If Congress is serious about taking a bipartisan stand against peddling divisive falsehoods and manipulating public anger for political profit, then whatever happens to MTG should also happen to AOC.
Of course, we all know that won't happen, and AOC succinctly expressed why: in a totalitarian system, the Good and Righteous People of the Ruling Party get to fudge as many details as they please in their pursuit of Deeper Truth. Facts themselves are politicized.
"Don't bug me about the facts because I'm MORALLY right!" is an interesting stance coming from the party that claims to love and revere SCIENCE! above all other things, but of course that's how they view "science" too. Conclusion first, then find or create "data" to support it.
Totalitarianism is the politicization of everything, including science AND morality. Political calculations are much more important than objective truth. Any standard or universal set of rules that would impede Correct Politics must be bent or discarded.
Correct Politicians only want the best for everyone. They are dedicated to the Greater Good. Any rule or standard that would obstruct their pursuit of the Greater Good is, by definition, evil. That is explicitly how left-wing "scholars" view the Constitution.
Do you Beltway and media elites want to know why there is so much distrust for government out there? Why so much faith has been lost in our institutions? It's because people are sick to death of the obvious hypocrisy and double standards. It is RATIONAL to distrust totalitarians.
Do ANY of the myriad laws, rules, and unofficial standard applied to the rest of us also apply to the political and media elite? Is there a SINGLE burden imposed upon us that they are also required to carry? Is there anything left that isn't politicized to perdition?
The Beltway titters at grotesque spectacles like John Kerry flying a carbon-spewing private jet to pick up a climate change award, but it's one more brick on the load of hypocrisy that has crushed all of our faith in government, media, and big business.
We know YOU don't believe the things we are required to believe. We know YOU won't make the sacrifices demanded of us, not even when we're told the very survival of the planet is at stake. We know it's all totalitarian politics.
And it all descends from the ideal so neatly expressed by AOC: if you're "morally right" - politically correct - then you don't have to be "concerned" with being "factually" correct. Such concerns are unacceptable limits on the power of Good People to do the Right Thing. /end
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When you see a group of politicians as frantic to criminalize all challenges to their legitimacy as the Biden Democrats, you can bet they're planning to massively abuse their power. You don't equate dissent with sedition unless you're expecting a LOT of dissent.
Questioning the legitimacy of authority is actually a healthy tendency. It's a primal human impulse: "Who are YOU to tell me what to do?" America was born from serious questions about the legitimacy of rule. A good system encourages such questions, confident it has solid answers.
The problem is that American government long ago grew far beyond the boundaries of legitimacy envisioned by the Constitution. It does all sorts of things our Founders would not have considered legitimate exercises of authority by their constitutional republic.
I thought often during the latter Trump years about the contrast with Barack Obama's "stray voltage" strategy, which involved saying provocative and often flatly untrue things to prompt discussion of Obama's preferred topics for political gain.
The idea behind stray voltage was that injecting your preferred narratives into national discussion was the goal. As long as people were talking about your issue - even if they were calling you out for lying about it - you could profit politically.
The prime example was Obama and his administration endlessly repeating easily debunked falsehoods about the "pay gap" and women earning 70 cents on the dollar compared to men. It wasn't true, and it was EASY to debunk, but they just kept repeating it like parrots.
The thing that really broke up the conservative movement was the surrender on social issues - the "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" intellectual fad - followed by the utter and total collapse of fiscal discipline in U.S. government.
It sounds like a simple, almost tautological diagnosis in retrospect - our thought leaders gave up on half of their ideology, then gave up on the other half - but it wasn't obvious to those thought leaders at the time, and the order in which the surrenders occurred was important.
Throwing in the towel on social issues stripped the conservative movement of populist energy. Politicians and pundits threw away the ability to speak passionately about subjects of elemental importance to normal people. They gave up red-blooded debate to talk about red ink.
The pandemic highlighted how decades of pushing for socialism have utterly destroyed our ability to measure costs against benefits and evaluate risk. We're down to people refusing to take vaccines until they're 100% effective and demands for lockdown until we have 0% coronavirus.
This neurotic hysteria is a result of pushing people to demand 100% safety and security in all things, and convincing them only bigger maternal government can make the safety blanket bigger. The law of diminishing returns means each 1% increase in "security" now costs billions.
Socialism thrives by frightening people out of taking risks and convincing them to demand Mommy Government take care of all their "grievances." By definition, the idea is to "socialize" all costs. The Big Lie is tricking people into thinking socializing costs makes them vanish.
This is a really interesting point, especially as we watch the return of Barack Obama's Ineptocracy under Joe Biden. Obama and his people were highly credentialed nincompoops who brought us one insanely expensive disaster after another.
Here's another example from yesterday: no, Janet Yellen isn't going to recuse herself from the GameStop thing just because she was lavishly paid off by Robinhood's owner. She's an "expert." Who are YOU to question her integrity?
The obsession with credentials is one of the biggest problems we face, combined with the centralization of power, corruption, elite arrogance, and the Western world's embrace of authoritarianism. Bubbled elites are claiming more power over our lives and demanding less resistance.
Xi Jinping's speech at Davos boiled down to: The world has no choice but to do business with China, and if you want to do business with China, you need to stop criticizing our tyranny and questioning our lies about the coronavirus.
Xi's address to the World Economic Forum will serve as well as any other moment for historians to mark the beginning of the Authoritarian Era. He said nothing new, but he restated the narratives and demands of Chinese fascism from a post-pandemic position of aggressive strength.
For the first time, Xi spoke to a world that is beginning to accept the tenets of authoritarianism, thanks to the incredible political and economic damage from China's coronavirus. China's ideals have become as viral as Covid-19.