When the Bill of Rights Is ‘Awkward’ for the Government, That’s a Win for Freedom

by el gato malo

If ever there were a contest to find the living avatar of the phrase “the clothes have no emperor,” I’d pick John Kerry and pit him against all comers.

I’m not sure there is an emptier suit in all the Beltway.

It’s like someone did a gain-of-function experiment on patrician stupidity and entitlement, slapped a politician haircut on top, jolted the neck bolts to life, and sent it tottering down the hill towards some unsuspecting heiress.

But such people are often useful, as they go to forums like the WEF and dazzle the Davos devotees with endless reprisals of “saying the quiet part out loud” because they don’t know any better, and the manic monocultures of assumptive right to rule that sit in such auditoriums actually applaud this.

have a listen:

“And I think the dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing. As part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue, it’s really hard to govern today. You can’t, you know. You know, there’s no, the referees we used to have to determine what’s a fact and what isn’t. In fact, the kind of, you have been eviscerated to a certain degree, and people go and let people self-select where they go for their news or for their information. And then you just get into a vicious cycle.

So it’s really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in that 45–50 years I’ve been involved in this. And, and there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities, in order to guarantee that you’re going to have, you know, some accountability on facts, etcetera. But look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.

So what you need, what we need, is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having, you know, winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to, to implement change. Now, obviously, there are some people in our country who are prepared to implement change in other ways. So you’re questioning, really, if democracy can survive and related social media.

I think, I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing. And to me, that is part of what this race, this, this election is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?”

When the government starts talking about how “difficult” or “awkward” the Bill of Rights makes governing, there is only one answer:

Good.

That’s quite literally the point. That’s quite literally the genius of the form of republic imagined and enshrined by our framers.

The individual stands paramount to the state. Our rights, derived from and imbued by our personhood, not from some proffered license from Leviathan, stand paramount to the state. And if that makes it impossible for the state to do something that it wants to do?

Tough noogies.

That’s almost certainly a sign that it’s something the state should never have been contemplating in the first place.

The job of a just state is to protect the rights of we the people and stay out of the damn way as we go forth to pursue our happiness.

“We need to take your rights for the collective good” is the mantra of the dictatorial demagogue.

Collective good is a lie. There is no collective good. It cannot be measured or foreseen. There is no valid fashion in which to measure trade-offs or ensure optimization. It cannot be maximized by diktat. “Collective good” is an entirely unknowable fiction conjured into being to convince a populace to sell itself down the river by adopting the “one size fits none” coercive solutions of elites, aristocracies, or technocrats (or perhaps worst of all, of a tyrannical majority).

The best way to make the demos think that your way is the best way is to lie to it about the facts and menace it with fabricated hobgoblins custom cut to sway and to frighten them into compliance.

Truth takes a distant back seat, if ever it manages to get in the car at all.

Katherine Maher, CEO of National Public Radio, lays out the media elite position here with perfect candor and admirable brevity:

“I think our reverence for the truth might become, might have become, a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

It’s not about truth. “Truth gets in the way of finding consensus and getting important things done.”

Yowsa.

Note the dovetail with Kerry:

“The referees we used to have to have to determine what is and is not a fact have been kind of eviscerated.”

Um, yes.

Exactly.

There’s your “referee” telling us in her own clear, simple words that she mistrusts “truth” and therefore “facts” and just wants consensus and a call to action.

This is not “saving democracy,” it’s buttressing the demagogues’ guild and making sure its members are the only ones speaking. They do not seek an era of openness or honesty; they seek a return to the bad old days of messaging monopoly and “it’s not news (or facts) until we say it is” while using your tax dollars to fund their manipulations.

The goal is not to erect logical arguments; it’s to pollute the logic of others with false salients to cause good reasoning to reach bad conclusions.

Garbage in, garbage out.

If I can monopolize your input data, bet your bottom dollar I can monopolize your downstream determinations as well.

Where “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts” once stood, now arises “your facts are the enemy of my consensus. Stop wising up my chumps.”

So let’s take some real note of this other word that keeps surfacing in both speeches: “consensus.”

This is a slippery word, a liar’s word, a word whose true meaning in this context stands in diametric opposition to its portrayal.

“Consensus” in the context of a society is a shibboleth for “someone is about to get railroaded.”

Consider: if there were real, 100% consensus, then you need no law, no diktat. Everyone is agreed and will simply do as they prefer. We only need such things manifest as a coercive state that mandates things and takes and redistributes by force if someone, somewhere in this equation does not want such actions.

And that’s pretty much always the case.

They call mob rule in support of such involuntary takings and subjugation “democracy” and “will of the people.” But is the consensus of three wolves and a sheep voting about what’s for dinner truly consensus? Not to the sheep it isn’t. And adding six more wolves, so now it’s “90% approval,” hardly changes this conclusion, does it?

Consensus-based coercive rule is the opposite of rights and of liberty. It’s tyranny, and tyranny of the majority is the worst sort of tyranny, for dictators that go too far find themselves isolated and overthrown, but majorities are always secure in their numbers. And this is why demagogues prefer to hide behind them, and why they seek to limit, filter, and oligopolize the information that the mob uses to determine its mind and throw its weight.

After all, it’s for “the common good.”

The whole thing is a labyrinth of semantic psyop.

It all sounds so reasonable.

But it’s not.

The aspiring aristocrats want nothing like even or universal rules. They want the ability and the right to lie, the ability and right to denounce others as liars and anoint themselves as truth arbiters, and to deny this right to others who might speak against them.

They HATE social media for this reason. They do not want we smallfolk gaining voices vaster than theirs and coming to know one another, or that no one really believes in them or their increasingly hallucinatory and absurdist worldviews. They want to repeat their mantras over and over until they become the consensus, and their consensus becomes the truth. (Because frankly, most people cannot tell the difference.)

But it’s not working because we are all out here talking. (And worse, we’re laughing.)

It’s not working because we increasingly see them for what they are, but they are blinded to themselves.

Watch this masterpiece of postmodern informational interview theater as Peppermint Psaki praises Kammy Cuddlebug and nanny aficionado Doug Emhoff for “reshaping the perception of masculinity.”

“An important part and interesting part of how people have talked about your role here is how your role has reshaped the perception of masculinity, and I’m not sure you’ve planned on that, but you are an incredibly supportive spouse. Has that been an evolution for you? And do you think that’s part of the role you might play as First Gentleman?

It’s funny, I’ve started to think a lot about this. I’ve always been like this. My dad was like this, and to me it’s…”

Sometimes words fail even me. LOL. Just kidding. No way. I got words for this one. Oh, yes indeedy…

Gatotake™:

This is nothing like the commentary that they think it is.

Basically no one believes this, and everyone knows that no one believes this.

There may have been a time that such a level of tortured twaddle could be passed off, but today it’s naught but an insanely high-pitched dog whistle, audible only within an ever-shrinking echo chamber that is so self-absorbed that it has no idea how unappealing it looks to the outside world.

Their worldview is entirely recursive.

They never interact with anyone apart from their fellow travelers.

This is not some cunning plan.

They have evolved into unwitting self-parody because they have no idea how far off the zeitgeist they are.

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