or How to Fight Against the Madness
IAIN HUNTER
As 2026 unfolds before us, a few sterling people will be getting on with pushing back against the global communist coup d’état. The majority, alas, will continue to keep their heads in the sand, happy that they still have a job and a standard of living to maintain. Others who feel something is wrong and who may be in various stages of working out what it is may be clutching their heads, lost in a depression, a pre-cursor to an all-pervading sense of hopelessness. What will be will be, they may think; the system holds all the cards and there is nothing we can do about it. They are wrong.
Most people who have a conservative outlook on life are not activists. For them, being an activist is the very antithesis of being conservative in their minds; they sit at home hammering keyboards or grumble in the pub about the state of the country while doing very little about it. It is an old cliché that evil triumphs when good men do nothing but doing nothing ourselves has led to our being governed by the incompetent and the malevolent. Doing nothing is a luxury we can no longer afford.
Rachel Mathews, the ‘Accidental Activist’ who was the driving force behind Council Watch has shown the way. There are two ways to do this; either we can exercise our right to attend Council Meetings and address the Council, or we can become councillors ourselves. It doesn’t matter whether we stand as Parish, District, Borough, Town, County or City Councillors. Ideally, we can stand as independents or as members of Reform UK, Advance UK, UKIP or one of the other minor parties. If standing as members of parties, we should follow your own consciences, not party diktat. If conscience and the party line coincide – great; if not, we must stand up.
We know, thanks to UK Column and the indefatigable Sandi Adams, that the globalists’ climate policy is being handed down to local councils, often by-passing national governments. It is being implemented through organisations such as C40 Cities, ICLEI and Unitary Authority Metro Mayors among others. There are many other destructive globalist policies eating away at the fabric of the nation, not least the two-tier justice system, the war on farmers, mass migration and the sexualisation of very young children. We can deplore all this, write to our MPs and go on marches but the truth is that our protests will largely be ignored by the Fabian regime. Direct action is what is required and that may be uncomfortable for many of us. We are simply not used to it.
This where we can make use of a device known as The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates. This is an important concept of Protestant thought developed during the Reformation which has been around since ancient times. It is a mechanism for addressing the evils of a tyrannical government in a constructive, effective and, above all, peaceful way. It has lain dormant for too long but some people in the United States have lately rediscovered it; they have started to use it to roll back the progressive excesses that have infested their public lives and civic governance.
When we consider governance, it has three original elements: The family, the church and self-government. The collective expression of these three elements is civic government which grew into national government. Hence national and civic government should be in accord with the three original elements. This is where things have gone badly wrong. In the grip of the political parties and their activists, government has placed itself above them and, by interfering with them, rendered them subordinate. We will all know how the state interferes with our private lives. In public life, nowhere is this more visible than in the fall of the established Church whose bishops are keener on pandering to modern political fads than preaching the scriptures and attending to the spiritual life of their flocks.
The first thing to understand is what is meant by the term magistrate. It is not merely a Justice of the Peace, officiating in the lower courts of law, as is widely understood in England and Wales. In ancient Rome, a magistratus was one of the highest government officers possessing executive as well as judicial powers. In other parts of the World it was used to describe a person with executive power over a geographic area and in post-Roman European kingdoms, especially in city-states, the term magistrate was used as an abstract generic term denoting the highest office, regardless of the formal titles (e.g. Consul, Mayor, Doge), even when that was actually a council. The term “chief magistrate” was applied to the highest official. In sovereign entities it was the head of state or head of government.
The doctrine was redeveloped by Jean Calvin in Geneva from a more elaborate doctrine of the lesser magistrates first employed in the Lutheran Magdeburg Confession of 1550, which argued that the “subordinate powers” in a state, faced with the situation where the “supreme power” is working to destroy true religion, may go further than non-cooperation with the supreme power and assist the faithful to resist.
With Calvin in Geneva in 1554-1556 was John Knox who would later establish the Church of Scotland. Knox had been exiled in England between 1549 and 1554 and was a great friend of bible translator and Bishop of Exeter, Myles Coverdale who became Godfather to Knox’s son in 1558. At one point it looked as though Knox might become a bishop in the Church of England. He went back to Geneva until 1559 where he busied himself with sermons and writing before his final return to Scotland.
Knox is most famous for The First Blast of the Trumpet Against This Monstrous Regiment of Women (meaning Bloody Mary of England and Mary of Guise, Regent in Scotland to her daughter Mary, Queen of Scots). However, he also wrote at this time a more important treatise, The Appellation from The Sentence Pronounced by the Bishops and Clergy: Addressed to the Nobility and Estates of Scotland 1558. This amounted to an exposition of the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates complete with over seventy biblical references in justification. It is worth familiarising ourselves with them; you may find this link easier to read.
