we need government to protect us from...

(and other fun fairytales you can tell yourself)

the enduring tale of government is that we need it to protect us and that if we did not have it some sort of mad max warlord world would pertain in which roving predators would enslave us if we somehow managed to not die first from eating unregulated falafel or using the wrong kind of child seat in a car.

of course, the flipside of this tale is the thesis that this has already happened and that we have simply become so accustomed to it that the warlords in charge have been widely mistaken for some intrinsic aspect of existence instead of the governance without the consent of the governed that it mostly constitutes. hey, it’s just half your income…

i raise this issue because i think it’s time that the great american center woke up to just how broken, predatory, and corrupt this has become.

government is indeed about protecting interests.

it’s just not about protecting yours.

rather than serving the people and securing the so called “blessings of liberty” in their name, it serves itself and its own and the bigger and more technocratic a state becomes, the more this shall be so.

it has been on surreal display these last 3 years and bizarre illogic and privilege of it has reached the point where, all over the world, people got a truly good gander behind the curtain and are starting to ask real questions about all these agents and agencies. this sort of thinking has vaulted into the mainstream. and we need to nurture this. this is the time when we demand rollback.

it’s obvious both that the state serves ends other than ours and how entitled it has become about such pursuits.

it’s also obvious that the rot has become completely systemic and damn near fractal: it exists everywhere at all scales. and none of the malfeasants ever seem to go away.

Phil Kerpen @kerpen

Nikole Flax -- now tasked with leading the IRS's 87,000-employee doubling in size -- was chief of staff to IRS commissioner Steven Miller during the targeting scandal. When Congress investigated, her emails disappeared in an alleged hard drive failure.

theepochtimes.comIRS Official in Charge of 87,000 New Agents Played Key Role in Obama-Era Targeting ScandalHouse Republicans say they will keep a “watchful eye” on the Internal Revenue Service official tapped to run ...

the same government that sought to hide the vaccine data for 75 years and that refuses to even measure the side effect rates for vaccines or report the all cause deaths and cancers appearing in their wake while manipulating media messaging and engaging in widespread narrative based censorship of culpability in wuhan viral research then tap the very same people who orchestrated the weaponization of the IRS against political foes (and claimed the dog ate their homework when caught) to run the unprecedented expansion of the IRS.

and people are just sort of sanguine. i mean, folks are annoyed, but mostly, they just do nothing as the careening corruption continues. people talk about it like its the weather.

“a bit muggy today, isn’t it?”

“my, that was quite the unscrupulous downpour of governmental double-dealing this afternoon, glad i brought my umbrella!”

everyone knows this is going to lead to no good, but it’s just sort of taken as written that no one can stop it or that this is just not quite the fight to pick. we just expect things like this of government. and at a certain point, this itself becomes the problem.

does this israeli cover up even shock anyone anymore?

it should. by any even rudimentary standard of human ethics, this is a horror:

a government that was mandating vaccines and vaccine passports knowingly and deliberately suppressed the side effect data on these drugs to hide a blatant safety signal.

their chief concern was not “how do we stop harming our people?” it was “how do we keep from getting sued?”

does this seem like “government protecting you” to you?

Yaffa Shir-Raz @YaffaRaz

🇮🇱In a leaked video, a research team commissioned by the Israeli MoH warns: "We’ll have to think medical-legal – how to present our findings to avoid lawsuits. Why? Because of quite a few side effects we said: 'OK, it exists and reports exist, BUT STILL GET VACCINATED'".

and honestly, compared to what the CDC and NIH have been doing, this is kid stuff.

this behavior is absolutely endemic.

california teachers unions that provide vast amounts of political funding and thus wield proportionately vast political power just got caught paying for “oppo” research to dig dirt on parents whose heinous crimes were “wanting to get their kids back to school in person” and (outrage of outrages) wanting a say in what is taught there because they cannot countenance curriculums so woke that they have erased martin luther king from black history because “judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin” is hate speech not consistent with CRT.

Reopen California Schools @ReopenCASchools

🚨 BOMBSHELL 🚨 Newly PRA’d emails show @WeAreCTA conducted opposition research on school reopening parent groups during the school shutdowns in CA. Then after a principal was accidentally CC’d, the “damage control” was asking him to illegally delete the email. 1/🧵

these are the people organizing the state to work against the people.

and they are as expert as they are shameless about securing their own interests.

the hunter biden story just keeps getting worse. the litany of graft, pay for play, and kicking money right to a US presidential candidate for peddling influence is vast. and they lied, suppressed the story, silenced a whistleblower, and influenced an election.

they knew full well they were doing it.

best i can tell, there is still NOTHING being done. the son of the president has made tens of millions, perhaps more selling influence and the police cannot be bothered to notice. what are we to call that if not the prerogatives of warlords to do as they will while you may not?

and what choices does one have to navigate such a system?

we cannot even seem to hold elections, much less agree upon their outcomes. and, spoiler alert, this is going to happen again this midterm.

Auron MacIntyre @AuronMacintyre

Democracy is a dead man walking Each side has declared every election they lose fraudulent for literally my entire adult life We will continue to go through the motions because no one knows what else to do but voting as a true mechanism for legitimization is dead

Townhall.com @townhallcom

DOOCY: "If we're all in agreement that it is incorrect to say the 2020 election was stolen, what about the 2016 election?" KJP: "We're gonna focus on the here and now." https://t.co/3NHa3A8NAT

i mean, really stop and think about that one.

in the richest, most technologically advanced country in the history of countries, we cannot devise a system to count and verify votes with perfect, trustworthy accuracy?

come on, man…

of course we could. it would be the work of 6 months to create a verified, auditable, indelible system to tally and validate votes in real time using open source systems.

but the warlords do not want that. that’s accountability and honesty. the wretched state of the current system with its risible security and 2,000 opportunities to cheat and to lie and malign is not a bug.

it’s the key feature of the system.

nobody in power wants it to work. they just want to put thumbs on the scale and foment politically useful outrage.

they just want to undermine any sense that you can make a difference and turn election after election into a cat hoop as the parties switch position but nothing really goes anywhere.

Dont Show Your Cat @DontShowYourCat

classic game of leap-cat

seriously, when was the last time this system become any less captured and corrupt? when last did this ratchet loosen rather than tighten?

this is the intent of the game.

consider the possibility that keeping this threat right at the edge of “maybe we should do something” is the key feature of a system of subjugation. they will take and take and the moment you start to push back, they will stop and allow you to acclimate to the new incursion and once you do, they will start taking again until you have, inch by inch, drifted miles from anything you would once have deemed acceptable as you hope “someone will do something to save us.”

this incrementalism of “never quite today” is how you are eaten by inches and acclimate to the rule of tyrants who sell your predation as panacea from the freedom they have taught you to fear.

each outrage is never quite the straw that makes you buck, but their sum breaks your back in the end.

but it sure looks different when you step back and start to compass the totality of what has been taken and what’s coming next, doesn’t it?

and if the next incursion still seems too small to warrant action for real change, then which one will be? how many dozens more will pass in the same manner? and where will that take you? and is that really what you want?

because it’s never just one more thing. there will always be another and another and another without end and each submission makes the next easier.

and so perhaps it’s time to draw the line and say “no more.”

if not you, who?

if not now, when?