Expertise Replaces Consent as a Philosophy of Governance
When did the U.S. Federal Government start routinely deceiving the public?
The Perilous Journey of Ionian Virtues, Part 3
Expertise Replaces Consent as a Philosophy of Governance. When did the U.S. Federal Government start routinely deceiving the public? While any specific date is bound to be arbitrary, the fatally flawed investigation of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy marked the onset of a series of coverups from which it proved impossible to escape. The tragic irony is that there was most likely no conspiracy1, and therefore no need on that account for a coverup. JFK's successors pursued a disastrous overseas war financed by ruinous taxation and debt. In response to these financial pressures, the Dollar was de-coupled from gold in 1971, and promptly lost value in international trade. The devalued currency enabled the United States to pay for imported goods by printing paper, while introducing a hidden tax and source of future inflation and indebtedness. Foreign wars and domestic social policy experiments vastly inflated the numbers of unelected officials whose tenure was justified by expertise, rather than by the consent of the governed. These two philosophies of governance are antithetical: The holder of expertise believes that superior knowledge enables him to operate systems of government too complex for the uninitiated to grasp. Failures are not disclosed, because all policies are perforce wise and benevolent. Knowledge of these official secrets further enhances officials' expertise. Fifty million documents classified every year2 chisels an ever-widening gap between those who know and those left in the dark. One example will serve for many: When a newly developed missile slated for delivery to Qatar via Libya downed a U.S. helicopter in Afghanistan, courtesy of the Taliban, the information was suppressed3 and the intelligence official who discovered it by tracing the serial number found in the shell casing was later fired4.
Nullifying the Ionian notion that everyone, regardless of status, is capable of participating in governance if fully informed, office-holders found that they no longer needed popular support to succeed in their careers. Success or failure would instead be determined by pleasing a regulated industry, or the non-profit cadres that grew up around every tax-financed program. At this stage of shadow conflict, everyone chose not to notice that an adversarial relationship between officials and ordinary people had materialized. At first, only mild satire testified to this divergence of interests: 'Your tax Dollars at work' accompanied by a glaring example of governmental waste, or an obviously insincere 'I'm from the Government and here to help'. Even as public officials acted more and more as a class with its own interests distinct from those of the public, they maintained an appearance of exclusive devotion to the public interest by testifying at Congressional hearings, issuing reports, etc. All that changed with the advent of mass surveillance.
Mass Surveillance Institutionalizes Predatory Government Behavior. Edwarod Snowden unmasked the massive extent of Federal spying on ordinary people in 2013, from his own first-hand experience. He was forced into exile for doing so, as he expected would happen, and found asylum in Russia. He was not the first to warn about the dangers of mass surveillance (James Bamford, among others, had done so), but he articulated most thoroughly the nature of the threat posed by the spy agencies to everyone's freedom. Even while employed by the NSA, he kept a copy of the Constiution near him. By the time he revealed the espionage conducted against ordinary citizens, Snowden was fully prepared to give a moral, legal, and philosophical accounting of the basis of his actions, had arranged for cooperating journalists to write about it, and had made sure that he would have no information that might harm U.S. national security or agents5. He documented the active collaboration of device-makers, telephone companies, Internet Service Providers, social media, NSA, CIA, FBI, and other agencies in sweeping up indiscriminately, and without the slightest hint of probable cause, Americans' private emails, telephone conversations, Web-browsing habits, medical records, credit-card transactions, and anything else they could gain access to. Many wondered then what could possibly be the utility of gathering yottabyes6 of such data, unaware that tax records were already being used by the Obama Administration in 2010 to target, intimidate, and silence political opponents7. By comparison with the far more sophisticated techniques of identifying and targeting opponents in use only five years later, the early efforts against Tea Party organizations were crude, primitive, and easily detectable. But they dramatized what could happen to anyone faced with hostile Government forces.
