When the people cannot see the real law, and therefore do not know the law, and worst of all, no longer care about the law, realizing instead that all is merely power, Lenin’s “who-whom?”, then the society has no rule of law.
…
The short version of what follows is that America is now a country without the rule of law. In any federal government action of any prominence, or touching on any aspect of Left power, and in many actions without prominence and without political import, we should assume the rule of law does not exist.
A Democrat who literally got away with murder…
We’ll have to wait and see whether the statute of limitations applies and whether other evidence can be found that matches the crime he describes, because even a confession may not be enough on its own in a court of law.
Reading that story reminded me of this article published back in 2021 during the days of Covid-19, On the Brawndo Tyranny:
Our tyranny is something new in history, and I name it the Brawndo Tyranny. The reference is to the prescient 2006 movie Idiocracy, a dark comedy where a future society of morons starves because they irrigate crops with Brawndo, a Gatorade stand-in (the “Thirst Mutilator”), figuring it’s better for plants than nasty water. Our tyranny is the same level of stupid.
I’m edging closer to watching Idiocracy, but am waiting for modern America to even more closely resemble it. The writer of the piece, Charles Haywood (“Toward a politics of future past”), warns his readers that the piece is a lengthy, technical, legal analysis of government actions at that time, rather than other things that are also leading America to its Brawndo moment.
The point of this exercise is to assist those out there who can sense that everything we are told by our overlords about how we are governed is a lie, but don’t understand precisely what is really going on. Even the few news sources that are not lying do not go into the necessary level of detail about government actions that obviously are outside the rule of law; there is just not enough of an audience. Certainly, this level of detail is an acquired taste, and I sympathize with, because I share, the idea that it is hardly worth bothering. After all, we already know we are being lied to, and the solution is not to better understand the lies, but to silence the liars.
He first defines what it means when we say “the rule of law”, using Dicey’s famous 19th century definition and John Locke. He then looks at three law efforts of 2020-21 and argues that they were all in violation of the rule of law:
- The Eviction Order, issued by the CDC on September 4, 2020, which would prevent landlords from evicting people, on the grounds of keeping everybody in place to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
- The Mask Order issued by the CDC on January 29, 2021, requiring universal wearing of masks in every public place.
- The Emmett Till Antilynching Act (ETAA) (2019).
On that last one you may wonder what lynching was happening in the US at the time, or had happened since the 1920’s, and why this hadn’t been tackled in law earlier. He has some fun pointing out that the most notable previous attempt was the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, introduced by the Republicans and opposed by the Democrats, which failed to pass in 1918.
But it has been dealt with since 1918, being a crime under multiple laws, hence the lack of lynching these many long years. The entire ETAA had nothing to do with lynching. The reason for the title was twofold.
First to hide the introduction of a whole bunch of new crimes, such as any attempt to “interfere” with and/or “intimidate” (neither defined) anybody engaging in any “Federally Protected Activity” (actually already covered by a specific 1968 law), and to introduce motive to turn these into “hate crimes” requiring not one year in the clink as per the 1968 law but ten years.
The second reason was the usual Leftist effort at Narrative Control:
The value in power gained of passing a law against lynching is high, because anyone who opposes it must want lynching to continue, obviously….As with everything in public life today, it’s all a psyop.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration Haywood writes that when Senator Rand Paul opposed this crap – after it passed the House by 410-4, he was attacked by two Democrat Senators (one of them Kamala Harris), the New York Times and other Democrat activists precisely on that angle; that he either didn’t care or even wanted Blacks to be lynched in modern America (“Frustration and Fury as Rand Paul Holds Up Anti-Lynching Bill in Senate” – NYT).
