mr hornberger tells you the reality of freedom here in the empire and i suspect you haven't thought about these things that much;

In 1978, an old high-school friend of mine gave me a book to read entitled A Time for Truth by William Simon, who had served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1974 to 1977. After reading the book, I told my friend that I had found it to be interesting but also that I had found Simon’s preoccupation with restoring liberty to America somewhat weird given that the United States was already a free country.

Like most other Americans, I attended public schools, which, of course, was run by government officials. That was where I was indoctrinated, along with everyone else, into believing that I lived in a free country. I was among millions of other children who were required to stand every morning to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which included the phrase “with liberty and justice for all.”

By the time I graduated high school, my indoctrination was complete. I had absolutely no doubt that I lived in a free country. I’d venture to say that the same is true for 99 percent of other students who attend America’s public schools. They graduate convinced that they live in a free country and oftentimes live the rest of their lives with that mindset.

But it’s a lie, as I learned several months after reading Simon’s book, when I discovered libertarianism in a series of books entitled Essays on Liberty, which The Foundation for Economic Education had published some 20 years before. As I began reading the essays in those books, the scales began falling from my eyes.

I realized that I had been lied to since the first grade. The United States is not a free country and the American people are not a free people. They just believe they are, owing primarily to the indoctrination they receive in public school or, oftentimes, in government-licensed private schools......https://www.fff.org/2019/04/19/americas-life-of-the-lie/