The Counterrevolution: An Excerpt From My New Book
This essay is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-released Essays on the Counterrevolution, which you can get for FREE when you become a Premium Member.
The following is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-released Essays on the Counterrevolution, FREE to all our Premium and Founding Members.
by Rod D. Martin
May 31, 2025
Geopolitics, like generations, is in many respects shaped by impersonal forces. But history is entirely personal. It is subject to a personal God. And likewise, it is frequently redirected by specific human personalities. From Alexander and Caesar to Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan, our lives are repeatedly reshaped by the vision and determination of a single man.
As I’ll develop throughout the book, this is the story of the counterrevolution. That’s not just political rhetoric: as I’ll develop herein, it absolutely applies to our remarkable situation, one which most conservatives have never understood, but which improbably enough, a real estate developer-turned-reality TV star has.
God forever uses those the world considers foolish to confound those it considers wise.
The Relentless Resolve of Donald J. Trump
Say what you will about Donald Trump, but no honest observer can deny this: the man simply refuses to quit.
For eight years — from the moment he descended that golden escalator in 2015 — Trump has faced a sustained political, legal, and media onslaught unlike anything in American history. The entire weight of the modern establishment has been hurled at him: the intelligence community, the Enemedia, the corporate class, the bureaucracy, the academy, Big Tech, even the Justice Department and the courts. Not since Lincoln has a president or presidential candidate been so hated by the entrenched powers that be. And not since Lincoln — or at least Reagan and FDR — has a man in that position shown such unbreakable resolve.
Trump should have been broken ten times over. They told us the Access Hollywood tape would end him. They told us the Mueller investigation would indict him. They said he would quit, or be impeached (well, removed), or fade into irrelevance after 2020. They said he’d never survive January 6th. They told us the indictments — ninety-one utterly bogus yet very real felony counts across four jurisdictions — would finish him once and for all: bankrupted, humiliated, imprisoned for life.
They even tried to assassinate him. Twice that we know of.
And yet he stands. Bloodied but unbowed. If anything, the machine he built — smashed together by force of will, political instinct, and an unmatched connection to the American voter — is leaner, tougher, and more lethal than before. The former enemies he’s won over are legion. The sheer physical courage of the man has won the hearts of millions (including, consequentially, Elon Musk, who endorsed him within minutes of the above photo).
They called him a joke. He beat sixteen Republican challengers and then defeated the Clinton machine. They called him a puppet. He governed more conservatively and more effectively than any president since Reagan — by some measures, more so. They said he was finished. He’s now bulldozing the entire world order painstakingly established over 90 long years.
This isn’t just political staying power. It’s not merely savvy. It is grit — the kind of indomitable will that chews up obstacles, that survives hurricanes of hatred, that presses forward while every sane advisor whispers “turn back.” It is raw, unfiltered determination of the sort that built empires, founded nations, and carved a civilization out of the wilderness. Trump is not just hard to beat; he is impossible to discourage. Who can stand against such a man?
He has paid a price. His family has paid a price. The price for crossing the Uniparty and refusing to bow to the priesthood of elite opinion is high. And Trump has paid it in full — again and again. He did not have to do this. He was wealthy. He was beloved by the left when he stayed in his lane. He had a golden life of luxury and applause, and he walked away from it all — for a mission no one but he believed he could complete. That’s not ego. That’s a calling. And say what you will: that kind of self-sacrifice in the face of relentless opposition is rare. It deserves our respect.
Let’s be clear. Most men would have folded. Most presidents, confronted with a fraction of what he has endured, would have retreated to the safety of memoirs and presidential libraries. Trump charges into the storm. He welcomes the fight. Not because he enjoys it — though he does — but because he knows what’s at stake. He knows this is a war for the soul of the Republic — indeed, for its very existence — and he’s not waiting for someone else to do the hard things.
There’s a reason the American people — especially those long abandoned by both parties — see him as a champion. They know he doesn’t have to fight for them. They know he could walk away, save himself the trouble, and enjoy a comfortable retirement. But he doesn’t. He keeps showing up. Like a real-life action hero, he keeps punching back. He keeps taking slings and arrows most men couldn’t bear for a day — much less for eight brutal years — and he does it with fire in his eyes and a smirk that drives the left to madness.
