Unless you oppose all coercion, ‘resistance’ claim rings hollow

By David McElroy · January 27, 2026

I’m appalled at pictures of protesters lately holding up signs proclaiming that they’re part of a “Resistance” movement. These left-wing progressives are sincere in opposing Trump’s version of government oppression, but they want their own version of oppression as a replacement.

If you resist oppression by one jackbooted thug — but not oppression by another — you’re just a partisan political hack, not someone standing for genuine freedom. I can’t take your “resistance” seriously unless you oppose oppression from all sides and stand for the natural rights of every individual to make his or her own voluntary choices — whether you agree with that person or not.

For centuries, hardly anybody questioned the notion that everyone had a duty to obey whatever king or other thug had seized control of a territory. That was accepted as obvious, even though it seems ludicrous to us now.

Today, hardly anybody questions the idea that all individuals must rightly obey the will of a majority of people around them. If you ever look honestly at the moral reasoning behind this idea, you will find it’s no more reasonable or moral than forcing people to obey a king.

If you truly want to resist government — which is simply organized oppression — you need to do it all the time, not just when you’re angry about losing an election and having “the other side” ruling over you. If you really want to resist government coercion, those of us who support a voluntary system will welcome you.

But that’s not what you want. You like coercion — when your team is in charge and it’s other people being forced to obey.

Here’s the most dangerous common delusion that most people hold:

“I know how everything and everyone ought to be — and anybody who doesn’t agree with me is stupid or evil, so he should be forced to obey my side.”

Few people are honest enough or clear enough in their thinking to be that blunt, but that is the essence of their attitudes.

I don’t bother to debate socialism anymore for the same reason I don’t debate whether fascism and theocracy are good political systems. Socialism cannot exist unless you force people to comply with your preferences for their lives. If you favor any such coercion over people who prefer to peacefully live their lives in their own ways — whether your coercion is in the name of socialism or nationalism or religion or democracy or anything else — your idea is evil, no matter what you call it.

You have no right to impose your system on me or anyone else. I don’t care what you call it. I don’t care that you supposedly have good intentions. I don’t care if you think you’re smarter or wiser or more moral than the rest of us. Forcing others to obey your will for their lives is evil, no matter what you call it.

People commonly imagine they could fix the ills of the world if they merely had the power to force others to obey. This is despite the ample evidence that top-down solutions rarely (if ever) work better than the solutions which emerge from individuals working voluntarily in the framework of their natural rights — their freedom of choice and property rights.

The delusion that your brilliant solution could stop a societal problem through force is so common that almost nobody questions it. That’s why majorities seize the power to force their will on everybody else and few question whether it’s moral or pragmatic. True Believers never notice the unintended consequences of their coercion and they always think bad side effects can be cured by more coercion.

Never do they step back and say, “We should have left people alone to decide for themselves.”

The only people who scare me as badly as Trump are the anti-Trump people who take Trump’s buffoonery and evil as validation of their own desires to force everyone to obey their political whims. Anti-Trump coercion is just as evil as Trump coercion is. The moral path is rejecting coercion and embracing voluntary choice and freedom.

Political power is necessary only if you intend to force people to obey you against their will. No force or coercion is necessary for free people to make voluntary agreements among themselves about how to live — and to leave each other alone. Political power in the name of individual liberty is a contradiction in terms.

Donald Trump is a political cancer, but fighting him by embracing a different form of political coercion is like saying, “I don’t want cancer, but heart failure would be fantastic.”

A more polite and socially sophisticated form of coercion is just a different form of evil.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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