I'm not aware of any military that deploys a precision marksman without a spotter. That makes a precision rifle a two-soldier job. .50 caliber machine gun? two, maybe three boots? Squads will have members with DMRs or LMGs but they aren't suitable for the same task -- they just extend the capabilities of the squad.

Extend that to thinks like fighter jets, nukes, comms, etc. etc. and the actual threat of any of those is drastically reduced outside the crazy people do crazy things category of events, and even then, you're going to need a big group of crazy people.

The replacement and actual threat already exists and was popularized in the Middle East in the 70s and arrived here in the 90s but it isn't sensational but I'm not confident I wouldn't end up on yet-another-watch-list by saying it explicitly. So, yay, freedom.

Wrong. A democracy, at least a functioning and legitimate one, is not judged by enacting the will of the majority, but by protecting the rights of the minority.

Allowing everyone else to participate and weigh the totality of needs and wants is what makes democracy different.

The principles don't have to be mine, and they don't need to be political, even. It's even possible with something silly... "America has the best fucking apples on the planet, and we're goddamn proud of that. Everything we strive and suffer for is for the best goddamn apple pie in human history, and if you wanna take that, you can pry it from our cold dead hands. "

Right now, we're socially fractured in every way possible to fracture under the threshold of combat, and even that is failing in some places.

We better figure out what it means to be American before there's no point to it, or before it fails so badly that continuing as an American means fatally corrupting any principles or ideals we claim to hold.

There are ideas for seasteads and crypto-nations that I find compelling, but I'm not a utopian. I think the Constitution is something admirable and the ideals are structurally important for any notion of liberty going forward in history. I hope that America finds its way back to some sort of cohesion but I don't see any paths toward anything resembling unity.

I think this feels "new" to Americans because it's on our border, and because Canada looks more like the US and is assumed to be more stable and less prone to authoritarian emergency measures than e.g. Venezuela or Argentina. But similarly extreme and extra-judicial banking controls have been implemented by other governments in the hemisphere when authoritarian left-wing parties in power feel threatened by right-wing populist movements they believe are at least partly sponsored by America.