The Imprisonment of Tina Peters Is a Warning to Us All
Guest post
America is not fractured because of partisanship. That explanation is too shallow—and false. The country is in turmoil because it is in the middle of a regime-level conflict over who governs and who obeys.
The real war is authoritarian power versus individual sovereignty. Everything else—left versus right, red versus blue, progressive versus conservative—is camouflage layered over that deeper struggle.
Why Tina Peters Matters
Tina Peters is not a sideshow. She is the point.
Peters served as a county clerk in Colorado with a legal duty to preserve election records. When she was informed that the election system was to be updated through a “Trusted Build”, she created a backup. Her concern was simple: once data is destroyed, accountability becomes impossible.
For this, she was charged, convicted, and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Tina Peters is 70 years old. A widow. A cancer survivor. A Gold Star mother who lost her Navy SEAL son in service to this country. Whatever one believes about the 2020 election, no rational standard of justice can justify a punishment of this severity for what amounts to record preservation.
This was not law enforcement. It was lawfare (the purposeful abuse of law by government officials to selectively violate the rights of a citizen).
The message is unmistakable: challenge our exercise of the system—even at the most local level—and the full weight of the state will be brought down on you.
This Is a Question of Sovereignty
In the American constitutional order, voting is not a ceremonial exercise. It is the means by which the people exercise sovereignty. Consent flows upward from citizens to the government.
Authoritarian systems reverse that flow. Elections remain, but only as theater. Outcomes are managed. Accountability dissolves into bureaucratic complexity, procedural mazes, and selective enforcement of the law. Power migrates away from citizens and into insulated institutions that answer only to themselves.
That is not a hypothetical future. It is the trajectory we are on now.
Authoritarianism Comes in Many Costumes
Authoritarianism is not a single ideology. It can present itself as Marxism, democratic socialism, globalism, progressivism, or just sacrifices demanded for “the greater good.” The labels do not matter. The structure always does.
When unelected bureaucracies rule.
When courts legislate from the bench.
When legislators entrench themselves for decades.
When the media launders narratives.
When law enforcement is selectively weaponized.
When the centers of power are hip-deep in untouchable corruption.
That is authoritarianism, regardless of which slogans are used to justify it.
Why Elites Fear Populism
Populism terrifies elites because it restores the one thing they cannot tolerate: direct accountability.
Authoritarian systems are always run by a small number of insiders—oligarchs, bureaucratic classes, donor networks, or ideological cadres. Corruption is not incidental to these systems; it is foundational. Complexity replaces consent. Obscurity replaces transparency.
For individual liberty to thrive, honesty matters. For authoritarianism to grow, lies, propaganda, censorship, and intimidation become routine.
Tina Peters was not punished for breaking the law. She was punished for violating an unwritten rule: do not look too closely at how power is exercised abusively.
The Coup That Doesn’t Look Like a Coup
This is not a coup with tanks and barricades. It is a slow, methodical institutional takeover.
Election systems are made complex, creating openings for fraud; those who would benefit from the fraud claim it hasn’t happened and won’t; and the system is shielded from scrutiny.
Legislative rules are abused to block reform. Like the filibuster, which is used to frustrate democracy as senators pretend that they have no choice, while allowing a minority to thwart the will of the people.
Administrative agencies claiming independence from constitutional authority are a means by which sovereignty is eroded from the people by unelected bureaucrats.
Judges converting ideology into precedents that favor an authoritarian position, again, frustrate the will of the people.
Career bureaucrats – the deep state – are sabotaging elected leadership—another transfer of sovereignty.
Piece by piece, sovereignty is transferred from citizens to the state. The result is a country that still uses democratic language while hollowing out democratic control.
What Can Still Be Done
There is still time, but time alone will not save us. Margins matter.
Restoring constitutional government requires:
Overwhelming electoral victories are needed to reduce the chance of procedural sabotage.
Federal election integrity standards, with real enforcement, must be passed.
States need constitutional amendments permitting the recall of federal officials who prove to be duds or to have lied.
Reassertion of executive authority over administrative agencies – they don’t get to be a fourth branch of government – unanswerable to the electorate.
These are not radical ideas. They are commonsense prerequisites for self-government.
Why Trump’s Truth Social Post Struck a Nerve
This is why Donald Trump’s recent Truth Social post announcing a pardon for Tina Peters mattered.
Whether a president can legally pardon a state conviction is secondary. What mattered was that Trump named the abuse. He publicly acknowledged what so many institutions refuse to admit: Peters’ prosecution was political.
The reaction was immediate and revealing. Not outrage at injustice, but outrage at exposure. Not concern for proportionality, but panic that the narrative had slipped.
A system confident in its legitimacy does not fear scrutiny. A system that imprisons whistleblowers and lashes out when attention turns its way does.
The real war is not left versus right.
It is rule by consent versus rule by fraud, lies, intimidation, and bureaucratic decree. And Tina Peters is proof that the line is closer than many are willing to admit.
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