As populist opposition in the ensuing years coalesced into a serious threat to the Deep State8, the previously publicity-shy spy agencies took to the airwaves and pressrooms to broadcast increasingly preposterous assertions of Russian collusion with a presidential candidate. These were based on nothing more than a 'dossier' compiled by a British ex-spy from alcohol-fueled ruminations of a Brookings job-seeker, and from well-paid partisan-fabricated dirt laundered through a law firm as legal consulting. After this failed to achieve the desired electoral result in 2016, they were then recycled in a long-running Special Counsel Investigation which eventually deemed them false. The next presidential election revived the Russia-collusion hoax yet again, this time to deny the existence of a computer containing detailed records of bribery, extortion, and payoffs to members of the Biden family. Though clear evidence was published in the New York Post9, a cadre of '51 intelligence experts' assembled by future Secretary of State Blinken asserted in a letter10 that it was 'Russian disinformation'11, as if the entire computer and all its lurid and incriminating contents had magically materialized from the Kremlin in Moscow to a repair shop in Wilmington Delaware. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency declared the 2020 election 'the most secure in American history'12. Post-election, an assembly outside the Capitol building in January 2021 was ushered in by Capitol Police who opened doors, while persons later identified as FBI agents urged violent confrontation. This was described by House Speaker Pelosi as an insurrection, in a parliamentary maneuver apparently intended to prevent Representatives' objections to the electoral vote-count from being presented13. The insurrection label was then reified and exploited in lawsuits, to characterize opponents as domestic terrorists, and to justify raiding the homes of people who happened to be in the vicinity. In the pre-dawn darkness of a day in June 2022, FBI agents raided and searched the home of a retired Texas couple, handcuffing them without explanation.14 The couple had only ever been outside the Capitol on the date of the insurrection. But raids like this (there were many others) made the insurrection seem more real than it would have otherwise appeared.
The National School Boards Association, acting on a request from a school board in Virginia, picked up the domestic terrorist theme in October 2021, calling for 'the expertise and resources of the US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), US Department of Homeland Security, US Secret Service, and its National Threat Assessment Center' – in other words, all available Federal police forces – to combat parents objecting to their daughters being raped in school15. The Department of Justice and the FBI accordingly investigated these parents and put them on a domestic terrorist watch-list. Soon, domestic terrorist became a synonym for political opponent, or anyone suggesting officials might be exceeding or abusing their authority. Every act of unprovoked coercion makes Government malevolence more overt. Perhaps the intention is to elicit overt acts from dissidents, which can be labeled as domestic terror.
Government Operations Normalize Sado-masochistic Practices. Forcing the un-woke populace to 'affirm' that boys can be changed into girls and vice versa can only be construed as an exercise in humiliation. Such an assertion nullifies common-sense and biological fact in one stroke. Sex is determined at conception, is written into every cell in the body, and is an indelible part of humanity since its origins in multi-cellular life. Humanity as a species survives by sexual procreation. But decades of gender studies produced hundreds of lettered experts prepared to recite on cue that sex is nothing more than a social construct, and that there is no difference between boys and girls. The reader will recognize this bizarre belief as the product of post-modern abolition of objective truth. Nor does it stop with rhetoric. Like Russian collusion and domestic terror, it must be reified – made to seem real. Actual surgical butchery – genital mutilation – is performed to create the cosmetic appearance of the other sex. In schools and other captive institutions, vulnerable individuals are counseled into the belief that all their troubles can be solved by cosmetic genital surgery. They are not told, and will find out too late, that it actually disfigures them for life, irreversibly. Thousands of these operations have been performed, with tragic, often suicidal, results, as the perpetrators must surely be aware. Hospitals and doctors are paid an average of $80,000 for each of these grotesque mutilations, to lend real-world credibility to an utter fiction.
But enriching themselves at the expense of tragically deceived victims is not even the point. The point is to commandeer the resources of the state, with its associated honors, prestige, and privileges, so as to grind their enemies into the dust. They brag about them, as if they were doing heart transplants. And they cite the imprimaturs of Government funding agencies and professional associations, both of which have been staffed with willing accomplices.
The consequences of straying from apparent – though contrived – group consensus can be devastating for fearful individuals. Censorship quickly evolves into threats to jobs, career blacklisting, and loss of livelihood, all of which combine to strip self-esteem to a ghost of its former confidence. Sanctions imposed by professional associations, such as revocation of licensure, 'hearings' conducted without the slightest pretense of due process, forced recantations of remarks objectionable to hyper-sensitive individuals, and the like have both practical and psychological effects. Threats to employment of doctors, nurses, airline pilots, soldiers, and truckers have – not surprisingly – endangered public health, civil aviation, military readiness, and supply chains. In civil aviation, for example, mid-air mayday calls due to pilots' vax-caused cardiac arrest or other emergencies are up 386 percent in the first three months of 2023 over the 2018 – 2019 average.16
The psychological effects of such threats can be just as corrosive, as fearfulness reduces all to servile conformity. Fear of job loss or other sanctions causes people to err on the side of caution, suppressing their own free expression. People silenced by threats, coercion, job loss are less able to form a cohesive group of the like-minded who see through official deception. This habit of fearfulness inculcates a sense of personal unworthiness, of regarding one's private thoughts and observations as somehow less valid than those made ubiquitous through official media. Fear-driven passivity is the real goal of censorship and career sanctions. Thus a sadomasochistic sensibility is built into the routines of a government bent on control rather than consent.
