Why not offer voters “freedom from the Constitution?” “Freedom from fear” means security via mass delusions about the nature of political power. Perhaps our ruling class should replace the Bill of Rights: “Political buncombe will make you free.”
Note that in the period covered in X’s latest “Transparency Report” to the EU on its “content moderation” efforts, nearly 90% of such requests for information on the purveyors of ostensibly “illegal or harmful speech” came from one country: Germany.
The neo-liberal consensus built in the postwar period contained the seeds of its own destruction. It was too dependent on the creation of institutions beyond people’s control and too reliant on elite mastery of events.
For better or worse, authoritarianism has happened many times in history — it’s kind of the human default. The original state.
Africa is at risk of getting the worst of both worlds: failure to check the epidemic and failure to check economic collapse. Why? Most African countries lack the administrations and health systems to implement “test, isolate, treat, and trace” regimes.
In the United States this need to face the possibility that one will have to act decisively, has not been as urgent since ‘the Revolution of ’75.’ The enemy today is not outside the gates; it is inside the gates.
The catastrophic mismanagement of Hurricane Helene relief is showing the American people that Washington’s dysfunctional but, worse, it doesn’t even seem to be trying to serve the people. Instead, we serve it. Like livestock. So how did we get here?
I observed Governor Tim Walz’s handling of the 2020 Covid-19 crisis in Minnesota with increasing concern. What started as a two-week pause quickly evolved into a series of questionable policy decisions that contravened scientific reasoning, constitutional rights, and fiscal responsibility.
With the national health crisis, food debauchery, and farm exploitation suddenly jumping to headlines via RFK, Jr., numerous people have offered solutions but nothing I’ve seen truly gets to the heart of the problem.
China’s ruling Politburo held an emergency economic meeting and decided to crank up the money printers to 11, pumping money to consumers, to banks, to property developers, basically to anybody who might spend it.
Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information’. Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. The justification is fake. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery.
I entered our “Time of Troubles” armed with Pieper’s most striking sentences at the forefront of my memory. What I gained was a forewarning: a singular percept of falsehood as an enduring and adversarial presence within our public life.
