets the criteria underpinning the charge he's been convicted of, unless you think thoughts and prayers really are an effective way of affecting change in the world. 

That those involved in his cases have construed what he's said as a threat speaks volumes, either on the inability of those trying his case to be objective (the judge who sentenced him admitted candidly in open court that he couldn't be), or on their dismal failure of basic logic. Moreover, those utterances are the product of years of abuse and unwarranted incarceration, nothing more nor less than retaliation by a law-enforcement and judicial machinery whose cogs dislike the fact he doesn't genuflect before the authority bestowed upon them by the people. 

While I certainly agree that some of what Eric has said crosses some ethical lines, and while I do not agree with all of the content, I also recognize that this is not a criterion upon which to base law, and no law has been based on this criterion. That hasn't stopped police and judges from stretching definitions to the point of abuse. The only law-breakers in the entire history of Eric's activism have worn state livery, and none of them have faced any consequences, including several known murderers still in the employ of the state (one such murderous and mindless thug who is the subject of the nation's first illustrated lawsuit).

Eric's goal is to wake people up to the criminal behavior of the state, and this will sometimes involve engendering shock, because people really do need to be shocked out of their apathy. The events of the last year in the aftermath of yet another in a long line of murders by law enforcement, one of them the subject of much noise in your own state, the brutal murder of an innocent, gentle young musician administered horse tranquilizer at the behest of your state's armed criminals. And criminals they are, routinely breaking the law and committing acts of heinous violence on those they're supposed to protect.

This is the long train of usurpations of which your founding fathers spoke. This is the government overreach fueling the current discontent in your nation, of which state-protected murders are merely the clearest manifestation.

Martin Luther King expressed a wish for the nation: Be true to what you said on paper.

Live up to your blurb. Recognize there is no good reason to keep a peaceful man incarcerated for asserting his constitutionally-protected right to speak, and to film, especially to film public officials in the execution of their duties, an activity that goes to the heart of the scrutiny of government, and the entire motivation for the first law of the land, the first amendment. Be aware the world is watching and, if you value the oath you took, look to the liberty it should be defending, that Eric is defending, that those out in the streets protesting are defending.

Put simply, look out there in the cities of the nation at the moment, and ask yourself this; do I want the activist who loots and burns, or the activist who speaks? Do I want the activist who wishes to tell children about freedom, or the activist who wants to show the children how to break windows. Who should really be in prison, the murderers killing innocents and being paid by the state to do so, or the one who quite correctly calls them murderers and demands accountability. 

It's always been a source of somewhat sinister amusement to me that liberty is so costly in the land of the free. There can be, of course, no land of the free in wherein the words 'papierren bitte' carry an expectation of compliance. There can be no home of the brave in which those charged with our protection lose their minds over words or cameras. There can be no dawn's early light in a land where the photon is stifled; where transparency is made opaque; where scrutiny is blinded.

Please look at Eric's case, and ask yourself if you really want to govern a state in which the criminals hold the reins of law. You have the authority to intervene and impose the true law of the land, or you can support the criminals.