With everyone's hopes and fears displayed on social media, and covertly available to government spies, masses of people became easy prey for psychological operations ('psy-ops'). These techniques migrated from consumer purchase decisions17 to elections and personal health practices, transforming the nature of governance. They caused billions of people around the world to allow themselves to be harmed by injecting experimental gene-altering drugs into their bodies. How this happened is related in detail by John Leake and Dr Peter McCullough in The Courage to Face Covid-1918, and by Robert F Kennedy Jr in The Wuhan Coverup19. A consortium of U.S. health agencies and Chinese bio-weapons researchers inflicted a plague on humanity from a lab-engineered virus that escaped from the Wuhan Virology Institute. Whether this bio-weapon was released through Wuhan's slipshod safety-protocols or otherwise is immaterial. Like arson investigators setting fires, the Baric – Fauci – Zhengli20 trio (BFZ) diligently performed gain-of-function breeding to turn bat viruses into human-transmissible respiratory illness. The likelihood of such a virus emerging through natural evolution is vanishingly small, and in fact no intermediate animal has ever been found. Despite being warned of the obvious dangers21, the BFZ trio persisted in their deadly research.
To cover their tracks, U.S. tax dollars were routed through a cutout called the Eco-Health Alliance, gene-splicing was done to simulate animal-species crossovers, genetic blueprints of early forms of the virus were removed from public databases, and prestigious medical journals were paid by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to publish papers falsely claiming natural origin of the Wuhan virus. Millions died or were sickened by the combined effects of the virus, enforced isolation of whole cities, suppression of known remedies, improper use of ventilators, and panic. Within months, another plague followed, in the form of a purported antidote, a 'vaccine' using the same spike protein used by the original virus that had been engineered to adhere to human endothelial cells22, to hijack the immune system to stimulate billions of antibodies. The downside of this ghastly genetic experiment followed soon thereafter. The designers of this ingenious drug had neglected to consider its effects on other components of the natural immune response, which were weakened in proportion as the monoclonal antibody response was magnified. They also neglected to provide an off-switch, an omission with unfortunate consequences for every organ the spike proteins circulated and adhered to. Cardiological, neurological, hematological, and musculoskeletal damage materialized23, in some cases immediately after injection, in others months or years later. All told, the number of deaths and injuries caused by these injections far exceeds that of all previous vaccines combined. The sudden 2021 – 23 rise in all-cause mortality, or excess deaths, tracks closely in every country the initiation of the covid mass-vaccination campaign and rates of injection. Yet inexplicably, not only do these lethal products remain on the market, they are still recommended by the U.S. public health agencies.
A Global Consortium. With traditional kinetic warfare, there is no mistaking an attack – missiles fly, bombs fall, buildings explode, people are killed or maimed, blood streaks the walls. But this two-part bio-weapon attack – the Wuhan virus and the global mRNA injections – presents a conundrum. The scale of death and injury suggests comparison with acts of war. The conundrum is: Acts of war by whom and against whom? Blame focused initially on the Chinese Communist Party, But there's no 'clash of civilizations' here. It doesn't fit into the traditional template of great-power rivalry. Nationality is apparently irrelevant. In fact, U.S. and Chinese health agency bio-weapons experts and officials actually collaborated intimately, co-authoring scientific papers, mobilizing scientific and popular opinion, back-slapping at conferences, parceling out the work of spreading a smoke-screen over their deadly designs, enforcing conformity, sharing in the bounty of ever-increasing Government funding, and dividing the 'vaccine' spoils among drug producers. This behavior cannot be normalized into any peaceful context, yet most people remain confused about who exactly are the belligerents in this attack on ordinary citizens. Cadres of the Chinese Communist Party have long understood that their careers have almost nothing to do with popular approval. Likewise, U.S. Deep-State officials operate largely without answering to the public or to elected representatives. As with the Chinese situation, expertise serves in place of consent, so despite vast differences in culture and history, the template is starkly similar. Today, however, a global consortium of international bureaucrats, linked by the World Economic Forum, WHO, the Gates Foundation, and other self-appointed international organizations, facilitates an unprecedented degree of global uniformity. Their motivations are various – genocidal (in the guise of population control)24, pecuniary, personal salvation, power-lust, or all of the above, animated by psychopathic arrogance and utter contempt for common-sense, the common culture, and common humanity. Whether the target populace is aware of it or not, the conflict they (we) are engaged in resembles war, with real casualties. Citizens have been taught to hate their country, their ethnicity (if White or Asian), their bodies, their very selves. They have been made to feel guilty for merely existing, as if their lives threatened the Earth's 'sustainability'. The globalists, channeling Karl Marx, in the jargon of prophecy meets technobabble, claim this is all for our own good, to save the planet, and anyway historically inevitable.
