Democrats Will Take All Our Rights Eventually — Including Gun Rights

When the Government Decides What You Say, What You Earn, and Whether You Can Defend Yourself, You No Longer Live in a Free Country.

Fibonacci Blue / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A recent essay published in Cultured on Medium, titled “Republicans Will Take All Our Rights Eventually — Including Gun Rights,” caught my attention for all the wrong reasons. It was a rage-filled, emotionally driven screed denouncing Republican power with sweeping declarations and zero evidence to support a single argument. No citations. No court records. No legislative history. Just grievance dressed up as analysis. I decided it deserved a rebuttal, one built the way arguments are supposed to be built: with research, documented facts, and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Because if we are going to have a serious conversation about who is actually dismantling American rights, the record points in a very different direction than that essay’s author was willing to look.

Let’s be honest about what we’re watching unfold in slow motion. The Democratic Party, piece by piece, bill by bill, and regulation by regulation, is engaged in the most sustained assault on individual liberty this country has seen in generations. Gun rights are only the most visible front. Your wallet is next. Your voice is already being managed. And if you think the line stops there, you haven’t been paying attention.

The Gun Grab Is Already Underway

They don’t call it confiscation, of course. They never do. They call it “common sense.” They call it “safety.” But the march is unmistakable.

In 2021, the Democrat-controlled House passed two gun control bills in a single week: one eliminating private firearm sales and another giving the FBI the power to delay gun purchases indefinitely. Then came the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which subjected 18-to-20-year-olds to expanded psychiatric screenings and juvenile record checks before they could exercise a constitutional right. The Democratic National Convention’s 2024 platform called for national universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, federally funded “red flag” laws, and the elimination of the gun industry’s legal immunity. In 2025, Democrats reintroduced the Assault Weapons Ban, legislation that would ban the sale, transfer, manufacture, and import of semiautomatic firearms.

Notice the pattern: each bill is packaged as modest, each one sold as targeting only “dangerous” people. But the architecture being built is one of total control. First, close the “gun show loophole.” Then mandate storage. Then ban the weapon itself. Former Congressman Mike Kelly put it plainly: these bills are “another attempt by Democrats to make it harder to exercise that right.”

Silencing the Voice: Social Media and the First Amendment

Before they came for your guns, they came for your speech. The difference is that they didn’t need legislation. They used the back channels of government bureaucracy and their cozy relationship with Silicon Valley to do it quietly.

The Twitter Files, released in 2022 by journalist Matt Taibbi after Elon Musk acquired the platform, revealed that Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, and even the CIA. The White House, the CDC, the FBI, and the Surgeon General’s office all pressed Twitter to censor posts on COVID-19 vaccines, mask efficacy, the lab-leak theory, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. When the internal emails surfaced, House Democrats on the Weaponization Subcommittee didn’t demand accountability. They attacked the journalists who reported it.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI violated the First Amendment by coercing social media companies to suppress protected speech. A federal district court issued a preliminary injunction forbidding any government agency from pressuring platforms to remove content. The Biden administration fought the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the case on a technicality, leaving the question of government censorship constitutionally unresolved. That a permanent prohibition on these agencies was even necessary speaks volumes.

When Democratic congresswomen formally warned Facebook not to “backslide” on censorship and restore banned accounts, they weren’t suggesting a policy. They were issuing a threat. The First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging free speech. It does not matter if the abridgment is direct or laundered through a private platform under official duress. The result is the same: silence.

Obama’s IRS: Religion as a Target

If Democratic suppression of speech on social media is the modern model, the Obama administration’s use of the Internal Revenue Service against Christian and conservative organizations is its foundational template, and a chilling precedent that has never been fully reckoned with.