This is not normal. It is exceptional. And in this moment — this dangerous, precarious, history-bending moment — it is necessary.
America doesn’t need another consultant-driven politician (and it should do everything it can to avoid them in 2028). It doesn’t need another cautious caretaker of decline. It needs someone with the courage to say the quiet parts out loud. It needs someone willing to look foolish to confound the “wise”. It needs someone who knows the game is rigged and has the spine to tear the table apart. It needs someone unbreakable.
Trump has been that man.
Whatever happens next, history will remember what he endured. It will remember that he stood. That he bled. That he “fought like hell” for a country most of his enemies only pretend to love. That he endured everything — everything — and still came back swinging.
For Such a Time as This
Romans never called Augustus “king” or “emperor”. He was simply the “first citizen”, or “first among equals”. He did not abolish the Senate. He did not suspend elections. He kept all the forms of the old Republic.
And yet he ruled. Absolutely. The ancient forms masked the reality of the new substance.
For 90 years Americans have been ruled. Not by a single person, but certainly by a single party. Elections make little difference if the machinery of government continues imposing a particular point of view regardless of the voters’ choice.
The forms of our Constitutional order remain. Their substance has been “progressively” drained from American life. You have, and have had, virtually no say over the people or policies that dictate even the minutia of American life.
Did Donald Trump the complete outsider understand that in 2015? Certainly to some degree. But most movement conservatives didn’t. Forms are powerful, and not devoid of all meaning, thus creating a haze through which few see clearly, especially those invested in the status quo. The few conservatives who did see were viewed as extremists, cranks, or nerds. The GOP as a whole took alternate positions: “This is fine” and “eh, what can you do?”
But the Donald Trump of 2025 is our Gandalf the White. He has fought the Balrog of the state and been reborn, understanding clearly how Washington really works, and determined to set things right.
His legions of critics call that “revenge”. And perhaps to some degree it is.
But in fact, it’s not revenge but restoration, of the pre-New Deal constitutional order, in which elections really matter and the people are truly both sovereign and free.
This is the story of the early days of that war.
The Counterrevolution
Every nation has a beginning. Ours was not the triumph of a warlord, or the growth of a tribe, but a declaration: a revolution in the name of restraint — a rebellion against tyranny for the sake of individual liberty under law.
But nothing lasts forever. Our revolutionary America was vulnerable to counterrevolution, not from (explicit) monarchists or after a while foreign invaders, but from within: from ideologues who denied the sin nature our Founders affirmed, who believed they could perfect man if only they could command him; from jurists who confused their black robes for divine right; from bureaucrats who mistook permanence for legitimacy.
As every political science student knows, to these people, the American Revolution was no revolution at all. To them, “revolution” means France and Robespierre, Russia and Lenin, China and Mao, regeneration through chaos. They ignore the obvious: that all of their so-called “revolutions” simply replaced one ruling aristocracy with another. Only in America did we throw off not only our masters, but the idea of masters. Only in America did we assert that there are unalienable rights granted by God alone, not by the state, and that sovereignty, delegated by Him, resides alone in the people.
And so it stood, for 160 years. But then came the 90-year twilight, not fully enslaved but no longer truly free. The Deep State Franklin Roosevelt created kept the forms of the old Republic but not its substance. It kept the appearance of elections — elections made all the more believable because different parties won and lost, and sometimes (as with Reagan) the outsider brought real change.
Yet underlying that, in the minutia of control, FDR established one-party rule. And that rule has lasted for almost a century.
Donald Trump is perhaps the most improbable of revolutionaries, but may be the only man who could have braved the task.
In part this is due to the Deep State’s wrath. Hillary was supposed to win, after all. With Scalia dead, a leftist Supreme Court majority virtually assured, the aging Alinksy acolyte was poised to finish what FDR began. Her actions would be rubber-stamped and shockingly thorough. There would be no coming back from it: the “fundamental transformation of America” Obama promised would be made complete. She had prepared her whole life for this.