I was unaware of this Act, probably because it died after Paul stood his ground, which is good because it sounds frighteningly like the so-called “hate speech” laws in Britain that have seen people arrested for social media comments. However, Haywood isn’t exactly celebrating, because what happened on the ETAA will happen again on other laws:
Part of the explanation is that I guarantee you that not more than a handful of the members of Congress have any idea whatsoever what is contained in the ETAA, or any idea what the debate around Paul’s amendment is or means. No, they just signed on because their staffers (most all of them stupid, young, and uninformed) told them to and it sounded good to them.
And while you can laugh at the shallow and often dumb Brawndo politicians producing this shite it stops being funny right quick when the government then uses these stupid laws to go after anybody who opposes whatever it wants to do.
You may think this is all too technical. Actually, that is part of the point. When the average citizen cannot hope to understand the labyrinthine ways of government; when opacity is a feature for our overlords, not a bug, serving to ensure they can never be exposed to criticism, much less punishment; when they feel no need to justify themselves except to other elites who return the favors of their class; then the average citizen is far more disenfranchised than if he merely had no vote.
As the Soviets and other communists have often found, exerting greater and more detailed control over your society often doesn’t produce what you hoped for, the book “Red Plenty”, reviewed here, containing many examples of stupidity that was a natural outcome of such control.
A core principle, on which I am putting most of my rhetorical chips, is that stupid cannot continue for long, and the more stupid, the less long. The usual response to such optimism is to quote Adam Smith, that there is a lot of ruin in a country. But he meant the ruin resulting from bad or unlucky decisions, especially debt and overspending, not the type of ruin we are experiencing that he could never have imagined: the collective insanity of the ruling classes and the handing over of the reins of power to those least able to honorably and capably exercise power.
Perhaps, but how different is that from the USSR, which lasted 70 years, with the post-WWII period of 46 years being the most important? The USA, even according to Haywood, has been cracking along much the same tracks for perhaps twenty years, maybe less, and is much more powerful and less threatened than the USSR was. The Brawndo stupid could go on for another few decades.
Still the Trump vote he references, an increase of 11 million from 2016 as people realised Trump was better than they’d expected, gives him hope – which the 2024 vote should have amplified since he wrote this piece.
But their non-violent tools for this, such as screaming “racist!”, have rapidly lost their power (again, as shown by the votes for Trump). This will require them to either give way (as unlikely as that is), or again use violence, as they did this summer, but ratcheted higher, which will feed into one of the other choices leading to their overthrow. There is no way out for them. It is a trap. But that’s what happens when you’re stupid.
I was impressed by two pieces of prescience from his 2021 article. The first around how the goverment wields its power amidst all these laws:
It used to be that juries were the American (and English) system’s brake on political prosecutions. But defendants no longer receive review of their case by juries in the federal system, except in extremely rare instances. First, most defendants can’t afford to defend their case; the unlimited resources of the federal government are unleashed against any defendant who dares to actually plead not guilty and assert his right to a trial.
Second, and more important, the tyrannical expansion of both crimes and penalties in the federal system means the government can easily charge almost anyone with crimes carrying decades in prison—but offer a much lighter sentence as part of a plea bargain. The risk in going to trial, in terms of personal destruction, is just too high for most people. A choice that is no choice at all is the very definition of tyranny.
That was exactly what would be done to the J6 defendants, and in their case two things happened which even his jaded cynicism missed. First there were often blatant violations like keeping people in prison for months without trial (a violation of the 6th amendment). Second, Federal jury trials held in the most Democrat place in American, Washington D.C. where 94% voted for Joe Biden, produced an almost 100% success rate in conviction. Even so Heywood would no doubt be further convinced of his thesis by the Keystone Cops efforts of the Biden DOJ and assorted Democrat Attorney Generals to take down Trump over the next four years.
The second concerning none other than…
(I’d be shocked if Elon Musk isn’t targeted soon for being insufficiently woke.)
Not quite. He certainly was targeted for buying Twitter in 2022 and restoring freedom of speech – very anti-woke – but more for screwing the Democrat Party, whom he had supported for years with money and votes.
That turned out to be a very Brawndo thing for them to do.
No Minister 