Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. You’re shutting down my life with your draconian social curbs. There is no way doddering Joe Biden got 80 million votes after his historically anemic non-campaign. These are sentiments that seem commonly voiced today.
Many pundits and commentators on the right and elsewhere are decrying what they see as sheep-like acceptance of the dominant establishment narrative presented by the “mainstream” media, career politicians, and Big Money titans. But the truth may be far more disturbing. Are Americans rejecting manipulations from on high so heavy-handed that a child can see through them? Passively allowing the perpetrators to have their way?
Much like the poor unfortunates who endured life behind the Iron Curtain for most of the second half of the 20th century, Americans seem to be embracing the agenda of a ruling elite they may dislike but feel powerless to do anything about.
Lessons From the Recent Past
Think about a society of obedient automatons who acquiesce to tyranny in a docile manner and one made up of people who simmer inside yet still toe the line. Both are dystopian hellscapes. But in terms of current threats to American liberty, this nation may resemble the latter.
The defining feature of such a scenario is the Big Lie. Remember disgraced pedophile Jeffery Epstein’s implausible jail “suicide”? Trump-Russia collusion? The mind naturally rebels against blatant untruth, yet so many falsehoods flourish nonetheless. This is the classic leavening agent of tyranny.
Famed Czech dissident Vaclav Havel wrote of the phenomenon in 1978 as the Soviet Union maintained its bloodstained rule over half of Europe. In his classic essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel described life in what he coined the “post-totalitarian system.” By this he meant a ruling system that is not based on one centralized power source but rather on a “complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime.”
Do Havel’s words remind you of anything today?
“The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”
A man writing about life under communism in 1978 perhaps described modern America to a T: Big Tech squelching free speech, endless war, fake news, phony science. Heck, he even mentioned “farcical elections.”
Havel’s next paragraph is vital. He wrote:
“Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”
Gunning the Motor
The one-worlders and Swamp insiders who had free rein over our political system from 1988 to 2016 faced what many believed was their Waterloo four years ago when the American people finally rejected them for a populist outsider not beholden to their cartel. To stave off this distasteful act of resistance, the elites had two choices.
One, they could modify their behavior, seek to reconnect with the American people they had long neglected, and hope to painstakingly regain the public confidence they had forfeited.
Two, they could separate themselves all the more from the citizenry and labor to impose Havel’s post-totalitarian control apparatus by utilizing such means at their disposal as their hold over major media organs, the “expert” class in all its forms, and the bureaucratic levers of our national institutions.
We now know which path they chose. In light of this, Biden’s campaign could be seen from another perspective. A major presidential candidate went out of his way not to interact with the American people and is now poised to be installed in the White House following an election charged with one “irregularity” after another.
Biden’s non-campaign, once the butt of so many jokes, holds darkly sinister ramifications. It further removes We the People from our government, which ostensibly is there to serve us. If networked machinery “elects” a president rather than the honest support of sovereign citizens, this nation is lost.
Havel tells us that the post-totalitarian system cannot be implemented without the submission of a subjected people to things they know to be untrue. Thus, it is not the gullible sheep among us who threaten our liberty today. Tens of millions of Americans know they are being lied to. What they choose to do about it will decide whether this country is to rediscover its heritage of freedom or succumb to serfdom.
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Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