The attack on experience-based common-sense, which originated with the post-modern philosophes, leaves people bereft of elementary perception. The virtual world becomes so all-pervasive, especially for the young who were born into it with no knowledge of what life was like before it got sucked into screens, that the real world hardly exists for them. They consider direct sense-experience an inferior and somewhat quaint mode of perception. Distrusting their own observations and experiences, they are easy prey for algorithm-driven artificial-intelligence programs that 'know' what is most likely to ignite their likes and dislikes. These are echoed back to users until they cannot even tell the difference between their own views and what they are induced to believe. Individual personality becomes a casualty of this regime, and with that loss goes any meaningful relationship with others. In the perpetual emergency contrived by alarmist headlines and their reification, fear becomes the driving force of all social interaction, as everyone struggles to avoid the slightest affront to hair-trigger sensitivities. In this way, conformity is enforced.
Yet the Ionian virtues of self-governance, freedom, and pursuit of happiness persist in efforts to:
De-normalize the sado-masochistic cult in control of academia, government, and medicine
Say no to the cult of expertise, the death cults, and the psy-ops distorting our vision
Dismantle the regime of censorship
Grow awareness of the essential nature of free expression in all circumstances
Stop grandiose social and medical experiments lacking an informed societal consensus
Let truth be the test of any assertion seeking assent
Learn from experience what works and what doesn't work.
Let beauty be sanctified
Take courage
We are living through a time of cataclysmic upheaval. It is not a time of linear progress, but rather one of lurching in several directions at once, with chance events determining momentary outcomes. A software engineer who reads the Constitution in his spare time unmasks a labyrinth of official spying on ordinary people without cause. An oligarch buys a social media network and reveals a host of government-directed surveillance and censorship. Pension-fund managers divesting 'woke'-ESG-driven portfolios25, and consumers recoiling from 'woke' products26, bring a much-needed reality check to business decisions. Admissions quotas and curriculum destruction in education are discredited in Florida27, but stubbornly remain in place elsewhere. The art world continues to celebrate kitsch; post-modern culture remains the default contextual wrapper. In medicine, a few doctors28 advise on the etiology of mRNA damage and how to remedy it, while the vast majority of patients suffer in thrall to malpractitioners. Deep-State operatives, reinforced by the weapons and pharmaceutical industries, cling to their privileges. Political disarray or another fiscal crisis could intervene, but no one knows when. With luck, we will survive the cataclysm while also looking out for 'the next best thing'.
[Full essay also published at Isonomia Quarterly and featured at Real Clear History for March 7, 2024 (3rd from top).]
Postscript: Since this essay appeared, I’ve noticed other references to overt government malevolence. Dr Robert Malone talked about "Psychological and Cognitive Warfare on Citizens" — new technologies of influencing the behavior of non-U.S. citizens and enemies alike, that were then turned inward on U.S. citizens. There, in what was once the land of the free, government psy-operators do not differentiate ordinary people from enemies, thus making an enemy of virtually everyone. Here, also, is a very long review of Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare, accompanied by dystopian sci-fi illustrations. Carter likewise notes that ‘the technologies developed for foreign counterinsurgency were being deployed on the home front, the social engineering tools honed in the colour revolutions were being turned against the domestic population as well’. As long as these techniques continue to be used on ordinary people, election outcomes will merely rotate those who enjoy the limelight. Awareness of their overt malevolence can give us the courage us to deny them mastery of our hearts and minds. That’s a reasonably good first step.
