We now embark on an election that astounds. It will decide, in North Carolina and across the nation, whether we are to live, as our forebears prescribed, in a free nation and society. Or, instead, whether we will surrender our heritage, mission, and birthright, in favor of a government of corruption, venality, brutality, and despotism. The Declaration of Independence set forth our national aspirations, our defining charge. It also said, after listing a long set of George III's compact-breaking transgressions, that "a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." Unfit he is. This all know. All.