Forty-five years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I read a book called Power, Morals, and the Founding Fathers, by a fine historian named Adrienne Koch. The book was excellent, then and now, and there was one passage in Professor Koch’s work which has remained fresh in my mind to this day. I dug out the book from my shelves this morning. The passage that stayed with me follows.
In a discussion of several issues “important for democracy in our time”, Professor Koch writes,
“The first involves the role of the expert. This represents a serious political problem in a complex industrial society that wants to maintain its democratic ethos. Hamilton was not only an expert in financial matters but really believed that only those who are an expert, a quality he associated with the rich and well-born, should control. To overcome the dangers implicit in control of experts, it is necessary to provide mechanisms for assuring there is constant confrontation of experts so as to bring to light the different issues of fact and value implicit in all recommendations. This is most important, because there is a magical area that surrounds the role of the expert, which is a danger to democracy.” [1 – italics added]
Looking back to my first reading of this passage, it seems that Americans for a half-century have put great trust and enormous funding into seeking advice from “experts” in nearly every sphere of the republic’s life and that the payoff for the investment has been unrelenting disaster. A few of examples of “expert” predictions and analyses that were dead wrong would include: a light at the end of the Vietnam Tunnel from 1965 to 1975; the assessment that infants in the womb are not human beings; the exhaustion of the earth’s petroleum reserves in the 1970s; the arrival of a new and catastrophic Ice Age; cakewalk military victories in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and an overheating of the planet that would yield submerged coastal cities, the end of snow and icebergs, and a year-round, ice-free Arctic Ocean long before 2020.
All the predictors who gave us these half-assed predictions were supported in their absurd analysis with dozens of laughable models, and hundreds of think-tank and university reports that agreed with the laughable models. Naturally, all of these foolish mistakes (lies?) were accompanied by a frenetic media that sharpened the unwarranted fears of the public that the predictions were meant to ignite and keep fueling. Interestingly, the only solution proposed to ward off any of these predicted disasters was for the citizenry to fork over more of their earnings (and liberty) to the national government to spend on work of the always wrong “experts”, their predictions, and their media shills. This reality recently was underscored by a meme showing, if I recall correctly, a picture of Obama and bearing the phrase “If you pay even more exorbitant taxes and surrender your liberties to your government, it will cool the planet for you and your family.”
And now we have the Chinese Virus, and, with it, the predictors have stumbled onto a miracle. Their predictions, studies, and models about the illness have been dead wrong. Yet the country’s entire economy has been closed down — yielding c. 20-percent unemployment — on the strength of that bad analysis, those lousy predictions, and the cunningly soothing words and advice from carnival barkers like Fauci, Birks, the CDC, and thousands of their media allies.
Most of the the latter lack enough brains to take their own temperatures, but some mysterious entity has given them the absolute confidence to assert the uselessness and danger of using Hydroxychloroquine to try and cure those ill with the Chinese Virus, or using it as a defense against it. These hacks chant this warning even as the lives of the sick in many other countries are being saved by the drug. Oddly, U.S. doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel are using it to cure and protect themselves, but I suppose that is because the medical “experts” want to save their foot soldiers. The truth about the drug? Well, even Google confirms there is no harm in trying to save lives with Hydroxychloroquine (2).
Along with these fraudulent “expert” predictors and their media parrots, we are also under attack by Democratic leaders – especially Democratic governors – bent on keeping the republic closed-down until it expires; to use law to prevent people from keeping their jobs and businesses alive and families fed — this they call the “Families First Act”; and slowly preparing a situation in which the citizenry will only be able to vote by mail in the thereby fixed November, 2020, election. Then, after Trump is gone, citizens will be forced to submit to probably debilitating vaccine inoculations, be chipped, cooperate with universal tracking, and be happy to accept an invitation to experience “dignified isolation” in detainment camps.
Doubt this progression? Los Angeles County officials and their health “experts” just confined their citizens (subjects?) to home for three more months, which will further wreck the state’s economy. Concerned for their health? Not a chance. Newsom, Pelsosi, Finestein, Harris, and their fellow fascists have bankrupted California. They are now angling for a federal bailout and they need a slaughtered economic to get one. As always for California’s elected officials and their “experts”, their attitude towards the state’s citizens is precisely the same as their attitude toward babies in the womb, namely, “Fuck’em, make ‘em die.” Dead citizens after all make for more Democratic voters. Ditto, of course, for New York, Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, etc. Indeed, the rule of thumb is “find a Democrat, find a fascist”, or, I suppose, a China-paid communist.
Time is getting short, as the rising number of anti-quarantine and pro-open-up demonstrators across the country suggests. At this point, these courageous people – some of them fully armed, praise God — are rightly aiming at the targets nearest to home; that is, the Democratic governors and local officials of such states as Michigan, Virginia, New York, Minnesota, New Jersey, Illinois, and California. Break the will of these officials and their “experts” to remain fascists, and then let Trump, his administration, Attorney General Barr, and the military try to take care of the rest of the problem.
But, damn it, Mr. President you must get the republic’s coercive power off its ass soon. Treason has been committed by the coup attempts against you and your administration; several states have defied the law and, in essence, are waging an insurrection against the national government and the Constitution; many states can no longer be said to enjoy the “republican government” that is guaranteed by the Constitution; several governors are illegally scuttling the 2nd Amendment in their states, especially here in Virginia; the Democrats are using their governors and Big Tech buddies to censor the citizenry and smash the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion, assembly and speech; at least three dozen former U.S. general officers are attacking and undermining you, with that shitbird McChrystal using technology paid for by the taxpayers to do so; and the Democrats have used the federal health bureaucracy’s “experts” to destroy the economy and weaken national security. YOU MUST ACT, Mr. President, or, by God, the unemployed, impoverished, exploited, confined, but armed citizenry will act. There are, after all, a host of targets who have arrogantly, even joyously identified themselves as haters and enemies of the republic, the Constitution, and the overwhelming number of their fellow citizens. Move soon, Sir, move soon.
It also is worth recalling that, in the latter part of the 18th century, many Americans found an inexpensive, effective, and readily available tool to use to break the will of those of their august, self-important fellow citizens who took salaries, titles, and land grants from the British king and government in return for helping to strip their fellow Americans of their wealth and liberties. The tool was a generous application of a dose of tar-and-feathers, and, more often than not, it somewhat painfully turned the trick. (3)
Traditions meant to protect liberty, are easy to apply, and generally work ought never be abandoned. Tar and feathers is an obvious one. Armed resistance against a Democratic Party and its allies bent on destroying the Union — as it sought to do in 1861 — is another such tradition.
–Endnotes:
–1.) Adrienne Koch. Power, Morals, and the Founding Fathers. Essays in the Interpretation of the American Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell University Press, 1961, p. 59
–2.) https://www.google.com/search?q=hydroxychloroquine
–3.) https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/media_player?mets_filename=evr3107mets.xml