And she was inevitable, after all. Like Thanos towering over Tony.
When she lost, the cry went up like the shriek of the damned. Caught utterly off guard at what was supposed to be their moment of utmost triumph, they turned on Trump with a rage and hate that cast off all reason. He was an outsider. He didn’t yet understand Washington. He could have been managed. But the left’s patience was expended. They didn’t just want to beat him: they wanted to punish him, and all those hideous deplorables who’d dared to speak back to their betters.
Trump’s experience both in office and in his four years in exile taught him more than most conservative “leaders” knew, about the weaponization of government against its political opposition and the longstanding transfer of most Constitutional authority (and much that went beyond it) from the people’s elected representatives to those insulated entirely from them. They wounded him without killing him. And in the process they revealed the puppet show’s strings, to a man they’d incentivized to cut their strings and burn them out.
So here we are.
This is the moment when FDR’s long counterrevolution reaches its own reckoning. The Deep State is rotting. Its courts have become legislatures, its agencies have become sovereigns, its laws unread, its processes unknowable. Its schools no longer educate, its currency no longer holds value, its borders no longer exist. It cannot win wars, balance budgets, or tell a man from a woman. The revolution is eating itself. And its answer, in typical Marxist fashion, is to demand ever-increasing control.
Our task is not a rebellion against America, but a rebellion for her — a refusal to surrender the Republic to the long twilight of technocratic despotism. The essays in this volume have traced the partisan and bureaucratic betrayal of our Constitution, the judicial usurpations that mock the rule of law, the subversion of sovereignty by globalist abstraction, and the cultural demolition wrought by an elite that loaths the mere mention of God and hates His order.
There are two roads ahead of us.
One leads further into technocratic tyranny, surveillance and manipulation cloaked in digital convenience, enforced by algorithms, and anesthetized by universal basic income. It is the path of managed decline, of permanent emergency, of citizenship reduced to subjection and the human soul flattened to data. The elites of Davos, Brussels, and D.C. call this “progress.” But it is actually empire.
The other road is harder — but freer. It is the road of decentralization and rebirth: of a people taking back responsibility from the state, of institutions rooted once more in families, churches, communities, covenants, and crucially, elections. It is the digital reformation of a constitutional republic: where blockchain and AI are used to limit power, not entrench it; where space and energy abundance free man from the Malthusian lies of managed scarcity; where education is reclaimed from indoctrinators and returned to disciplers of truth.
And it is theological. All revolutions are religious. The American Revolution certainly was, its theological convictions the foundation of our liberty. The left’s deifies the state for the benefit of those who rule it, and abides no other God before it.
The tide is turning. The façade of inevitability is cracking. Courts are rediscovering the separation of powers and the nondelegation doctrine. States are reclaiming their constitutional jurisdiction. Parents are standing. Young men and women, born into the ruins of postmodernity, are looking not for self-expression, but for meaning, duty, and roots. They are beginning again to build.
And they must. The counterrevolution is not a moment, but a movement. Not a reaction, but a reformation. Not a restoration of the past, but a resurrection of the eternal.
And it is far from certain, and far from over.
Yet I believe we will win. I believe the next century will not be defined by a self-deified elite, but by those who dared to rebuild from the ruins. And as always, the future will belong to those who believe in it enough to fight for it.
So fight. And build. And believe.
The left’s revolution is dying. Let the Republic rise.
Rod D. Martin
Grace Hall
May 31, 2025
"And it is far from certain, and far from over.
Yet I believe we will win. I believe the next century will not be defined by a self-deified elite, but by those who dared to rebuild from the ruins. And as always, the future will belong to those who believe in it enough to fight for it.
So fight. And build. And believe.
The left’s revolution is dying. Let the Republic rise."
OR A New Set of Elites.
The Old Set (post WWII) stopped believing In God, Western Culture. They are dying, replaced by....Who(?). That's gonna take some time to figure out. I'm 77 so I won't see it. You Kids Have Fun.