“government derives its authority from consent and that when a government systematically violates the terms of that consent, the obligation to obey it dissolves.¹ Thomas Jefferson said the same thing plainly in 1776: when a government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. That position is canonical, mainstream, enshrined in the document every American schoolchild reads.²

Jefferson laid out specific criteria. A government loses its legitimacy not when its subjects feel aggrieved but when it structurally forfeits the purpose for which it was authorized. He was describing a specific condition: a government that had stopped serving the people who authorized its existence and had begun serving a ruling class instead.

We are inside that condition now.”