The Ultimate Privilege
The ability to use the powers of government indiscriminately for one's own ends is the ultimate form of privilege in the modern age.
It has recently been alleged that then-candidate Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, just prior to the 2020 election, solicited his friends in government who were former intelligence agents to publicly declare the politically embarrassing Hunter Biden laptop “Russian disinformation.” The pressure worked, and news outlets quickly reported that 50 former intelligence agents had all declared the laptop story had “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”
As we all now remember, this was used unceasingly to not only disarm the impact of the laptop revelation, but also to convince news outlets and social media to severely restrict reporting on it. Twitter infamously disabled the New York Post’s link to the story.
It Was State Propaganda All Along
According to reports, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell testified to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees that “then-Biden campaign senior adviser, now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken ‘played a role in the inception’ of the public statement signed by current and past intelligence officials that claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
Of course, we now know that statement was created by those past intelligence officials without evidence and solely for the political impact it would have on the upcoming election and with no regard for its truth.
Thus, the authority of the government was invoked to sway the American people on an issue that very well could have turned many of Joe Biden’s more reluctant voters off. The information found on the younger Biden’s computer were not limited to images of a debauched lifestyle, but also evidence that suggested he had been involved in corrupt, and potentially illegal, graft in Ukraine and China. Moreover, credible evidence existed suggesting a link to the elder Biden himself. The details of all of this, however, are not as important for these purposes as the fact that a politically embarrassing fact was revealed, and one candidate was able to trade on the reputation and authority of the United States government coming to his aid to not only create the appearance of exonerating him, but simultaneously vilifying his opponent as a collaborator in Russian disinformation.
Government Usefulness Privilege
Lately, we are bombarded with a constant refrain insisting to us that the most powerful person in the United States is any white male. So-called “white privilege” is presented as the key to wealth, influence, luxury, and power in America.
One would think that the number of white men in America who have insufficient power to keep themselves from overdosing on opioids in a rundown apartment in a deserted post-industrialized Midwest town would be enough to disprove this white privilege myth.
There is a source of extreme privilege in the US, but it has nothing to do with skin color or any other demographic consideration. If you are useful to the established state, you have the privilege to do essentially whatever you wish, with no consequences, and as an added benefit, government agents and the media will risk their own reputations to smear your political opponents free of charge.
It is not merely the acquisition of political office that grants this privilege. And as will be discussed below, smaller versions of this privilege are granted to nonpoliticians who are also useful to the government as activists, terrorists, disruptors, mouthpieces, and similar types. But even once one obtains power in the US, to benefit from this privilege, they need to be viewed by the established state apparatus as useful to it. This means they must use their power to helps further entrench existing government agencies, grant them more power and security, and expand or create new agencies where more of their acolytes can be given soft, lucrative positions with nearly infinite job security and the opportunity to wield unearned power over other Americans’ lives.
Today, employees of these agencies have learned that they can trade on the reputation and authority of the government they represent. The average US citizen has been hypnotized to treat government as synonymous with trustworthy. It is another one of our myths in this nation that, when someone becomes employed by the government, they suddenly loose all interest in their own financial well-being, lose all non-neutral political opinions, and have no interest in enforcing their opinions on others. The same average US citizen easily assumes the opposite of any business owner or private entrepreneur, but cannot imagine government employees being in it for themselves in any way. And the prevalence of this sentiment makes it all the easier for government employees to abuse their positions. If they say they have done a study, and it turns out the public would be better off giving them more money and power, the public would treat it as if it were a neutral observation of fact. But they would immediately recognize the self-serving nature of that statement if a business said it.
Perhaps this all has to do with our lack of imagination. We can’t imagine what a government employee might want in life that he could use this false attribution of trustworthiness and authority to get. But we know that all people want financial security, job security, a sense of importance, to have their opinions validated, and to see their preferred candidates elected to office. Government employees are no different, and they have the means to do all of those things. They just need to ensure the right people get in power, that the right messages are treated as true, and the wrong personalities are treated as traitors.
The most useful set of people to government employees are politicians. Getting the right people into positions to write and enforce the laws further entrenching government power is so irresistible it probably doesn’t even consciously occur to them that they are doing it much of the time. Apart from literal scheming, as in the false statements of past intelligence operatives regarding the Biden laptop, the positions they get behind, the language they use in public addresses, and even the decisions they make within the jurisdiction of their own jobs will naturally drift toward those which will ultimately result in some benefit to them.
But at the present time we are also confronted with “useful” activists. These are the protesters, boycotters, academics, celebrities, and even terrorists, who the government elites find useful for furthering the messages they prefer or suppressing messages they dislike. It is easy to see this everywhere in modern America. For example, terrorist groups pretending to oppose tyranny or fascism (using ironically tyrannical and fascistic methods) roam the streets in places like Seattle and Portland terrorizing non-radicals, damaging businesses, and assaulting those who speak out against their preferred point of view. And even if they are arrested, they are routinely released on little or no bail, they are rarely charged with anything, much less anything approaching the seriousness of their conduct, and to boot they are given cover by government officials as “kids getting a little out of hand” or as rare examples that don’t speak for the entire group.
A person engaging in similar conduct who is even remotely associated with the “right-wing” or any other “small government” ideology gets no such privilege. All branches of government converge on him to ensure he is not only punished to the fullest extent of the law, and then some, but also that he is publicly vilified as a traitor and insurrectionist before even standing trial. No conciliatory tone is taken with respect to his allegiances, and his crimes are taken as evidence that this individualistic mindset that opposes large governments is really just “right-wing” and that all right-wingers like him are potentially dangerous. If there are any doubts about this, just consider the differential between the treatment of the January 6 “insurgents” and the Tennessee capital “peaceful protesters.”
Inevitable Decomposition
This should all be very predictable. No man is immune to the desire for security, admiration, and influence. These temptations are not new to the human race, but something has unleashed them on the Western world in particular and loosened all their restraints in recent years. Documenting the decomposition of society that comes with it is the point of this project.
What causes this? This must be a question left open for future generations to consider with the benefit of hindsight, but let this example be informative. In the present age, the notion of government has become a drug. It addicts those with government positions to the use their trustworthy appearances to influence and control the rest of the citizens, and it lulls the rest of the citizens into the stupor required to view them as trustworthy in the first place. By erecting the government bulk around our society as we have today, we have created a self-perpetuating demon. It uses what power it has to accumulate more, and it uses that power to accumulate even more.
The universal urges toward security, admiration, and influence guarantee that any such structure, so long as it is staffed with human beings, will exhibit these properties eventually. Restraining social forces may hold this at bay for a while, perhaps even for centuries, but eventually, little by little, men find ways of exploiting the vulnerability of the system in which they operate to this kind of influence. Gradually, systems of government mutate as each individual with access to this ultimate privilege uses it in ways that should be entirely predictable.