I don't disagree with many of the facts as you lay them out; but I disagree with the conclusions. As well, I resist that passivity, violently.
I did not say anything about being passive. In my estimation - relying on the ballot box or more efforts to make Constitutional Amendments fall under the category of passivity. Especially when dealing with an entrenched oligarchy that has no problem illustrating their contempt for us. Tyrants are not moved by civil measures. I'm far from passive. But my engagement is being done in an arena that Patriarchs like Henry and Paine had to spearhead first in order to prep a mindset that would be required for what would come upon the Colonists in short order.
As you outline below - a warning must be given of what is going to happen as consequences are yet to be visited on us for what has already been sown. That said - most of what I read about this issue limits commentary to false bravado or cognitive dissonance of where we have arrived and are headed.
We are going the way Argentina and Chile and Cuba and Ethiopia and Germany and Italy and dozens of other nation-states have gone in the past. We KNOW where it leads.
It leads to increasinly-violent repression; towards gulags and slave-labor camps and engineered famines and wars done to use up useless cannon fodder. It winds up with mass executions, either for trumped-up crimes, done to spread fear among those not yet arrested...or else for pure ethnic or ideological genocide.
EXACTLY. But most think you are cuckoo for even bringing up that possibility.
"That cannot happen here" is the usual and standard reply.
Unfortunately, such people are ignorant of, or discount wholesale - human nature. And that has not changed in 6000 years of recorded human history.
And all that is necessary for it to continue and to step up the pace, is for good people to do nothing - to hide and cower and pray for a humble spirit to bear it.
Scripture is pretty clear that if a nation is given over to judgment - praying to endure to the end is an admonition from the Lord Himself. For it is Providence that grants a victory over unjust rulers - not our own strength or resolve. To assume we can do anything of ourselves defeats us in advance of any effort we make outside of God.
The MORAL duty of the hour is to try to STOP it - with the means available.
The 'means' has been corrupted into irrelevance. Fact of the current situation.
Article V's time of effectiveness would have been a decade or so ago. But since the rule of law is no longer is respected or followed, it will just be more closing of barn doors after the horse escaped. At this time, article V's effectiveness will be to demonstrate that civil recourse is no longer a possibility against a tyranny. It will provide the justification to do what must be done because it will be the last measure and effort made to avoid what I think is inevitable.
It is not yet the time to hoist the Gadsden Flag and raise a pitchfork. That way leads to quick obliteration, at this point.
If not now, when? After we are all in chains and the examples have been made of those obliterated souls who dared resist so as to cause any and all who oppose tyranny to go silent and dark?
NOW is the time to use the political tools available to either stop this deranged juggernaut, or else cut one's home, one's community, one's city, one's STATE...FROM this madness.
I am of the belief that political tools are at this point, useless. You cannot restrain tyrants via civil means. Period. The Beast is now self-aware. Political tools are for a civil society who are self governed by a set of shared principles and values. We no longer have those in this country any longer, save for sects of a balkanized population that finds itself in the minority of ideological thought and persuasion.
Secession is one such plan. Not the only one but an obvious starting point.
Forget the legal constructs of secession. Simply grow a population to refuse to comply with the beast and have them ready and prepared to defend themselves when the beast comes to force it's will upon them.
"Secession" merely gives the legal caste the power to declare such action illegal and a cassus belli to do much worse much quicker and sooner against the people who refuse to bend the knee. Think of it as asymmetric warfare by refusing the consent to be governed by the beast that has risen up to rule over us.