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1 See a summary of the forensic evidence here.
2 An explanation of how over-classification undermines democracy and national security.
3 At July 25, 2012.
4 At April 30, 2014.
5 Edward Snowden, late in the pages of his memoir, Permanent Record, describes his sensation at being personally introduced to XKEYSCORE, the NSA’s ultimate tool of intimate, individual electronic surveillance. 'I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who’d ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were being surveilled in gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.' https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/edward-snowden-labyrinth/
6 In a million square feet, two billion dollar digital storage facility at Bluffdale Utah. One thousand terabytes equal a petabyte. One thousand petabytes equal a zettabyte; multiplied by another thousand, an exabyte. It takes a thousand exabytes to make one yottabyte, which is a 1 followed by 24 zeros. This is equivalent to 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
7 August 2010: IRS advises tax examiners nationwide to apply special scrutiny to Tea Party organizations applying for section 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status.
8 'Deep State' is a term that was at first mocked as the delusory belief of 'conspiracy theorists', until former CIA Acting Director John McLaughlin said in 2019 'Thank God for the Deep State': https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4826847/user-clip-john-mclaughlin-god-deep-state%20 . Whereupon the Deep State was not only officially acknowledged, it granted itself Divine authority to supersede the Constitution.
9 https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/
10 Attorney General William Barr stated that suppression of information by means of such knowingly false assertions constituted 'election interference': https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-barr-joe-biden-lied-hunter-biden-laptop
12 'Most secure election in American history'.
13 Insurrection as parliamentary maneuver.
15 https://nypost.com/2021/10/13/school-boards-letter-suggests-arrested-dad-a-domestic-terrorist/
16 Airline Mayday Radio Calls Up 386% in 2023.
17 Freud's American nephew Edward Bernays perfected what he called the 'engineering of consent', persuading women to smoke cigarettes so that they could possess an object resembling a male organ.
18 John Leake and Dr Peter McCullough, The Courage to Face Covid-19.
19 Robert F Kennedy Jr, The Wuhan Coverup.
20 Ralph Baric is the University of North Carolina virologist who parlayed gain-of-function research into a lucrative partnership with Shi Zhengli (the 'bat lady' of Wuhan), financed by Anthony Fauci from U.S. taxpayers' funds through the National Institutes of Health.
21 By Rutgers biologist Richard Ebright, among others.
22 Cells lining blood vessels and vital organs.
23 See Dr Peter McCullough's Substack for his summaries of medical research and his own and others' clinical experience in identifying and treating mRNA-injection-caused deaths and injuries.
24 It is wise to be aware that not all people are well-intentioned; as Archbishop Vigano puts it: 'We must understand that our rulers are traitors of our Nation who are devoted to the elimination of populations, and that all of their actions are carried out in order to cause the greatest amount of harm to citizens. It is not a problem of inexperience or inability but rather of an intentio nocendi – a deliberate intention to harm. Honest citizens find it inconceivable that those who govern them could do it with the perverse intention of undermining and destroying them, so much so that they find it very hard to believe. The main cause of this very serious problem is found in the corruption of authority along with the resigned obedience of those who are governed.'
26 Sales slump at Target and Bud Lite.
27 Christopher Rufo, New College of Florida votes to abolish its gender studies program.
28 Such as Dr Peter McCullough.
I think this early-American episode goes to the question of intent. It seems doubtful that Jefferson intended harm to the United States, which he had helped to create, or to the American people. While any historical dividing-line is arbitrary, there seems to be much less justification in attributing goodwill or good faith to post-JFK Administrations. This post and others suggest a progression from an adversarial relationship with the citizenry, to clear indications of government acting in its own interest (such as with mass surveillance) against political opponents, to over-reaching, constitutional nullification, gross illegality, and outright hostility. So we may be justified in concluding that there is something essentially different about governance now, compared to the way it was in Washington and Jefferson's day.
In response to ' When did the U.S. Federal Government start routinely deceiving the public?', Elliot Werner notes that Thomas Jefferson left notes of Cabinet meetings on his desk, leaving his door unlocked so that journalists could read them. This baffled and incensed President George Washington, Elliot writes.