Beginning in March 2010, IRS agents began flagging organizations with words like “patriot,” “Tea Party,” or “limited government” in their names for burdensome additional scrutiny, delaying their applications for years and demanding donor lists that the Supreme Court had already ruled off-limits. The House Oversight Committee determined that the targeting occurred amid direct political pressure from President Obama and Democrats following the Citizens United ruling, and that conservative organizations were targeted precisely because their names reflected their conservative beliefs, while progressive groups were not. Franklin Graham wrote to President Obama personally, stating that both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse had been targeted. Dr. James Dobson revealed his organization, Family Talk Action, had been harassed and its tax-exempt application deliberately delayed.

The American Center for Law and Justice represented 41 conservative organizations subjected to what it called “blatant targeting and religious discrimination,” ultimately forcing the IRS to issue a formal apology and enter a consent decree. And yet the Biden-era IRS resumed the same playbook, denying tax-exempt status to a group called Christians Engaged, citing explicitly “Bible teachings” as the grounds for rejection. Let that sink in. A federal agency in the United States of America denied a religious organization its legal status because it taught the Bible.

The First Amendment protects not only speech but the free exercise of religion. Using the IRS as a weapon against churches, Christian charities, and faith-based advocacy groups is not tax enforcement. It is the suppression of religious liberty by bureaucratic harassment, slower and less visible than a court order, but just as lethal to constitutional rights.

Now They’re Coming for Your Wealth

If they can redefine a constitutional right out of existence, they can certainly redefine your right to your own earnings. The Democratic tax agenda is not about fairness. It is about redistribution as an instrument of political power.

A 2021 Democratic tax proposal aimed to seize $2.1 trillion from the private economy over ten years, raising corporate taxes, targeting foreign business operations, and hammering individuals and small businesses with income and capital gains increases. Democrats then introduced the Billionaires Income Tax Act, a proposal to tax unrealized gains, meaning the government would tax wealth that hasn’t even been converted to income yet, fundamentally rewriting the relationship between citizen and state. More recently, Senate Democrats have pushed to make earnings above $1 million subject to a 12% surcharge on top of existing rates, and the estate tax remains a Democratic priority, ensuring that what you built over a lifetime doesn’t fully pass to your children.

The philosophical pretense is equality. The practical reality is dependency. Strip people of accumulated wealth through taxation, regulate their businesses through the tax code, and you manufacture a population more reliant on the state, and therefore more compliant with it.

The Bigger Picture: An Institutional Power Grab

Gun rights, speech rights, religious liberty, and property rights are all symptoms of a deeper disease. The Democratic Party’s ambition isn’t simply policy. It’s structural dominance. Democratic senators introduced legislation to abolish the Electoral College, effectively handing permanent presidential power to population-dense coastal states. Democratic presidential candidates floated packing the Supreme Court from nine to fifteen justices, reducing the nation’s highest court to a partisan rubber stamp. Senate Democrats pushed to eliminate the filibuster, the one mechanism that forces consensus in a divided republic. And Democratic attorneys general filed briefs asking the Supreme Court to curtail First Amendment protections online, while Democrats defended federal censorship programs conducted under the guise of combating “disinformation.”

This is not the incremental pragmatism of a center-left party. This is the systematic dismantling of every counterweight to centralized power: judicial independence, federalism, free speech, gun ownership, private wealth, and religious expression, one “common sense” measure at a time.

The Slope Is Real

The standard rebuttal is that the “slippery slope” is a logical fallacy. But a fallacy requires an absence of evidence for the causal chain. Here, the evidence is the policy record. Background checks became red flag laws. Red flag laws became assault weapons bans. Government “guidance” to social media companies became a coordinated censorship infrastructure involving the FBI, DHS, the State Department, and taxpayer-funded NGOs. IRS “neutrality” became targeted harassment of Christians and conservatives. Millionaire surtaxes became taxes on unrealized gains. Each step is presented as the final, reasonable one. None of them ever is.

Americans who value their liberty should understand that rights don’t erode all at once. They erode one compromise at a time, each one framed as prudent, each one welcomed by a press that asks no hard questions. By the time the final right is gone, people will have been conditioned to believe they never really needed it in the first place. That is the playbook. And it is working.