In broad outline, the Doctrine says that when a higher-ranking civic authority makes an unjust, unlawful, immoral, tyrannical or otherwise repugnant ruling, court opinion or policy, it is the God-given right of the lower authority to refuse to obey. Moreover, it is obliged, it has a duty, to resist to protect the people over whom it has jurisdiction.
As an illustration of the principle involved, consider what the Roman Emperor Trajan is reputed to have said when putting a captain of the praetorian guard in possession of his post. He gave him a drawn sword, according to the custom, saying, “Use it for me against my enemies if my commands are lawful; if they are not lawful, use it against me.”
How is this done? The lesser magistrate interposes himself between his people and the higher authority and it is important that his people stand with him. This works both ways. The higher authority is similarly obliged to act if the lower authority does or proposes to do something unlawful or evil.
This is illustrated by the story of Publius Petronius, who was Roman governor in Syria from AD 39 under the Emperor Caligula. In response to communal rioting in Judea when Jews tore down a statue of Caligula in Jamnia, the Emperor ordered that a statue of himself should be erected in the Temple in Jerusalem. This was wholly unacceptable and a stand-off ensued eventually culminating in crowd of thousands of Jews facing off against thousands of Roman soldiers. They made it plain to Publius that they would not back down, and the threat of violence was in the air. Publius walked between them and the soldiers and, addressing the Jews, promised that the statue would not be erected. He wrote to Caligula asking him to rescind his order. Caligula wrote back ordering Publius to commit suicide but was assassinated shortly thereafter. It ended happily for Publius; the ship bringing the news of Caligula’s end arrived before the one bringing the suicide order which was duly ignored.
Neither Trajan nor Publius Petronius would have known of the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates, but in their words and actions they demonstrated that they understood a principle which transcended time, cultures and religious belief. Rome at the time was still pagan.
The beauty of the Doctrine is that it goes hand in glove with Common Law. What a lesser magistrate is doing when he (includes she) interposes himself is recognising the obligation in Common Law to speak up or to act when a wrong is perceived and inalienable rights are infringed. If good men (includes women) fail to stand up, then the tyrant has the convenience of planning for his next move or action. Whereas if they do make a stand then the tyrant has two choices: He can either withdraw in response to the challenge or he can ‘double down’ which forces him into the open where others can more easily see his true nature and the opposition gains strength.
There has been success in using the Doctrine in the USA. In several counties in Michigan and Ohio people have got themselves elected, taken control of their County Boards and thrown out DEI measures. Groups of parents forced School Boards to remove all LGBTQ material from the syllabus. More and more people are realising they cannot stand aside; they have to get engaged and confront the boards in the control of lawless men who have perverted everything, turning common sense and custom on its head, claiming good is evil and evil is good. Fundamental change was immediate and grew quickly. Once started it spread like wildfire.
If people are going to stand for election as councillors themselves, all well and good but, unless there is a massive turnover of councillors at an election, they are likely to find themselves in a minority as the rest of them carry on implementing bad policy. It will a long hard struggle to convince any of them.
If people aim to persuade existing councillors to take a stand, the first thing to appreciate is that there are some good people working as councillors who have genuinely open minds. There are also party puppets, lots of them, who will adhere to the central party line. They may be a lost cause and all that can be done is to work to remove them from office. The most important thing is to be prepared. There is only three minutes available to people who wish to address a council, so a speech has to be tightly written and be on point. It’s no good hoping to ‘wing it’. Speeches have to be concise, clear and logical so rehearsal and the employment of rhetorical devices will help enormously.
Once a councillor, or group of councillors, has been convinced to take a stand, it’s not over. The higher power may respond aggressively, and smear campaigns will be mounted. Matters may get very rough. People will need to stand with them to demonstrate solidarity and be prepared to put themselves out and, if necessary, make sacrifices.
Finally, for a really good explanation of the Doctrine, listen to Pastor Matt Trewhella talk about it in this interview with Mark Anderson, the North American correspondent for UK Column. The interview is two years old and much of the references are to the tyrannical excesses of the Biden administration in the USA.
Pastor Trewhella has a book on the Doctrine which is selling extremely well and is available on Amazon for £12.45. There is a kindle version for £5.21. It is well worth having a copy.
There is also at UK Column a podcast of Charles Malet talking to nurse Laura Demaray in Idaho about her use of the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates during the Covidocracy.
It doesn’t matter what you wish to fight against it can be used. It can be used against the climate ‘emergency’ and net zero measures, geo-engineering, ‘health’ measures, fifteen-minute cities, 5g masts, wind turbines, solar farms, mass Muslim migration or sexualisation of children. No-one is coming to save us. It is up to us. We need to get together, get organised, learn how to use the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates and just say no – as more and more good people in the USA are now doing.
This article (The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates) was created and published by Iain Hunter and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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