An In-Depth Special Report: Perpetual crisis, civil liberties, and the corporate media
Free speech, no emergency powers—as in none—and the break-up of Big Tech are keys to a free society
It is no secret that we live in an age of perpetual international crisis.
Just in the past two years we have lurched from the needlessly prolonged pandemic to the Russian-Ukrainian war. They exact from us our overwhelming attention, and their effects are felt just as much in Pretoria as in Peoria.
These are the most dramatic, but they are not the only alleged emergencies we have faced—not by a long shot—at least according to those who run our government. We have also faced a crisis of racism, a crisis of climate change, a crisis of gun violence. San Diego and other communities even declared Covid misinformation a public health crisis all by itself, a crisis about the crisis—the list goes on, emergencies all that require immediate action, the enactment of emergency powers, and the suspension of civil liberties and due process.
The clamor for emergency action not only never ends but becomes more deafening by the year: Just two days ago, no matter how fatigued we are by emergency, The Nation ran a piece called “The Case for Declaring a National Climate Emergency.” The left just has to have an emergency, any emergency.
In the United States, of course, Democrats and the left are the purveyors of constant crisis. That is not surprising. Democrats are our big-government party, and it goes without saying that emergency powers annex authority to the executive branch of government by deducting it from other branches, and those new powers are seldom completely relinquished.
As such, critics take aim at modern progressives and the hostage they hold in the White House as some new insurgency that threatens our democratic polity, and, to be sure, they must take blame for the incalculable damage inflicted on Americans during the pandemic, and now for at least some of the new injuries being suffered because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin didn’t shut down our domestic energy production, and he didn’t authorize sanctions that will push oil prices even higher.
Democrats wildly manipulated a pandemic of convenience to concentrate their bureaucratic powers, and at the very least did nothing to deter the Russian invasion and may well have provoked and encouraged it. The pandemic’s lockdowns and mandates destroyed small businesses, wreaked havoc on our children’s education and on the nation’s mental health, and unleashed the greatest inflation in decades—how to get a tax without calling it a tax—and now the Russian war has become another lever by which power is leveraged away from democratic accountability.
To be clear, it’s not that Putin’s war is just or valid. It is not. His crimes are egregious. And it is a legitimate crisis, as was the pandemic. No, what’s egregious is the way progressives and Democrats have shamefully exploited them for their own raw political ends, the ends of power.
Put simply, the pandemic was a straight-up declaration of excessive executive authority, so temporary but so needed for public health and safety, our leaders told us, while the war is another crisis demanding conformity in thought and action, an upheaval on the world stage that urgently requires that we follow our “government experts” to save us all. Freezing the bank accounts of Russian oligarchs may feel good, but from where is the power of the government to do that derived, and might the government feel empowered to do the same to U.S. citizens it feels are too sympathetic to the Putin regime?
No disagreements allowed, after all. No dissidents need apply.
Knowing well that the public has grown weary of outright usurpations of power, the federal government now seeks to scare the public—we could all be blown to smithereens, or we could effectively cancel you for your treason if you don’t support us—into voting for Democrats in November. Add to that a large dose of Putin-blaming for Biden’s horrible inflation, and you have another crisis tailor-made for the Democratic Party.
First, a pandemic of convenience, and now a war of convenience. As in the pandemic, economic sacrifice is expected; questioning the government’s narrative is unpatriotic, if not treasonous; and not merely actions but language contrary to that narrative is dangerous to humankind. Defy pandemic mandates, and the virus will decimate the world; challenge the government on Ukraine, and the butchering Putin will conquer Europe and impoverish and hopelessly weaken America.
Perhaps that is true, I don’t know. What I do know is that the incessant use of crises—and the emergency powers and actions that invariably accompany them—has now reached a tipping point after many, many decades, and the accelerating global inability to question authority, or to be able to debate what the correct course should be, at the very same time that Big Tech universally substitutes the symbols of globalism for the political language of community engagement, has taken us to the edge of democratic demise.
Let’s peek over the ledge. But be careful, don’t fall …