Dale Williams’ Free West Radio Program was conceived as a forum for defending and promoting the right of each State of the Union to shape its own unique culture, course and destiny.

The rise of a Free State Movement is, in part, a natural consequence of startling increases in the Federal Government’s encroachment on state’s rights. But, it is also a byproduct of the independent character of people living in the Western United States.

Most states in the Union long ago accepted a status as simple departments of the central government. In regions like America’s northeast corridor, you won’t hear much talk of state sovereignty. The concept isn’t part of the region’s sense of what makes a good American.

A state sovereignty resolution — much less a discussion of actual state sovereignty –  just doesn’t compute for most people from that part of the country. In fact, the idea would, in most locales, be met with ridicule as an anachronism, even an absurdity.

All the more reason to take joy in the fact that folks in a few of the Western States, and Texas, show signs of seeing things differently.

Free West Radio exists to accentuate that difference.

Yes, there are still people in America who recall that the States convened the Union, and not the other way around.

In the United States, the word “State” used to mean a place where people governed themselves. As the burden of Federal supervision and taxation edges closer to smothering small and medium enterprise in this country, that definition of the word state is cropping up more and more.

Bad as the present reign-of-the-bureaucrats may be, however, there are strong indications, both from our own Fedgov, and from the private sector, that life in America is about to get a whole lot rougher.

Today’s inconvenience, expense, delay and harassment — the constant companion of the minutely licensed and regulated American citizen — may someday be looked back upon with a touch of nostalgia if the much-telegraphed, coming national emergencies are as severe as some suggest they may be. Fear, intimidation and shock pursuant to our own Federal Government’s reaction to those emergencies may also finally bring large numbers of Americans into a state of doubt about the wisdom of having given so much lip service to the supposed necessity of such an all-powerful central government.

The new muscle which the Federal Government has granted itself in recent years (the “P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act,” the “Military Commissions Act of 2006″ and the “John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007″) means the scale of potential abuses against a citizenry formerly shielded by the Bill of Rights is practically unlimited.

Even the stated, near-term domestic agenda of the Feds, with or without the convenience of a national emergency, is chilling to those old enough to remember freer times.

It is an agenda of licensing, regulation, taxation and surveillance which dwarfs in its scope anything governments have attempted on this continent for 300 years. A dramatic move toward authoritarian rule, from the Panama Canal to Yellow Knife.

Stateless persons never have enjoyed the protection of habeas corpus, the right to bear arms without the worry of confiscation, the right to refuse inoculation, the right to reject audits on the energy usage in their homes, the security of enforced borders or the right to refuse participation in wars of aggression.

We common citizens of the heedless Federal behemoth have been reduced to something much like stateless persons. At present little stands between us, as resources of the state, and the coast-to-coast directorate which the Union has morphed into over the last 148 years. Our professional political class continues to drive on in precisely the same direction that has brought us to this pass… in a process which must, if left uncontested, end in only one outcome.

The New World Order does not quake at the prospect of individual defiance to this process, no matter how widespread. But the prospect of the people — and the states — reasserting their sovereignty under the authority assigned to them by the Constitution of the United States? That might give them pause… and us hope.

-D.W.