Reign of Error
Where Incompetence Ends and Evil Begins
Credit: C-Span
One of the best films I’ve seen in the past 20 years or so is “The Lives of Others” (2006.)
Set in East Germany during the Cold War era, the film provides an authentically creepy take on life behind the Iron Curtain, whether depicting the shabby gloom of half-lit, potholed streets, everyday acts of soul-stealing corruption, or the palpable paranoia in a society where everyone is spying on everyone else.
To a Westerner, habituated to freedom and an existence where restraint is imposed principally by the self, and not the state, the film feels literally foreign: Something that happens to someone else, somewhere else. My reflexive response when exiting the theater many years ago was: “That couldn’t happen here.”
The West, after all, at that time, provided a technicolored counterpoint to the leaden lives led by others in the East Bloc. That was affirmed in 1989 with the fall of the Wall and the ensuing breakup of the Soviet Union. Freedom and democracy had prevailed. Just one superpower remained standing. History, we had it on good authority, had arrived at its graceful, orderly end.
That was then.
If I were to watch “The Lives of Others” today my reaction might shift a few degrees: "Could that happen here?”
A generation after that triumphal era, life in the proverbial land of the free, at the very least, rebukes the assertion that history is over. On the contrary, we seem to be in the grip of unfeeling, indifferent forces. We may not live behind the Iron Curtain, but it feels as though we are enmeshed in a velvet one with no clear way out. Life in the “democratic” West may be comparatively soft, but it can also be smothering, suffocating even, under the rules, diktats, and even whims of an emergent overclass.
The exercise of power is, of course, required for any society to be coherent and functional. Someone has to be in charge. On the other hand, power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. It tends not to satisfy the appetite, but quicken it.
Power arises alongside its countervailing urge, freedom, producing an inevitable tension between the two. It’s a yin/ yang arrangement. Nature bestows freedom. Man asserts power, effectively taking his cut. Implicit in power’s exercise is the urge to control. But what first must be controlled is power’s willful impulse.
The Liars’ Club
Over the past decade or so, lying, one of power’s most reliable stratagems, has shed much of its moral baggage. As the bar has been lowered on integrity, lying has become increasingly accepted, the falsehoods more brazen, and the practice defter. Lies now comprise the mortar layered in between the bricks of gaslighting, scapegoating, censorship, and outright demagoguery.
The ability to dissemble in ever more sophisticated ways not only emboldens our elites but also enables them to fine tune the public’s response. Stoking fear and angst conditions the people to grow more dependent on the dubious assurances and arbitrary directives of those in charge.
The modern roots of official prevarication reach back to LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon and Watergate. Then along came Bill Clinton, turning the practice into an art form with his parsing of the word “is.” In retrospect that piece of semantic legerdemain was a relative trifle, soon to be followed by Bush and the WMD debacle. Then came the rise of the Security State post 9/11 which has institutionalized the practices of surveillance and micro managing the truth. Ironically, the Department of Homeland Security was formed because the FBI and CIA, serving their respectively separate domestic and foreign roles, had failed to communicate with each other in a collegial, transparent manner. Now they communicate all too well - in the shadows - and seamlessly with the likes of Facebook, Google and media dupes; with the NSA and its satellites, weaving a wide techno bureaucratic net, broad in reach and indiscriminate in scope.
The lying as habit regimen took further root during the Obama years, notably with the regime’s spin on Benghazi, whereupon it got another upgrade when the sanctimonious James Comey did his artful best in 2016 to run campaign interference for Hillary Clinton - she of the insecure home brew server jammed with classified materials. Given that the fish rots from the head, Comey proved to be the perfect leader of the modern FBI - a veritable den of intrigue - before his escape to William and Mary to teach…Ethics.
In his wake the artful lying has yielded to more brutish tactics as embodied by the multi pronged, multi front attempt by the presumed guardians of justice to take down Trump by any means possible.
The Democrats’ and the Deep State’s obsession with Trump is a curious matter. After all, when Trump first sought election his opponents dismissed him as a joke and his campaign a speed bump on Hillary’s road to her coronation. Come November 2016, it was time for the instant pivot - a Democratic specialty these days. Trump was now an “existential threat,” to “our democracy,” the second coming of Adolf Hitler. The word went forth. The man had to be stopped - pretty much by any means necessary.
Animal Farm, Guinea Pigs
Along with the rolling torment of Donald Trump, the regime and its proxies have targeted in various ways some of his fellow renegades such as Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Taibi, Robert Malone, and Brett Weinstein, to name some of the better known figures stepping out of line. (There are countless lesser known others whose names we will sadly never know.)
Alongside this campaign of selective harassment, the managerial elites have been running a succession of real time experiments on whole populations. The deadly campaign surrounding Covid, utterly lacking in informed consent and its fundamental assault on individual freedom, may be the most pernicious, but it hardly stands alone.
Other points of attack against the people include…
The assorted machinations surrounding the election of 2020 to suppress relevant information and corrupt the voting process to - at the very least - tilt the playing field in the Democrats’ favor..
Government collusion with Big Tech to censor and discredit dissident voices. (Viz. James Baker, the FBI, Twitter, and Facebook. Viz, as well, the aforementioned only exposed once Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.)
Classifying parents who show up at school board meetings with legitimate questions about how their children are being educated in public schools as domestic terrorists.
Heedless and wasteful government spending creating a persistent inflation that dispirits hard working people - as it slowly impoverishes them.
Inviting some 10 million unvetted non citizens into the country, leaving U.S. citizens - who had no say in the matter - to deal with the fallout and pick up the tab.
Apres Le Deluge…?
Recently a hurricane of biblical proportion struck the southeastern United States. A storm of the century left parts of western North Carolina, in particular, looking as it did 100 years ago. In some locales mules were employed to bring relief supplies into terrain which was overnight turned into roadless wilderness.
Amidst the maelstrom a couple numbers emerged, largely unnoticed and uncommented upon by the mainstream media.
The first number was 425,431, a figure pried out of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by enterprising members of Congress and dumped on a Friday afternoon. That is the number of known convicted criminals detained by ICE at the border, but then released into the United States. That figure includes 13,099 convicted murderers, and nearly 16,000 convicted sex offenders. (Say hello to the new neighbors.) ICE refers to these individuals, somewhat antiseptically, as “non-detained, non citizen convicted criminals.” The agency is unable to locate them; it has no idea where they are.
The second number was $1 billion.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, disclosed that FEMA’s budget for emergency relief was tapped out. (DHS oversees FEMA, which stands for Federal Emergency Management Agency.) Mayorkas was wondering out loud where he would find the necessary funds to address the next hurricane. In the meantime, it was revealed - though not by Mayorkas - that over the past two fiscal years FEMA has spent $1 billion of its budget doling out assistance to illegal migrants.
Recently Kamala Harris said that she was a key player in all major policy decisions made by the Biden administration and that she wouldn’t take back or modify any of those decisions if she had the choice.
In other words, Harris was signing on wholeheartedly to the Biden project/ legacy…which, from the current perspective, appears to be turning America into a country resembling East Germany circa 1975, with a hearty dash of modern day Honduras thrown in for a bit of added spice.