Happy Friday and Independence Day weekend!
I wanted to do an email themed around the idea of independence and sovereignty today.
In my research, I came across this quote from Thomas Jefferson.
"If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."
As powerful as that quote is, historians today believe Jefferson never wrote it.
Nobody can find it in a single letter, speech, or document. It's a paraphrase somebody invented, and the internet ran with it.
However, there is a documented quote from Jefferson that is even better.
In 1785, Jefferson published a book called Notes on the State of Virginia. In it, he wrote this, verified, in his own hand, in his own book.
"Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now."
Ever the wordsmith, Jefferson carefully selected a word that stands out to me.
Keeping.
As in custody. As in, your body would be kept by someone else. Managed. Held. Supervised by a custodian who decides what you need and when you need it.
As much as Jefferson worried about tyranny, he also worried about custodianship.
About a world where you technically own your body but someone else holds the keys.
Sound familiar?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Unfinished Revolution
We tend to think of the American Revolution as a finished event, but the founders didn’t see it that way.
They were openly terrified that independence was the easy part. The hard part was keeping a free population that could remain free. John Adams put it plainly in 1765, a decade before the Declaration.
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people."
A citizenry that stops educating itself will lose its liberty through passivity.
Freedom gets handed back, one small surrender at a time, to whoever seems willing to manage things.
2026
Nobody prescribes your medicine and diet at gunpoint.
Jefferson's nightmare arrived quieter than anyone probably would have imagined.
Think about what the average American man knows about himself.
He knows the exact price of a Bud Light. He knows his fantasy football roster. He can probably even tell you about the Kelce-Swift wedding.
But how many men have ever checked their free testosterone number?
Anyone can order their own lab work. But the system was never built for him to have sovereignty.
He gets seven minutes with a doctor. He gets told "your labs are normal" based on a reference range that includes sick 80-year-olds. He gets a shrug when he says he feels like garbage at 38.
Meanwhile, peptides with decades of human data sit in regulatory limbo. Compounding pharmacies get squeezed. Insurance companies decide what counts as "medically necessary" for your hormones.
No villain. No tyrant. Just a thousand small custodians, each holding one key to a body that's supposed to be yours.
The uncomfortable truth is that most of that sovereignty was handed over willingly by us.
Every time you accept "normal" without asking for the actual number, you cede a little ground.
Every time you outsource the entire question of your own biochemistry to a system with seven minutes to spare, the keeping gets a little deeper.
Jefferson feared the government would become the keeper.
He never imagined we'd volunteer.
Fighting Back?
So what does the second revolution actually look like?
Not rage. Not throwing out everything doctors say.
The founders' answer was less exciting and more durable. An informed citizenry.
Adams said liberty requires knowledge.
Applied to your body, that means a few unglamorous things.
It means pulling your own comprehensive blood work and learning what the markers actually mean.
It means knowing how to reconstitute your own peptides.
It means walking into a provider's office able to demand the treatment you want.
That's the revolution. It looks like homework.
Which is exactly what the founders said freedom would look like.
They knew liberty would belong to the people willing to do the work of keeping it.
Final Thoughts
The man who knows his labs, understands his protocols, and can explain why he's running what he's running has jurisdiction over his own body in a way no system can really touch.
The man who doesn't is in someone's keeping. It doesn't much matter whose.
The founders finished step one and left step two to every generation after them.
An informed citizenry, permanently, forever, or the whole thing slides backward.
The revolution was never finished.
It was handed to you.
What are you going to do with it?
Happy Independence Day and have a fantastic weekend!
Best,
Hunter Williams